War at a Distance : Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime

by Favret, Mary A.

• ISBN13: 9781400831555
• ISBN10: 1400831555
• Copyright: 2010-01-04
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking,War at a Distanceconsiders how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era, and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today.Favret examines wartime literature and art as varied as meditations on theIliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, and popular poetry in newspapers and periodicals; she locates the embedded sense of war and dislocation in works ranging from Austen, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to Woolf, Stevens, and Sebald; and she contemplates how literature provides the public with methods for responding to violent calamities happening elsewhere. Bringing to light Romanticism's legacy in reflections on modern warfare, this book shows that war's absent presence affects home in deep and irrevocable ways.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Prelude: A Winter's Evening	p. 1
Modern Wartime: Media and Affect
Introduction: A Sense of War	p. 9
War Mediated	p. 12
Worlds Without and Within	p. 22
Wartime Without Limits	p. 30
War as All Wars	p. 40
World Wars	p. 43
Telling Time in War	p. 49
Wartime	p. 49
Modes of Temporality, Structures of Feeling	p. 53
The Post-Boy and the News	p. 59
The Meantime	p. 68
Prophecy	p. 81
Interlude: Still Winter Falls	p. 98
Invasions
War in the Air	p. 119
Live Air	p. 120
Beyond Control	p. 123
Early Weather Science: Grounding the Weather	p. 126
A Georgics of the Sky	p. 131
Voices in the Air	p. 138
Everyday War	p. 145
A History of Suffering	p. 146
No Peace	p. 151
Diverting Away the Time	p. 161
A Broken Story	p. 165
Interlude: A Brief History of the Meaning of War	p. 173
War in the World
Viewing War at a Distance	p. 187
War in Pictures	p. 190
Worlding India	p. 198
The Historical Sublime	p. 212
The Rope-Bridge	p. 220
CODA: Undone	p. 230
Acknowledgments	p. 235
Bibliography	p. 239
Index	p. 255
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