The military memoir and romantic literary culture, 1780-1835
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The military memoir and romantic literary culture, 1780-1835
(Nineteenth century series)
Ashgate, c2011
- : hbk
Available at 4 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-256) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.
Table of Contents
- Contents: Introduction: modern war and the suffering soldier
- Part 1 The Genre of the Military Memoir, 1780-1835: The sentimental military memoir, 1780-1825
- Military authors and the commemoration of war, 1825-1835. Part 2 The Military Memoir and the Sacrifices of War: Suffering and the spectacle of modern war: Robert Ker Porter's Letters from Portugal and Spain (1809)
- 'An atom of an army': the sentimental soldier's tale and Journal of a Soldier of the 71st (1819)
- Romantic authorship and picturesque war: Moyle Sherer's Recollections of the Peninsula (1823) and George Gleig's The Subaltern (1825)
- The cheerful stoicism of the soldier hero: John Kincaid's Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (1830)
- Conclusion: 'a plain unvarnished tale': the military author and the romance of war
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
by "Nielsen BookData"