Neil Ramsey is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Contents: Introduction: modern war and the suffering soldier; Part 1 The Genre of the Military Memoir, 1780-1835: The sentimental military memoir, 1780-1825; Military authors and the commemoration of war, 1825-1835. Part 2 The Military Memoir and the Sacrifices of War: Suffering and the spectacle of modern war: Robert Ker Porter's Letters from Portugal and Spain (1809); 'An atom of an army': the sentimental soldier's tale and Journal of a Soldier of the 71st (1819); Romantic authorship and picturesque war: Moyle Sherer's Recollections of the Peninsula (1823) and George Gleig's The Subaltern (1825); The cheerful stoicism of the soldier hero: John Kincaid's Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (1830); Conclusion: 'a plain unvarnished tale': the military author and the romance of war; Appendix; Bibliography; Index

Examining the little-known memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Ramsey shows how these popular works profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.