The centrifugal force of the French Revolution and its effect on literary production, importantly elucidated by New Historicists such as Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann, and Marilyn Butler in the 1980s, revealed the political consciousness at the heart of romanticism. More recently, scholars such as Mary Favret and Simon Bainbridge have deepened our understanding of the cultural impact of life during wartime. Although the emphasis on the French Revolution as the pivotal historical moment in romanticism has been extraordinarily helpful in contextualizing the literary productions of this era, it has also tended to underscore a generational divide between writers in the 1790s and those who came afterwards, casting second-generation romantics such as Byron, the Shelleys, and Keats as a group struggling to reconcile the revolutionary hopes and fears of first-generation romantics with the grim realities of a post-revolutionary age. As Jeffrey Cox demonstrates in Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years, the elegance of this historical formula, as transformative as it has been in romantic studies over the past few decades, should give us pause. It does not acknowledge or account for the fact that the careers of Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth continued well after the deaths of Keats, Percy Shelley, and Byron. Moreover, the tale of an intergenerational struggle between fathers and sons marginalizes romantic women writers and their significant contributions to the cultural productions of their day.

Moving away from the primacy of the French Revolution in the romantic imagination, Romanticism in the Shadow of War explores the impact and influence of the Napoleonic Wars on romantic-era writers after the turn of the century. The Napoleonic Wars, spanning the years between the big moments of French Revolution and Waterloo, witnessed other, culturally meaningful events such as the Peace of Amiens, the Regency crisis, and Napoleon's first abdication. Other influential voices, too, began to emerge came to the fore during this period, among them writers such as Thomas Holcroft, Anna Barbauld, and Leigh Hunt, who wrote passionately on the subject of war from a global perspective. As Cox persuasively argues, the Napoleonic Wars brought a new international register to the literary and cultural productions in Britain. In their attempts to confront current crises, second-generation romantics created experimental forms of writing that drew upon the elegiac and satirical traditions while also introducing an entirely new visionary mode to engage with, and envision, the historical, spiritual, and social consequences of present-day global warfare and a new global culture.

In the first section of Romanticism in the Shadow of War, Cox probes the influence of the Peace of Amiens, which provided a welcome, albeit brief reprieve from life at war, with Britons flocking to Paris after the treaty and vice versa. It was in the midst of this period of intense cultural exchange and border crossing that Thomas Holcroft imported the French melodrama and introduced it to British audiences with his “Tale of Mystery” (1802). The melodrama—perched somewhere between comedy and tragedy—suited the uncertainties and anxieties of the time. Lawlessness and political tyranny might abound in this world, but what melodrama delivered for its audience was the reassurance of a moral universe with the hand of Providence rewarding the virtuous and meting out punishment to the wicked. This reassuring message did not sit well with Byron, who wrote his gothic tragedy Manfred (1817) as a wholesale rejection of the melodrama's self-conscious return to patriarchal order amid chaos. Although Manfred's form and plot are indebted to the popular form of the gothic melodrama, Byron's brooding Faustian play introduces religion, magic, and the supernatural only to reveal their inadequacy to explain away the ambiguities of modern life.

The second pair of chapters centers upon literary responses to the Regency crisis, beginning with Anna Barbauld's darkly satirical and prophetic poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. As Cox reminds us, the strangeness of this poem for Barbauld's contemporaries (as well as for scholars today) was its unconventional mixture of satire and prophecy. Interestingly, Percy Shelley's Esdaile notebook, copied out in late 1812, explores many of the same issues as Barbauld's text, paving the way for his own satirical and prophetic works, such as Queen Mab (1813) and Prometheus Unbound (1820). Satirical prophecy was not solely the province of the poets, however. As Cox points out, Mary Shelley also engaged in satirical prophecy in Valperga (1821) and The Last Man (1826), deploying the genres of the historical novel and science fiction to trace the historical trajectory of the rampant chauvinism of the Napoleonic War years and to predict the dire consequences of the present-day imperialistic urge.

Romanticism in the Shadow of War concludes with an exploration of Leigh Hunt's Dantesque The Story of Rimini (1816), penned during Hunt's time in prison, as a foundational text in the subsequent turn to Italian literature and culture by Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys, among others. Hunt's experimentation and national border crossing was, like the previous examples, a reaction to a specific historical moment—Napoleon's exile after Waterloo—and the cultural exhaustion experienced by Britons after a long era of bloodshed and violence. Cox argues convincingly that the explicit eroticism of The Story of Rimini was posited by Hunt as an antidote to the psychological drain of the Napoleonic War years. In the final chapter Cox argues that the Cockney appropriation of Italian literature was an attempt to acquire a cultural authority across national lines that undercut class biases and liberated language for those who were traditionally denied access to high literature: the lower classes and women. In sum, Romanticism in the Shadow of War provides a historically nuanced and thoughtful discussion of the emergence of a new literary radicalism and artistic experimentation during the Napoleonic War years that continues to reverberate down to the present day.