War At a Distance (ebook)

Argumento de War At a Distance (ebook)

"Delivering its impressive literary insights in a tone of humane regret, War at a Distance is a reminder of shared responsibility and shared concern. In Favret's compelling image, we are suspended before and between armed conflicts on the shakiest of rope-bridges, and the place of safety we are heading for is out of sight."--Times Literary Supplement

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. The book is a stirring and powerful meditation on what it means to live in a time of war. . . . Mary Favret's book teaches us to attend to the tumult that passes just out of reach of conscious apprehension; it attunes the reader to the sights and sounds of war passing beyond our ken. War at a Distance is a stunning achievement."--Noel Jackson, Wordsworth Circle

"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

"One of the most significant contributions to the category of general Romanticism this year is Mary A. Favret's War at a Distance. [It] is a consistently insightful consideration of the connections between wartime and everyday life--how the pain and suffering of soldiers is experienced and processed by their family and friends, the people who are left behind."--Year's Work in English Studies

"Favret also manages the delicate task of reading the past in terms of our present without obliterating the former's distinctiveness. As erudite in the history and discourses of war as it is in the literature and culture of Romanticism, War at a Distance is an essential book in the field."--Ian Duncan, Studies in English Literature

"Thoughtful, sophisticated, and subtle, this book analyzes the way war figures in Romantic writing, i.e., the way Romantic writing figuratively engages civilians' always-mediated experience of distant warfare. . . . Engaging clearly and intelligently with critical work by such thinkers as Raymond Williams, Dominick LaCapra, Susan Sontag, and Amanda Anderson, this book demonstrates that the contemporary experience of wartime has its roots in the Romantic imagination."--Choice

"War at a Distance deserves to be read and argued about in history, comparative literature and classics for years to come. . . . [T]his is the kind of book that encourages you to try out its ideas on works you may already know, and then rethink them, just as it makes you want to learn about the poets it discusses and the critics who played a role in its writing."--James Tatum, New Books on Literature

"I found Favret's narrative compelling. To connect all the necessary dots, she needed to lace together a fine web of interrelated texts of all kinds--verbal, visual, and historical. The final product stands up to the weight of scrutiny as well as entertains with a bravura performance of looking back and ahead in equal measures. Mired ourselves at a distance in our endless War on Terror, we should look long and hard at Favret's War at a Distance not only for the sources of our coping mechanisms, but also for the origins of how we separate ourselves from the reality of waging war and, perhaps unconsciously, contribute to how wars begin."--Bob Duggan, The Big Think

"[T]his is a brilliant and sophisticated book. It offers a wonderfully comprehensive and innovative study that builds not only upon Favret's own formative work on Romanticism and war, but also masterfully condenses and reorients the growing body of work in the field that has appeared over the last fifteen years."--Neil Ramsey, Studies in Romanticism0List of Illustrations ix
PRELUDE: A Winter's Evening 1

PART I: Modern Wartime: Media and Affect

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction: A Sense of War 9
War Mediated 12
Worlds Without and Within 22
Wartime Without Limits 30
War as All Wars 40
World Wars 43

CHAPTER TWO: Telling Time in War 49
Wartime 49
Modes of Temporality, Structures of Feeling 53
The Post-Boy and the News 59
The Meantime 68
Prophecy 81
INTERLUDE: Still Winter Falls 98

PART II: Invasions

CHAPTER THREE: War in the Air 119
Live Air 120
Beyond Control 123
Early Weather Science: Grounding the Weather 126
A Georgics of the Sky 131
Voices in the Air 138

CHAPTER FOUR: Everyday War 145
A History of Suffering 146
No Peace 151
Diverting Away the Time 161
A Broken Story 165
INTERLUDE: A Brief History of the Meaning of War 173

PART III: War in the World

CHAPTER FIVE: Viewing War at a Distance 187
War in Pictures 190
Worlding India 198
The Historical Sublime 212
The Rope-Bridge 220

CODA: Undone 230
Acknowledgments 235
Bibliography 239
Index 255