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1 results

  • 13 - Writing, reading and the scenes of war

  • from Part II - Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 314-334

  • Summary

    To understand how war found its place in British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one might follow William Cowper's lead when, in The Task he organizes the scene of war around the figure of the post-boy. Cowper's post-boy offers but one example of how a war fought on foreign ground and distant seas came home to England. Wartime creates itself out of continual, daily reading: the facts shift from day to day, from excerpt to excerpt, yielding the sense that no single instalment will deliver the truth and yet every snippet is crucial. Military historians remind us that, for infantrymen and cavalrymen, warfare in the age of Napoleon consisted primarily of the tedium of waiting. Registering the agony of those waiting for news of war, one begin to realize how frequently war's pain is transferred from the body of the soldier to those Coleridge calls 'spectators and non-combatants', from battlefield to home.