The Convention of Cintra is a prose tract by William Wordsworth, written between 1808 and 1809, on the subject of the Peninsular War. An extended essay on the moral and political imagination, Cintra is a key document in Wordsworth’s development as a thinker and literary stylist, and in the larger Romantic engagement with the legacies of the French Revolution. The tract is clearly an attack on the handling of the war in Spain and Portugal by the British army and government. But its exact politics have proved notoriously difficult to decode. Wordsworth feared that its radical attitudes would revive “the old yell of Jacobinism” against him (Middle Years 1: 312). Modern critics, however, have found in Cintra…
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Citation: Duggett, Tom. "The Convention of Cintra". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 June 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23231, accessed 22 November 2024.]
