Thanks to the invention of photography and the telegraph descriptions and images of war have proliferated from the nineteenth century onward, yet wars continue to be fought. The way descriptions of war are framed blunts the impact of images of death and makes war an acceptable option by representing it as “war without bodies” therefore without casualties. Beginning with Crimean War, War Without Bodies traces the ways that death was framed in poetry, photography, video and video games up to and including the Iraq War.

MARTIN A. DANAHAY is a professor of English at Brock University in Canada. He is the author of Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity and A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth Century Britain.
 

Introduction: Two Photographs
Framing Death
War Culture
1. Sacrificial Bodies: Fenton, Tennyson and the Charge of the Light Brigade
Documenting the Crimean War: Fenton's Photographs
Reliving the Charge of the Light Brigade
The Charge of the Light Brigade as Sacrifice
2. The Soldier's Body and Sites of Mourning
Memorializing the Dead
The Charge of the Light Brigade and Psychological Trauma
Diagnosing Trauma
3. War Games
Fantasy Wars: Dungeons and Dragons
Virtual Warriors and Armchair Generals
The Pleasures of Conquest
4. Trauma and the Soldier's Body
The Soldier's Gendered Body
PTSD and Moral Injury
The Politics of PTSD
5. Sophie Ristelhueber: Landscape as Body
Fait and Drone Vision
Landscape and the Soldier's Body
Reinserting the Civilian Body into the Frame
Conclusion: Future War without Bodies