Introduction

As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars raged across Europe, writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Thelwall, Charlotte Smith and Lord Byron, responded to the violence of their times with a mixture of ardent protest and measured acceptance. Yet as self-reflexive and historically fulsome as these studies undoubtedly are, one is hard-pressed to find any evidence of the material effects of history on the age other than those which encompass the revolution debate. Dismissed by many readers as a product of the age of sensibility, the evocation of female suffering, as Stephen Behrendt points out, was in fact a highly politicized trope, one that enabled women writers in particular to criticize the effects of war without fear of censure. One problem with Favret's conception of the representation of war resides in her assumption that exposure of the wounded and dying soldier makes visible 'a counter-public sphere, a space which recognizes the violence that the public sphere alone cannot, constitutively accommodate'.