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The Crimean War in the British Imagination, by Stefanie Markovits; pp. xi + 287. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, £50.00, $95.00.
As many scholars have noted, the Crimean War (1854-56) was distinctive for its reworking of national allegiances, its modern technologies for battle and for war reporting, and for the deep-seated ambivalence it stirred in contemporary commentators and the generations that followed. For these and other reasons, it is frequently hailed as a modern war, one predictive of later cultural rifts created by wars that lack cohesive popular support. In The Crimean War in the British Imagination, Stefanie Markovits provides a valuable account of the predominance of that war in mid-century Victorian cultural forms. Her book brings together discussions of the fiction, poetry, and visual arts of the late 1850s to demonstrate not only the topicality of the Crimean conflict, but also its shaping role in discourses not typically associated with politics.
The Crimean War was, as Markovits argues, experienced through printed texts in radically new ways: the detailed reports of Times special correspondent William Howard Russell took center stage, but a wide range of other voices and textual forms accompanied them, both in the pages of that newspaper and in other periodicals. Private (or apparently private) letters sent home by soldiers from the front were reprinted in the newspaper; letters to the editor debated matters of governmental policy; and poems, essays, and visual images conveyed still other responses to the conflict. Because these representations were circulating while the war was still ongoing, the Crimean cultural archive contains especially rich intertextual palimpsests: letters written by soldiers who refer to Russell's descriptions of their battles, the collecting...