In her dissertation in Comparative Literature, Keeping Watch: The Poetics and Ethics of Attention, Lily Gurton-Wachter investigates the "poetics of attention" that emerged in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using close reading and historical research, the project asks how literary figures of watchfulness and alarm redefined attention in response, and in resistance, to military discourses of keeping watch during the Napoleonic Wars. Analyzing alarmist documents that reveal the militarization of attention and the request that all citizens become "half-soldiers" by maintaining a constant sense of "watchfulness," Ms. Gurton-Wachter argues that war and aesthetics intersect in the demands they make on attention. She also states that literary texts from the Romantic Period both critique alarmism and maintain an interest in the state of heightened perception and receptivity that marks war-time alarm. In response to defensive watchfulness, Ms. Gurton-Wachter argues, poets explored an alternate form of attentiveness that departs from both military strategy and traditional standards of ethical action.