Considerations of writing about war, in war, because of war, and against war, in a wide range of texts from the middle ages onwards. War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, record and recognition. This is shown to be true even to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the intricateentwinement of war with contemporary life. Particular topics addressed include writings of and about the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; Shakespeare's "Casus Belly"; Auden's "Journal of an Airman"; and War and Peace. Ian Patterson is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches English at Queens' College, Cambridge. Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English and a Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Mary A. Favret, Rachel Galvin, James Purdon, Mark Rawlinson, Susanna A. Throop, Katie L. Walter, Carol Watts, Tom F. Wright, Andrew Zurcher.

The literary importance of letters did not end with the demise of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. In the turbulent period between 1789 and 1830, the letter was used as a vehicle for political rather than sentimental expression. Against a background of severe political censorship, seditious Corresponding Societies, and the rise of the modern Post Office, letters as they are used by Romantic writers, especially women, become the vehicle for a distinctly political, often disruptive force. Mary Favret's study of Romantic correspondence reexamines traditional accounts of epistolary writing, and redefines the letter as a 'feminine' genre. The book deals not only with letters which circulated in the novels of Austen or Mary Shelley, but also with political pamphlets, incendiary letters and spy letters available for public consumption.

New approaches to women writers and attitudes to women in the Romantic period, principally focused on North America. Focusing on the period from 1770 to 1830, this collection deploys recent thinking on women in the romantic period to define an agenda which will shape studies in this area into the next century. Investigating issues of class and gender, imperalism and gender identity, and gender and genre, the essays range widely over women and women's affairs during the period, and include pieces on such important writers as Emily Dickinson, Letitia Landon, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Recent developments in the theory and practice of feminist literary criticism are used to reassess the literature of the period, and to interrogate the notion of romanticism, both as a conceptual model and as a periodbounded by dates and geographical restrictions. As a whole, the volume raises questions about gendered romanticism in America, about the surge of romantic poetics in mid-century, and about the appropriation of gendered romanticism by fin-de-siecle writers. Dr ANNE JANOWITZteaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Contributors: GARY KELLY, MARY FAVRET, WILLIAM KEACH, JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH, SONIA HOFKOSH, EMMA FRANCIS, DARIA DONNELLY, BRIDGET BENNETT, IRA LIVINGSTON

What does it mean to live during wartime away from the battle zone? What is it like for citizens to go about daily routines while their country sends soldiers to kill and be killed across the globe? Timely and thought-provoking, "War at a Distance" considers how those left on the home front register wars and wartime in their everyday lives, particularly when military conflict remains removed from immediate perception, available only through media forms. Looking back over two centuries, Mary Favret locates the origins of modern wartime in the Napoleonic era and describes how global military operations affected the British populace, as the nation's army and navy waged battles far from home for decades. She reveals that the literature and art produced in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries obsessively cultivated means for feeling as much as understanding such wars, and established forms still relevant today.

Favret examines wartime literature and art as varied as meditations on the "Iliad," the history of meteorology, landscape painting in India, and popular poetry in newspapers and periodicals; she locates the embedded sense of war and dislocation in works ranging from Austen, Coleridge, and Wordsworth to Woolf, Stevens, and Sebald; and she contemplates how literature provides the public with methods for responding to violent calamities happening elsewhere. Bringing to light Romanticism's legacy in reflections on modern warfare, this book shows that war's absent presence affects home in deep and irrevocable ways.

..". provocative insights." -- Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature

..". a series of well researched and persuasiveessays examining what has been traditionally excluded from the Romantic literarycanon: the feminine, the domestic, the local, collective, sentimental andnovelistic." -- Women's Studies Network (UK) AssociationNewsletter

..". a contribution of real quality to ongoingdebates." -- British Journal for 18th Century Studies

Theessays in this collection question romanticism's suppression of the feminine, thematerial, and the collective, and its opposition to readings centering on theseconcerns.

The literary importance of letters did not end with the demise of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel. In the turbulent period between 1789 and 1830, the letter was used as a vehicle for political rather than sentimental expression. Against a background of severe political censorship, seditious Corresponding Societies, and the rise of the modern Post Office, letters as they are used by Romantic writers, especially women, become the vehicle for a distinctly political, often disruptive force. Mary Favret's study of Romantic correspondence reexamines traditional accounts of epistolary writing, and redefines the letter as a 'feminine' genre. The book deals not only with letters which circulated in the novels of Austen or Mary Shelley, but also with political pamphlets, incendiary letters and spy letters available for public consumption.