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‘To Die as a Soldier’: The Vital Romance of the Military Novel
Author(s) -
Ramsey Neil
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12570
Subject(s) - honour , romance , biopower , relation (database) , reading (process) , history , literature , sociology , aesthetics , philosophy , art , law , political science , politics , computer science , archaeology , database
Critics have generally dismissed the military novel as simply a minor version of the historical novel. This article reassesses the genre by examining what the Quarterly Review saw as the first ‘military novel’, Thomas Hamilton's Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827). It argues that, while his novel is modelled on Scott's historical novels, Hamilton also established an entirely new aesthetics, based on the soldier's suffering body. Reading this aesthetic in relation to a biopolitics of life emerging in the long eighteenth century, the article proposes that the novel constructs a new version of military honour for the modern nation.