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Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Pp. ix, 262. $26.95.
When a country goes to war, how are individual citizens' lives affected? how does war change the way they think, interact with each other, or represent the world around them? What does one wartime citizen have in common with another, across the globe or across the centuries? Although most scholars engaging with these questions have focused on mid-nineteenth- or twentieth-century conflicts, it was the Napoleonic era that witnessed several important developments, including the first appearances of the terms "non-combatant" and "civilian" in the English language, and the emergence of the idea of "wartime" itself as a distinct category (13). in recognition of the era's significance, linda Colley called for more attention to British civilians' wartime experience in her 1992 book Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, observing how little was known of responses to the wars-or "to the innovations, conquests and dangers that accompanied them"-and remarking that, since Britain never suffered an invasion during this period, "the impression has persisted that . . . [these conflicts] took place largely outside the thought-world of its civilian population" ([repr. Yale university Press, 2008], 3). Mary A. Favret's pathbreaking and sophisticated new book answers Colley's call and more, by offering thoughtful analyses of responses to war across an impressive variety of media from the period. Along the way, she reveals much about the Romantic origins of our own experiences of distant war today.
Though the British citizenry feared an invasion by sea that never came, it was their distance from the fighting that defined their collective wartime experience. Favret explains that, after the 1745 defeat of the loyalists at Culloden, "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" (10). Favret takes distance-whether geographic or temporal-as a central theme for her study. Thus, instead of letting the "problem" of British distance foreclose critical possibilities (a narrowness that has led to the persistent fallacy mentioned by Colley), she...