The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835

ISBN-13: 9780367887681 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 282 str.

Neil Ramsey

Opis

Examining the little-known memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Ramsey shows how these popular works 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

Recenzje

’This is a lucid and convincing analysis, fluently written... Admirably nuanced and impressively thoughtful... an important scholarly contribution that illuminatingly realigns war literature with other literary models.’ Times Literary Supplement '... this work is far more than a survey of a genre. It speaks to the field on several fronts; the rise of the professional author, the politics of sympathy and suffering, the development of autobiography, the policing of generic transformation, changes in the reading public and, of course, the emergence of a distinctive culture of war and of war writing in this period.' BARS Bulletin and Review 'Ramsey provides a cogent and persuasive argument for the ways these understudied Romantic texts illuminate both Romantic authorship and the period’s politico-military history.' SHARP News 'Ramsey draws on important cultural and military historians - notably Clive Emsley and Charles Esdaile - throughout this important book. Astutely conceptualized, meticulously researched, and superbly written, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835 is a timely and exciting contribution to Romantic and Victorian literary history.' The Wordsworth Circle 'The sheer number of these texts merits a monograph treatment: Ramsey has identified nearly 200 and helpfully lists them in an appendix,which will be a first port of call for any subsequent study in this area. The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture will be of great interest to anyone working on war and its cultural reception in this fascinating period.' Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Spis treści

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

O autorze

Neil Ramsey is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia.