ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the publication and reception of military tales in the leading military and naval journal of the period, the United Service Journal, which played a central role in disseminating such stories, and in offering extended discussions about how they might be understood as a species of literature. It describes how such stories commemorated individual soldiers’ suffering as a form of sublime feeling. As much as Britain saw itself during the Biedermeier era as a modern nation progressing towards a future of commercial peace and prosperity, it was a memorialising culture that lay in the shadow of war. Military and naval journals had appeared in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Being wartime publications the military and naval journals were largely discontinued at the close of the wars. The United Service Journal featured military tales, and engaged in an extended discourse on the nature of such stories, emphasising in particular what it saw as their emotional intensity.
