This stimulating collection of essays, Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture, had its origins in a conference held at the Australian National University in Canberra in 2011. The editors, Neil Ramsey and Gillian Russell, are avowedly interdisciplinary in their approach, aiming to reflect the recent growth of interest among scholars of romanticism in the affective influence of war (in particular war with revolutionary and Napoleonic France). A majority of the authors may be specialists in British literature, but they cannot, as the editors explain, allow themselves to be constrained by disciplinary boundaries, given that the violence of war and the range of emotions it aroused cannot be adequately understood within the limits of any single discipline. War, they insist, puts pressure on boundaries, including the boundaries of culture. As has been shown in a number of recent studies—among them Jeffrey N. Cox's Romanticism in the Shadow of War: Literary Culture in the Napoleonic War Years (2014), and Philip Shaw's Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002)—the experience of war belongs as much to the realm of private life as it does to the public sphere.

Historians of the long eighteenth century have also shown increased interest in the experience of war and its impact on civil society at a time characterized by the recruitment of mass armies and unprecedentedly high casualty rates. This was, in David Bell's phrase, the era of “the first total war,” affecting civil society as well as the military, distorting economies and patterns of consumption while disrupting the existing gender order across Europe (David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It [2007]). For historians, too, therefore, this collection will be of interest, overlapping with recent studies like Anthony Page's Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744–1815 (2015). The essays examine how writers and artists responded to war, building on the work of such scholars as Mary Favret, who, as Ramsey and Russell note, “traces the affective resonances of war through Romantic literary and visual culture to show how war's pains and fears were relocated into the subjective, everyday interiority of the Romantic wartime reader and writer” (5) in War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (2010). In the process the collection underscores some of the many ways in which the romantic imagination brought distant war close to home in wartime and postwar Britain. It shows how poets and artists portrayed the pathos of war as much as its glory, the sense of trauma that mingled uneasily with outpourings of patriotic nationalism. Creative writing is presented as a form of bearing witness: as such it proved a powerful medium for evoking sympathy for those who suffered. It also, in a romantic age, led some, artists and poets alike, to evoke the sublimity of war, to assert the purity of sacrifice in a greater cause, and to elegize military genius, whether of Nelson on the one side or of Napoleon on the other.

The book is organized into three major sections: the opening three chapters examine literary traces of the sufferings of war; the next four chapters follow war's material legacies; and the final section deals with the aesthetics of war, terminating in a bold argument by Nick Mansfield, based on a textual study of Clausewitz, that the understanding of war today has its roots in the aesthetics of the romantic era.

The essays themselves present snapshots of the cultural reception of war. Some address specific literary texts. Jonathan Lamb, for instance, argues that it is the shame of war that helps to explain the staccato nature of war memory as it is expressed in literature, and he compares the lack of a clear linear structure in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy with the disjointed memories of the First World War in Edmund Blunden's war poems. War also produced personal dramas that are the very stuff of poetry and theatre, as Daniel O'Quinn shows in his chapter on that most tragic of villains, Major André, a British officer hanged by the Americans when he was caught behind enemy lines in the War of Independence. Painting, too, evoked the ambivalence of the battlefield, a sensation of what Philip Shaw, quoting Clausewitz, terms “the realm of uncertainty” (167). The arts, it is repeatedly suggested, could provoke emotional responses that press reports and even soldiers' memoirs could not. Poems and plays, paintings, and panoramas emphasized the horror and evoked the full pity of war.

People wanted to get involved in the drama, and authors sought to awaken emotional responses to war's ravages. In Britain, given the prominent place of Waterloo in war memory and the importance that Britain attached to the defeat of Napoleon, it is unsurprising that a number of the essays look at post-1815 Britain, showing how deeply the country had been traumatized by its wartime experience. The dual sense of triumph and sacrifice ran deep in public consciousness. In the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and David Wilkie, in the theatrical displays at the Woolwich Rotunda, and in the decision to set up the Naval and Military Library and Museum at Whitehall Yard, a succession of essays demonstrate the eagerness with which the people of Britain sought to relive the memory of the battle and offered the armed forces greater professional recognition than had been accorded in earlier decades. Intriguingly, that enthusiasm was not confined to the soldiers of their own side but extended even to the French and to Napoleon himself. As Simon Bainbridge shows in a fascinating chapter, Britain's appetite for reenactments and representations of the wars with Napoleon was to last across the nineteenth century, while the Staffordshire pottery industry would grow rich on the emperor's memory, producing more busts of Napoleon than of Queen Victoria. Napoleon had always prided himself on winning the battle for history. Even in England, it seems, there is some evidence that he did.