ABSTRACT
The Peninsular War (1808–14) was a profoundly influential event in the national memories of its major participating countries, and a subject of continuing reinterpretation and shifting politics for well over a century. As an unexpected and traumatic defeat for the French Napoleonic armies, a triumphant victory for the British troops, and the climax of a long and bitter struggle for Spanish liberation which involved large numbers of civilians as well as soldiers, the war quickly unleashed a whole wave of art, poetry and literature that tried desperately to make sense of the events.
This chapter explores the question of how war narratives develop, focusing on the ways that stories from one war could and did travel – not only over a long period of time, but also over language barriers and through other people, from publishers to translators, illustrators, schoolteachers and military men. Reprinted, edited and resold, veterans’ memoirs from the Peninsular War were used many decades later to drum up military pride, encourage recruitment and educate children. Thus the narratives which were constructed around twentieth-century wars were able to draw on the legacy of a rich nineteenth-century narrative landscape.
