Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art
Philip Shaw, University of Leicester, UK
‘Beautifully written, lucid, and theoretically sophisticated, Philip Shaw’s study of Romantic military art is a
consistently illuminating account of an enormously significant but often overlooked subject’.
– Christopher Rovee, Stanford University
In a moving intervention into Romantic-era depictions of the dead
and wounded, Philip Shaw’s timely study directs our gaze to the
neglected figure of the common soldier. How suffering and sentiment
were portrayed in a variety of visual and verbal media is Shaw’s
particular concern, as he examines a wide range of print and visual
media, from paintings to sketches to political prose and anti-war
poetry, and from writings on culture and aesthetics to graphic satires
and early photographs.
Whilst classical portraiture and history painting certainly conspired
with official ideologies to deflect attention from the true costs of war,
other works of art, literary as well as visual, proffered representations
that countered the view that suffering on and off the battlefield
is noble or heroic. Shaw uncovers a history of changing attitudes
towards suffering, from mid-eighteenth century ambivalence to
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concepts of moral
sentiment. Thus, Shaw’s story is one of how images of death and
wounding facilitated and queried these shifts in the perception of
war, qualifying as well as consolidating ideas of individual and
national unanimity.
Informed by readings of the letters and journals of serving soldiers,
surgeons’ notebooks and sketches, and the writings of peace and
war agitators, Shaw’s study shows how an attention to the depiction
of suffering and the development of ‘liberal’ sentiment enables a
reconfiguring of historical and theoretical notions of the body as a site
of pain and as a locus of violent national imaginings.
Contents: Introduction; Seeing through tears I; Seeing through tears
II; ‘Complicated woe’: British military art of the 1790s; All the news
that’s fit to paint; Disgusting objects; images of wounding in the
aftermath of war; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
To order, please visit: www.ashgate.com
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Alternatively, contact our distributor:
Bookpoint Ltd, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales,
130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1235 827730 Fax: +44 (0)1235 400454
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June 2013
260 pages
Hardback
978-0-7546-6492-5
£60.00
View this title online at: www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781754664925
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