It’s a common truth now that as much as we create our culture, our culture also creates us. Like Frankenstein’s monster acting with a mind of his own, culture eludes our attempts to rein it in and shapes us in return. Mary A. Favret’s War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime looks at the way we look at warfare from the home front and point to the age of the Romantics, mired as they were in the Napoleonic Wars, as the origin of how we still see our world in times of conflict. Ranging back in history as far back as the Iliad and as far forward as W.G. Sebald, Favret centers her view of warfare vision on the days of Wordsworth and Turner. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Distance Learning."
[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Mary A. Favret’s War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime.]
