Victorian masculinities, or military men of feeling: domesticity, militarism, and manly sensibility

Furneaux, Holly ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5104-1975 2014. Victorian masculinities, or military men of feeling: domesticity, militarism, and manly sensibility. John, Juliet, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, Oxford Handbooks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 211–230. (10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199593736.013.010)

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

This chapter introduces an unlikely figure of ideal Victorian masculinity, the military man of feeling. It uses Thackeray’s exemplary Colonel Newcome, hero of The Newcomes (1853–5), to focus a number of debates central to Victorian ideas of manliness: the composition of the gentleman, the democratization of manly virtue, the social and national roles of army men across ranks. Building upon excellent recent work on the private lives and experience of Victorian men, it examines a mid-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the emotional experience and eloquence of soldiers, and questions the accepted idea that the Victorian period witnessed a decided stiffening of the upper lip. This essay challenges both the abiding stereotype of the emotionally buttoned-up Victorian male, and the idea, expressed in the Victorian period and familiar in our own, that feeling has no place in war.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISBN:	9780199593736
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2024 16:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/79999

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item