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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.
War and Literary Studies poses two main questions: First, how has
war shaped the field of literary studies? And second, when scholars
today study the literature of war what are the key concepts in
play? Seeking to complement the extant scholarship, this volume
adopts a wider and more systematic approach as it directs our
attention to the relation between warfare and literary studies as a
field of knowledge. What are the key characteristics of the
language of war? Of gender in war? Which questions are central to
the way we engage with war and trauma or war and sensation? In
which ways were prominent 20th century theories such as critical
theory, French postwar theory, postcolonial theory shaped by war?
How might emergent concepts such as 'revolution,' 'the
anthropocene' or 'capitalism' inflect the study of war and
literature?
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.
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.
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.
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