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 Distance considers 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
the Iliad, 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.
