ABSTRACT
This book has argued that the Romantic period saw the emergence of the military memoir as a distinct and prominent literary genre, one which shifted from a relatively marginal to a surprisingly dominant position in British literary culture. The Romantic period military memoir began as an adaptation of themes associated with the story of the suffering traveller within the framework of the impersonal campaign narrative. Although these works helped to establish sympathy between the military and civilian realms, they remained ideologically ambiguous, detailing war’s miseries and horrors in a manner that could be problematic to state-centred views of war. Subsequent to the success of Sherer’s and Gleig’s picturesque approaches to writing of war in the mid 1820s, however, the military memoir flourished as an instructive and enjoyable type of literature. It assumed a prominent status in the period’s literature by the late 1820s, representing a style of writing that was felt to be peculiarly British in character and which could successfully commemorate the nation’s wars for a middle-class audience.
