ABSTRACT

The tragedy that became crystallized in cultural memory as ‘Peterloo’ provided one of the darkest pages in British history, but also one of the best documented nineteenth-century events. The interest of the press, and the large number of participants, produced a polyphonic, multifarious corpus made of reports, eyewitness accounts, memoirs and testimonies, as well as poetic and prose texts. As a critical introduction to this monographic issue of The Keats-Shelley Review, the article discusses ‘Peterloo’ as an event whose historical and sociopolitical significance is also dependent on its manifold representations across time, genres, and discourses. Both factual or fictional, texts, it is suggested, contributed to construing Peterloo as an event by interrogating and emplotting facts, thus determining their shape and significance.

摘要

作为“彼得卢”在文化记忆中结晶的悲剧提供了英国历史上最黑暗的一页之一，但也是记录最完整的 19 世纪事件之一。新闻界的兴趣和大量的参与者，产生了一个由报告、目击者叙述、回忆录和证词以及诗歌和散文文本组成的复调、五花八门的语料库。作为对济慈雪莱评论这本专刊的批判性介绍，文章将“彼得卢”作为一个事件进行讨论，其历史和社会政治意义也取决于其跨越时间、体裁和话语的多种表现形式。有人认为，无论是真实的还是虚构的文本，都有助于通过询问和描绘事实来将彼得卢解释为一个事件，从而确定它们的形状和意义。