ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the continuity and changes occurring within the established traditions of the military memoir during the period of dramatic generic change. It discusses the ways in which an existing genre built around the campaign narrative tradition of the military memoir began to appropriate elements from sentimental writing and in particular from the cluster of popular genres that can be associated with the figure of the ‘suffering traveller’. The military memoir emerged as a common and popular genre across Europe at the start of the seventeenth century. When Britain became involved in the Peninsular War an unprecedented number of sentimental accounts of war appeared. The narratives of soldiering that appeared in Britain following the Peninsular War continued to be dominated by the tradition of the campaign narrative, but they also introduced a far greater emphasis on the personal experience of war.
