Waterloo and British Romanticism INTRODUCTION

[First paragraph] In the fall of 1989 robert m. maniquis edited a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on the subject of “English Romanticism and the French Revolution.” Published in the wake of that year’s bicentenary events, the issue was headed by Marilyn Butler’s article “Telling it Like a Story: The French Revolution as Narrative,” in which she observed the disparity between “the media’s zest for anniversaries” and “the compulsion of the modern academic historian to de-narrativize history.”1 A veteran of numerous anniversary events in the 1980s—from the quincentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the 400th birthday of Cambridge University Press—Butler noted wryly, “Being an academic at these parties is being the bad fairy at the christening. We want to replace historical folklore, which is at the heart of their celebration, with a more complex, fragmented impression of the past.” Butler’s endorsement of academic skepticism towards “the explanatory power” of “the simple memorable narrative” did not go unqualified, however. As she went on to note, if “our refusal of narrative is meant to defend knowledge from the non-professional, we use it at quite a high cost . . . academics at the present time badly need a language with which to intervene in the public sphere.”