Martial masculinities

This collection explores the role of martial masculinities in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society in a period framed by two of the greatest wars the world had ever known. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on an emerging field of study and draws on historical, literary, visual and musical sources to demonstrate the centrality of the military and its masculine dimensions in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian personal and national identities. Focusing on both the experience of military service and its imaginative forms, it examines such topics as bodies and habits, families and domesticity, heroism and chivalry, religion and militarism, and youth and fantasy. This collection will be required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of war and masculinity in the long nineteenth century.

This collection explores the role of martial masculinities in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society.

This collection explores the role of martial masculinities in shaping nineteenth-century British culture and society in a period framed by two of the greatest wars the world had ever known. It offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on an emerging field of study and draws on historical, literary, visual and musical sources to demonstrate the centrality of the military and its masculine dimensions in the shaping of Victorian and Edwardian personal and national identities. Focusing on both the experience of military service and its imaginative forms, it examines such topics as bodies and habits, families and domesticity, heroism and chivalry, religion and militarism, and youth and fantasy. This collection will be required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of war and masculinity in the long nineteenth century.

Introduction - Michael Brown and Joanne BegiatoPart I: Experiencing martial masculinities1 Burying Lord Uxbridge’s leg: the body of the hero in the early nineteenth century – Julia Banister2 Brothers in arms? Martial masculinities and family feeling in old soldiers' memoirs, 1793–1815 – Louise Carter3 Recalling the comforts of home: bachelor soldiers’ narratives of nostalgia and the re-creation of the domestic interior – Helen Metcalfe4 Charles Incledon: a singing sailor on the Georgian stage – Anna Maria Barry5 Visualising the aged veteran in nineteenth-century Britain: memory, masculinity and nation – Michael Brown and Joanne BegiatoPart II: Imagining martial masculinities6 Hunger and cannibalism: James Hogg’s deconstruction of Scottish military masculinities in The Three Perils of Man or War, Women, and Witchcraft! – Barbara Leonardi7 Model military men: Charlotte Yonge and the ‘martial ardour’ of ‘a soldier’s daughter’ – Susan Walton8 ‘And the individual withers’: Tennyson and the enlistment into military masculinity – Lorenzo Servitje9 Charlotte Brönte’s ‘warrior priest’: St John Rivers and the language of war – Karen Turner10 ‘Something which every boy can learn’: accessible knightly masculinities in children’s Arthuriana, 1903–11 – Elly McCausland11 ‘A story of treasure, war, and wild adventure’: hero-worship, imperial masculinities, and inter-generational ideologies in H. Rider Haggard’s 1880s fiction – Helen GoodmanEpilogue: gendered virtue, gendered vigour and gendered valour – Isaac LandIndex