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.

Reviews

'In a superbly written epilogue, Isaac Land offers a final synthesis of the chapters while presenting his own original research on cross-dressing women in uniform. [...] Ultimately, Martial Masculinities reminds us of the need to look beneath the homogenous surface presented by uniformed, drilled troops in the age of horse and musket. Moreover, it makes it clear that the influence of military gender ideals went far beyond those who donned a uniform.'
H-War

Introduction - Michael Brown and Joanne Begiato
Part I: Experiencing martial masculinities
1 Burying Lord Uxbridge's leg: the body of the hero in the early nineteenth century - Julia Banister
2 Brothers in arms? Martial masculinities and family feeling in old soldiers' memoirs, 1793-1815 - Louise Carter
3 Recalling the comforts of home: bachelor soldiers' narratives of nostalgia and the re-creation of the domestic interior - Helen Metcalfe
4 Charles Incledon: a singing sailor on the Georgian stage - Anna Maria Barry
5 Visualising the aged veteran in nineteenth-century Britain: memory, masculinity and nation - Michael Brown and Joanne Begiato
Part II: Imagining martial masculinities
6 Hunger and cannibalism: James Hogg's deconstruction of Scottish military masculinities in The Three Perils of Man or War, Women, and Witchcraft! - Barbara Leonardi
7 Model military men: Charlotte Yonge and the 'martial ardour' of 'a soldier's daughter' - Susan Walton
8 'And the individual withers': Tennyson and the enlistment into military masculinity - Lorenzo Servitje
9 Charlotte Brönte's 'warrior priest': St John Rivers and the language of war - Karen Turner
10 'Something which every boy can learn': accessible knightly masculinities in children's Arthuriana, 1903-11 - Elly McCausland
11 'A story of treasure, war, and wild adventure': hero-worship, imperial masculinities, and inter-generational ideologies in H. Rider Haggard's 1880s fiction - Helen Goodman
Epilogue: gendered virtue, gendered vigour and gendered valour - Isaac Land
Index

Editors

Michael Brown is Reader in History at the University of Roehampton
Anna Maria Barry is a Research Assistant at the Royal College of Music Museum
Joanne Begiato is Professor of History at Oxford Brookes University