Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime: a Review

Abstract

Mary Favret’s War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime is a brilliant, beautifully written book on the experience of war in British Romantic writing. Offering intricate close readings of Cowper, Wordsworth, Austen, Coleridge, and others, Favret situates these canonical writers in relation to large historical contexts: writings in a prophetic mode by Robert Brothers and Captain Charles W. Pasley, 18th century weather history, and British paintings of colonial India, to name a few. Beyond the texts and images of the Romantic period. War at a Distance moves with impressive sweep between wartimes past and present, from the Revolution and Napoleonic conflicts of two centuries ago to the first and second Gulf Wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. War at a Distance is a stirring and powerful meditation on what it means to live in a time of war.