Horatio Nelson: A Controversial Hero

(Paperback)

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Marianne Czisnik illuminates the life and reputation of Britain's most famous admiral in a fresh and groundbreaking manner. Some of the most controversial aspects of his life and career are explored, such as his involvement in the defeat of the Neapolitan revolution and his notorious love affair with Lady Hamilton. Along the way, new research provides original insights into the character of this complex man and the way his image was developed by successive generations of biographers and naval historians. The second part traces how the figure of Nelson has evolved in the popular imagination during the two hundred years since his death. This includes an examination of imagery, propaganda and fiction, as well as treatments of the admiral from a French, Spanish and German perspective. In this distinctive contribution to Nelson literature, Czisnik expertly reveals how the real man has been obscured, distorted and misunderstood by those for whom the image was more important than the reality

Reviews

'The distinctive nature of this book is that it focuses on the way Nelson was seen by contemporaries and subsequent generations and is based on a complete mastery of the correspondence between Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This is a book of real insight: there is no blandness - it is very readable.' Dr Michael Duffy, University of Exeter Marianne Czisnik's Horatio Nelson: a Controversial Hero demonstrates that there is still much more to understand about this man. Czisnik, significantly not of the UK, demonstrates the necessity to suspend for a time the business of writing full but superficial and subjective biographies, and to take a more clinical and analytical approach to a character that even contemporaries acknowledged as complex The result is that we get to know Nelson more intimately than in even the fullest of the other biographies. History in Focus Issue 9, The Sea

Author Bio

Dr. Marianne Czisnik trained and practiced as a lawyer in Germany before researching aspects of Nelson's life, image and iconography at the University of Edinburgh. A leading Nelson scholar, she has published on a wide range of subjects related to Nelson.