Mary A. Favret. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-4008-3155-5. Price: US$26.95

The notion of “distant war” that gives Mary Favret's book its title is immediately recognizable to readers today. In the age of the 24-hour news cycle, news and images from our own distant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are ever-available and yet intriguingly compartmentalized in our everyday existence. The specific threats, issues, and theaters of war recede into the background, dissolving into a general awareness that we are living in an undifferentiated period of “wartime,” without a clear beginning or end. We as distant observers seem be both removed from and somehow implicated in the wars we observe through what William Cowper called the “loop-holes of retreat.” For Cowper, famously, the daily arrival of the post-boy provided the medium for engaging with the world at war. The Internet and cable television provide us the same access, now in real time rather than days or weeks late, but with the same unsettling blend of familiarity and alienation. Wartime, as Favret defines it, is not merely a geopolitical condition but an affective state, a structure of feeling, constituted in everyday lived experience, not only at the actual sites of war but (perhaps especially) on the home front. Moreover, she argues, wartime in the modern sense is not universal but emerged at a particular historical juncture, the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, Favret challenges a common view, presented most notably by Paul Fussell but shared by many, including Virginia Woolf, that modern wartime as a distinct phenomenon came into being as a result of the weapons, communications technology, and sheer brutality of the First World War. While Favret agrees that a radical and unprecedented shift in the cultural significance of war did occur and did help to bring the modern world into being, she locates that shift more than a century earlier, in the European wars of the 1780s and 1790s, which 20th-century historians, enjoying the privilege of hindsight, describe as “conventional wars” in contrast to the “total war” of the 20th century. Although19^th-century writers did not envision nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, Favret shows that they did have an understanding of war—bloodless, scientific, rationalized, and professionalized—remarkably similar to the 20^th-century concept of total war. Romantic wartime translates war seen by earlier ages as a “sublime event,” random and outside the normal scope of understanding, into an “underlying situation or condition of modernity” itself (38). The spatial and temporal disorientation produced by regarding war from a distance, Favret concludes, helps to define and produce the self-questioning, uncertain modern subject. Regular access to newspapers also created a sense that all of the war news fit into an underlying order, one that gradually unfolded in a series. This notion that war could be assimilated into a logical, orderly structure was a key attribute of Romantic wartime. Even the ways in which words such as “war,” “wartime,” “civilian,” and “noncombatant” were used suggests a changing understanding of war's role in human history. Using illustrations from eighteenth-century dictionaries and philosophical texts, Favret contends that the notion that war was an aberrant and chaotic event, bringing “confusion and perplexity,” yielded to a view of war as professionalized, systematized, logical, even “the highest operation of intellect” (184). At the same time, the new meteorological science of the period emphasized Britain's interconnectedness with the rest of the world by conceiving of weather not as an accumulation of individuated local events but as a predictable global system. The Romantic-era public became acutely conscious of the connections between weather and the fortunes of war, with the storms that influenced the outcome of Waterloo only the most famous …