Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

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Holly Furneaux (Professor of English Literature, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University)

Military Men of Feeling

Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War

Holly Furneaux (Professor of English Literature, Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University)

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English

Oxford University Press
04 February 2022

Military Men of Feeling considers the popularity of the figure of the gentle soldier in the Victorian period. It traces a persistent narrative swerve from tales of war violence to reparative accounts of soldiers as moral exemplars, homemakers, adopters of children on the battlefield, and nurses. This material invites us to think afresh about Victorian masculinity and Victorian militarism. It challenges ideas about the separation of military and domestic life, and about the incommunicability of war experience. Focusing on representations of soldiers' experiences of touch and emotion, the book combines the work of well known writers - including Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Yonge - with previously unstudied writing and craft produced by British soldiers in the Crimean War, 1854-56. The Crimean War was pivotal in shaping British attitudes to military masculinity. A range of media enabled unprecedented public engagement with the progress and infamous 'blunders' of the conflict. Soldiers and civilians reflected on appropriate behaviour across ranks, forms of heroism, the physical suffering of the troops, administrative management and the need for army reform. The book considers how the military man of feeling contributes to the rethinking of gender roles, class and military hierarchy in the mid-nineteenth century, and how this figure was used in campaigns for reform. The gentle soldier could also do more bellicose social and political work, disarming anti-war critiques and helping people to feel better about war. This book looks at the difficult mixed politics of this figure. It considers questions, debated in the nineteenth century and which remain urgent today, about the relationship between feeling and action, and the ethics of an emotional response to war. It makes a case for the importance of emotional and tactile military history, bringing the Victorian military man of feeling into contemporary debates about liberal warriors and soldiers as social workers.

By: Holly Furneaux (Professor of English Literature Professor of English Literature Cardiff University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 217mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 9mm
Weight: 336g
ISBN: 9780192855800
ISBN 10: 0192855808
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 04 February 2022
Audience: College/higher education , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1: 'The company of gentlemen': Thackeray's Military Men of Feeling and Eighteenth-Century Traditions 2: Princes of War and of Peace: Secular and Spiritual Redemption in Dickens and Kingsley 3: Children of the Regiment: Narratives of Battlefield Adoption 4: 'Our poor Colonel loved him as if he had been his own son': Family Feeling in the Crimea 5: Sharing the Stuff of War: Soldier Art, Textiles and Tactility 6: Reparative Soldiering and its Limits: Cultures of Male Care-Giving Afterword: The Ballad of the Boy Captain Bibliography Index

Holly Furneaux is a Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester. She is author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor, with Sally Ledger, of Dickens in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and editor of John Forster's Life of Dickens (Sterling, 2011). Research for Military Men of Feeling: Emotion Touch and Masculinity, was supported by an AHRC Fellowship in partnership with the National Army Museum.