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

Working "at the intersection of two academic fields: the study of war time literature and the study of affect" (10), Mary A. Favret explores "how war becomes part of the barely registered substance of our everyday, ... how military conflict on a global scale looked and felt to a population whose armies and navies waged war for decades, but always at a distance" (9). For her, "the literature and art produced in Britain during its twenty-year conflict with France" is not just exemplary, but "established forms for how we continue to think and feel about war at a distance" (9). The challenge of the argument is in that "barely registered," in the reading of representations of wartime experience "inextricable from sitting at home on an evening, recalling absent friends, staring at a fire, gazing out a window" (9). How is the whole continuum of thought and feeling altered by distant military violence, and, above all, how is that changed continuum to be detected in literary and pictorial works that do not directly represent either war or the experience of war's immediate effects? This is not, for example, a book about expressions or depictions of grief over slain relatives or friends.

War at a distance is "fundamentally dislocating" first in "our sense of the movement (or stasis) of time" (49), and a subtly worked out chapter evokes various wartime temporalities and "the structures of feeling" (53) they support, playing variations indeed on the term "wartime" itself. Another considers weather, specifically "how a new weather science provided forms for mediating distant war" (120), and examines "the traces of warfare and grief evident in romantic poetry through metaphors of weather" (121). The "everyday," linked to trauma studies, reflects distant war in various ways, including the importation of the imperatives of "survival" (170) into the rhythms of daily domestic life and thought. The final full chapter (there are several shorter "interludes" and a "coda") is entitled "Viewing War at a Distance" and analyses a few wartime pictures, in particular three engravings of India by Thomas and William Daniells, whose "registration of distance especially evokes and shapes desolation" (198).

Favret's prose is full of paradox and nuance, and is frequently highly poetic itself. She is in pursuit of delicate, half- or more than half-occluded effects, to be teased out with wordplay and incongruous juxtaposition. There is little trace of cruder passions: little anger, pride, nationalism or patriotism, or jingoism, and only a few indignant protests. By the book's account, distant war is so deeply but unspecifically imbricated in every aspect of experience, temporalities are so dislocated, and wartime so pervasive and so interminable, that any thing which might characterize "not-wartime" fades from view and we are confronted with a grim portrait of the experience of modernity itself as war.

The concepts are interesting, elegantly and at times provocatively developed. But while the readings of a range of sources from the period, some well-known and some obscure, are often suggestive, they are also sometimes quite strained, and only variably persuasive. A reference to "Keats's belated knight-at-arms" (76) suggests a willingness to deploy any handy congruence with the book's theme. The claim that "the untold war experience of Captain Wentworth haunts [Persuasion's] account of its heroine's experience" (150) leads to the conclusion that "Austen has brought war home not only to everyday bodies, but also to the rhythms of everyday minds—including that of the reader" (171). Favret's readers must judge for themselves, of course, so ambitious an extension of the barely registered.

Several passages of William Cowper's The Task are returned to over and over. In The Task book 4, Favret plausibly focuses on the arrival of the post-boy with the newspaper, as the poet speaks of "the sound of war" which "has lost its terrors ere it reaches...