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.

Military literature was one of the most prevalent forms of writing to appear during the Romantic era, yet its genesis in this period is often overlooked. Ranging from histories to military policy, manuals, and a new kind of imaginative war literature in military memoirs and novels, modern war writing became a highly influential body of professional writing. Drawing on recent research into the entanglements of Romanticism with its wartime trauma and revisiting Michel Foucault's ground-breaking work on military discipline and the biopolitics of modern war, this book argues that military literature was deeply reliant upon Romantic cultural and literary thought and the era's preoccupations with the body, life, and writing. Simultaneously, it shows how military literature runs parallel to other strands of Romantic writing, forming a sombre shadow against which Romanticism took shape and offering its own exhortations for how to manage the life and vitality of the nation.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (on 'Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology', 'Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief', and 'Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures', the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students and established scholars.

This volume argues for the enduring and pervasive significance of war in the formation of British Enlightenment and Romantic culture. Showing how war throws into question conventional disciplinary parameters and periodization, essays in the collection consider how war shapes culture through its multiple, divergent, and productive traces.

Dead Men Telling Tales is an original account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808-1814), Matilda Greig charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic, and from writing to publication to afterlife. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, she challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers' direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political motives of the authors and uncovering the large cast of characters, from family members to publishers, editors, and translators, involved in production behind the scenes. By including literature from Spain and Portugal, Greig also provides a missing link in current studies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, showing how the genre of military memoirs developed differently in south-western Europe and led to starkly opposing national narratives of the same war. Her findings tell the history of a publishing phenomenon which gripped readers of all ages across the world in the nineteenth century, made significant profits for those involved, and was fundamental in defining the modern 'soldier's tale'.

This book illuminates the genesis and development of modern war writing in relation to Romanticism, biopolitics and disciplinary theory.