Romances of War: Die Erinnerung an die Revolutions- und Napoleonischen Kriege in Grossbritannien und Irland, 1815-1945

This monograph examines more than 500 historical novels, in addition to poems and works of historiography to explore the literary contruction of the British collective memories of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) until World War I. The author  challenges the thesis  by historian Linda Colley in her classic study Britons (1992) that a common hatred of France welded English, Scots, and Welsh together as a British nation between 1792 and 1815. He suggests instead that a national master-narrative emerged only much later, in the mid nineteenth century, when communicative memory, that is to say, the first-hand experiences of war survivors, gave way to cultural memory, whose diminishing cognitive immediacy opened up opportunities for a selective commemoration of the past. The fusing of fact and fiction in historical novels became a catalyst of this transition. Interestingly, in Ireland the interpretation of the events remained controversial. To this day the country lacks a cross-confessional myth.