Romanticism and the Biopolitics of Modern War Writing

Description

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.

Neil Ramsey is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of New South Wales, Australia. His interests include the literary, cultural and biopolitical responses to warfare during the eighteenth century and Romantic eras, with a particular focus on the representations of personal experience and the development of a modern culture of war. He is the author of The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780-1835 (2011) and co-editor, with Gillian Russell, of Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture (2015) and, with Anders Engberg-Pedersen, of War and Literary Studies (c.2022).