ABSTRACT

The impact of the French Revolution and the critical awareness it produced during the Romantic period have long overshadowed the facts of war in the literature produced between 1793 and 1815. Often turning to war as an effect, a function or an extension of revolution, Romantic writers represented both 'events' in interdependent fashions. Together with Wordsworth's tract on The Convention of Cintra, Coleridge's Letters on the Spaniards is a key prose text involved in reorganizing the Iberian campaign through a variety of narrative modes. The eight letters are organized according to a crescendo of rhetorical intensity and through an alternance of particularized analyses and digressions, historical reconstructions and generalizations, which recall the subdivisions and demarcations of the Friend. The inset tale and its chiastic design contain a narrative of national resurgence which, with its successful conclusion, brings the romance quest to its solution and the hero/people to the achievement of its goal.