Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary A. Favret is associate professor of English at Indiana University. She is the author of Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters.

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"This book is a masterpiece. Brilliant, brave, and beautifully written, it combines precision with lyricism. It will be required reading for scholars and students in Romantic studies, but its appeal will hardly be limited to them, since the topic is relevant to anyone interested in the nature and effects of war in our own time."--Kevis Goodman, University of California, Berkeley

"War at a Distance is an important, exquisite, and thoughtful consideration of the affective experiences of wartime. Favret helps us to reconsider the Romantic imagination as one haunted by the measurelessness of war's effects."--Celeste Langan, University of California, Berkeley

"Favret's vividly realized and impeccably argued analysis demonstrates that state-sponsored violence was not merely a political or military matter, but had profound consequences for how Romantic thinkers--many living far from the ground zeroes dotting the globe--imagined and conducted themselves, experienced time, and thought about the future. War at a Distance is not only a sobering reflection on what it means to live with oneself and with others amid military modernity, but also an irrepressible call for peace."--David Clark, McMaster University

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WAR AT A DISTANCE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

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

Chapter One

This book considers how war becomes part of the barely registered substance of our everyday, an experience inextricable from sitting at home on an evening, recalling absent friends, staring at a fire, gazing out a window. As it looks back over two centuries, War at a Distance tells 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. For those at home, the task was to find sentient ground for what often appeared a free-floating, impersonal military operation, removed from their immediate sensory perception. The literature and art produced in Britain during its twenty-year conflict with France cultivated this ground obsessively—and in doing so, it established forms for how we continue to think and feel about war at a distance. As a wartime phenomenon, British Romanticism gives its distinctive voice to the dislocated experience that is modern wartime: the experience of war mediated, of time and times unmoored, of feeling intensified but also adrift.

Modern wartime refers first to the experience of those living through but not in a war. As writers in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century went about their everyday routines, their country was sending men to kill and be killed across the globe. In the course of the eighteenth century the newly United Kingdom had crushed two armed rebellions at home; participated in a half dozen wars on the continent; expanded its imperial holdings on the Indian subcontinent, in the Caribbean, and in Africa; increased and then lost a good portion of its North American colonies—through warfare. At the turn of the new century, Great Britain entered a worldwide campaign, fighting first against regicides and Terror and later against an evil despot (the French Revolution and Napoleon, respectively), emerging in 1815 as the world's dominant military power. The intensity and length of fighting have led historians to refer to the eighteenth century as a "Second Hundred Years War," and Linda Colley has shown that British national identity was decisively forged through this century of nearly constant military action. But that military action, again, was undertaken at a remove: after the defeat of Stewart loyalists at Culloden in 1745, distance—either geophysical or temporal—was increasingly built into the British nation's understanding of war. War on home turf happened back then; it was history. If it occurred now, it occurred beyond the reach of eyes and ears, somewhere else, over there.

In trying to capture this modern wartime, the chapters of this book take up materials as varied as meditations on The Iliad, the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, popular poetry in the newspapers and periodicals, theories of history and the everyday, the work of dictionaries, and various modes of prophecy and prognostication; they contemplate forms of war and wartime that range from the early years of the eighteenth century to the present. Yet their primary material (their "hearth" as it were) is the literature of romantic wartime. This material makes clear that wartime responses move in several directions. In some instances the experience of war at a distance prompts a move toward abstraction, an increasing distance from the human body. Here the consolations of system, idea, and purpose hold sway: as from a bird's-eye view, you see patterns emerge; you comprehend why and when, where and how war operates. War becomes an object of knowledge, a universalizing abstraction; indeed, in wartime it threatens to become all you know. In other instances, the reverse occurs: wartime promotes a sense of atomism and despair which folds into the body so completely that inertia and apathy— lack of feeling—are its only signs. Wartime here defeats human responsiveness. There is a third, perhaps more productive response, suspended between and resistant to the polar pulls of abstraction and numbness. The last chapter of this book locates this third response visually and spatially in a "middle distance." But it surfaces throughout the book as a poetic or aesthetic response, a response that strives to produce and give form to feeling. And it is this third term, the productive aspect of wartime writing, which opens wartime—and the romantic writing that conceived it—to the present.

War at a Distance works, then, at the intersection of two academic fields: the study of wartime literature and the study of affect. The scholarship on wartime literature and culture—for example, Paul Fussell's masterpieces, The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War; Bernard Bergonzi's important Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and...