Napoleon was, after his defeat at Leipzig, “granted” the island of Elba to rule. He soon found this unsatisfactory, and, early in 1815, left for the south of France, and marched on Paris to some acclamation. He was, all too quickly, defeated at Waterloo. Observing all this was Byron’s friend J.C. Hobhouse, an ardent Bonapartist. Byron, who posed as one, never answered his letters from the thick of things in Paris. This book is structured in four layers, and begins with an essay about Byron and Napoleon, which is then followed by Byron’s poems about Napoleon and Hobhouse’s diary. Hobhouse’s letters conclude the volume. Most of Hobhouse’s diary has never been published. The book is published, aptly, on the bicentenary of The Hundred Days.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron’s last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.

Love letters during the Napoleonic wars were largely framed by concepts of love which were promoted through novels and philosophy. The standard texts, so to speak, which were written by major authors who inherited this Enlightenment bearing, responded to the emerging concepts of love found in novels and philosophical essays. Love among this Napoleonic coterie is unique because it demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between the love letter and the romantic novel. Germaine de Staël, Juiette Récamier, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Lady Emma Hamilton, Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien Bonaparte, were the authors and recipients of some of the most passionate love letters of this period. They were also avid readers of the newly emerging genre of the romantic novel, and many of them were also authors of such works where they projected their personal romances onto the characterization of their fictional heroes and heroines. In addition, these authors had lived through the recent French Revolution and the Terror. Imprisoned during the Revolution, or branded as emigrés upon their return to Paris, their mature adult lives were spent in the shadows of the Napoleonic wars in which they shifted political loyalties as the specter of Napoleon’s powers grew from First Consul to Emperor of Europe. The looming threat of war ignited the depths of their passions and inspired their intellectual analysis of love, happiness and suicide. Their evolving concept of love was a romantic, all-consuming passion which gripped the lovers in fatal embraces. This book’s analysis of their love letters and romantic novels reveals the emerging political landscape of the period through extended metaphors of love and patriotism.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British press began a campaign of critical abuse against Leigh Hunt, caricaturing the radical journalist as an upstart "Cockney" author whose literary talents were as disreputable as his politics. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was revered as a peer and a poetical genius who, the conservative press argued, would never befriend and collaborate with a writer like Hunt. Yet Byron did just that. Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement is the first full-length study of the friendship and literary relationship of two of the most important second-generation Romantic authors. Challenging long-held critical attitudes, this study shows that Byron and Hunt engaged in a creative and meaningful dialogue at each major stage in their careers, from their earliest published volumes of juvenile poetry and verse satire to their most celebrated contributions to Romantic literature: The Story of Rimini and Don Juan. Drawing upon newly recovered letters and unpublished manuscript material, this book illuminates the surprisingly durable and artistically significant friendship of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt.

A gripping narrative history of Napoleon Bonaparte's ten-month exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba In the spring of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated. Having overseen an empire spanning half the European continent and governed the lives of some eighty million people, he suddenly found himself exiled to Elba, less than a hundred square miles of territory. This would have been the end of him, if Europe's rulers had had their way. But soon enough Napoleon imposed his preternatural charisma and historic ambition on both his captors and the very island itself, plotting his return to France and to power. After ten months of exile, he escaped Elba with just of over a thousand supporters in tow, marched to Paris, and retook the Tuileries Palace--all without firing a shot. Not long after, tens of thousands of people would die fighting for and against him at Waterloo. Braude dramatizes this strange exile and improbable escape in granular detail and with novelistic relish, offering sharp new insights into a largely overlooked moment. He details a terrific cast of secondary characters, including Napoleon's tragically-noble official British minder on Elba, Neil Campbell, forever disgraced for having let "Boney" slip away; and his young second wife, Marie Louise who was twenty-two to Napoleon's forty-four, at the time of his abdication. What emerges is a surprising new perspective on one of history's most consequential figures, which both subverts and celebrates his legendary persona.

Byron wrote that he was “born for opposition”. This collection of essays takes Byron at his word and explores ways in which he challenged received opinion in his lifetime. The essays also challenge commonplace attitudes in criticism of Byron today. In this, the volume honours the remarkable range of work of the late Dr Peter Cochran. The matters covered here are Byron’s poetics, his ideology, and the principles and practice of editing his texts. Jerome J. McGann opens the poetics section by examining lyric writing in a Byronic perspective. In the lead essay on ideology, Bernard Beatty asks whether we should rethink Byron as a whole. A substantial addition to Byron’s correspondence is made by Andrew Stauffer beginning the editing section. In all, this book gathers original contributions from sixteen international scholars and friends of Peter Cochran. The accessible, engaging style makes their work suitable for all readers of Byron, as well as undergraduates and professional academics.

The shadow of Napoleon never left the nineteenth-century and continued to haunt the histories and wars that followed in curious and circuitous ways. The empires of Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III, set the stage for the pendulum swing of time from revolution to its antithesis, empire. The Anglo-Italian style developed as a reaction to these empires, the widespread devastation caused by power, and the monuments it created. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Vernon Lee responded to recurring themes in Italian Risorgimento politics and culture in the post-Napoleonic era and Second Empire periods. Many of them were ex-patriots, who adopted Italy as their new home. Their unique contribution aligns them with a style that is distinguished by the themes of national independence, feminism, the abolition of slavery and republicanism. They perceived their own time in terms of parallel dimensions in which the past and present converged in national histories at home, in America and England, and in Italy, their new ideal state. The language of their new nationalism evolved from the chronological study of Ancient Rome up to the Renaissance, and the style of both revolution and empire, neoclassicism, while their perspective was largely shaped by a reactionary contrast between the empires of Napoleon I and III, and an ideal state they envisioned for Italy.