ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that John Kincaid achieved success by developing Moyle Sherer’s and George R. Gleig’s style of writing, similarly inscribing his narrative with marks of authorial good taste. Kincaid’s Adventures was one of the best received and most famous of these ‘adventure’ military memoirs. By the time John Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade was published in 1830, the military memoir had become established in Britain as a recognised and commercially successful literary genre. Kincaid’s embrace of a professional, regimental identity is also reflected in the enormous emphasis he places on his role as an active combatant at war. From Kincaid’s perspective, as one whose soul is ‘strung for war’, the amateur soldier’s theatricality suggests a mixing of civil and military identities as a kind of ungendered monstrosity. Kincaid emerges as the very ideal of the citizen-soldier, occupying what Favret describes as the soldier’s ‘abstract, collective and immortal body’ that ‘lives with and through the fiction of the nation’.
