Crime fiction and war narratives have long been intimately connected, with military conflicts pro... more Crime fiction and war narratives have long been intimately connected, with military conflicts providing material for criminal plots, villainy, victims, mysteries, clues and detectives since the Golden Age of crime fiction that followed World War I. With their emphasis on crime, corruption, detection and policing within the framework of the sovereign nation-state, crime narratives have also proved particularly apt at registering postwar challenges of conflict zones. As literary genres, crime fiction and war narratives also share long-established ties to popular fiction, film and TV adaptations. Yet, as I will discuss here, their relations can be fraught: When these forceful genres collide, they often do so disruptively and agonistically, with powerfully productive results. Strikingly, the era of seemingly permanent war of the early twenty-first century has seen the ascendancy of crime fiction, most notably in the "Golden Age" of television and streaming video, while war stories occupy a much more uncertain place in contemporary culture. Indeed, with a few exceptions, Iraq and Afghanistan war movies have been deemed "box office poison" for domestic audiences eager to consume the fantasy of lawless cruelty offered by series such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Crime fiction reigns supreme in the "Forever War era", where recent war narratives appear to need the crime genre to impose coherence and interpretive order on their fictional worlds. The uneven relations between crime and war genres were delineated early on in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887). As Sherlock Holmes's hierarchical partnership with the ex-military Dr Watson made clear, when the crime genre and war narrative overlapped, crime fiction would typically have the upper hand. During the interwar years of the Golden Age of detective fiction and hardboiled fiction, the genres consolidated their respective identities and fictional territories. While both detective fiction and hardboiled crime writing often reflected the social fragmentation and ironic disillusion that followed World War I, as in Dorothy Sayers's shell-shocked detective Lord Peter Wimsey or the hardboiled detectives of Chandler or Hammett, their domestic settings tended to be on the home front and feature a civilian cast of characters. Indeed, Alison Light has argued that the whodunit between the wars was consciously constructed by post-World War I writers like Agatha Christie as a feminised "literature of convalescence" (Light 1991: 69-75). World War II saw some further intermingling of the genres, in the wartime noir of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), or in the tropes of the returning veterans in Raymond Chandler's The Long The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, et al.
The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Edited by Adam ... more The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (distributed by Oxford UP USA), 2012. 590 pp. £150.00 cloth.Critics of the literature and culture of war face a formidable challenge. How are they to insist on the relevance of warfare beyond the ends of particular conflicts, while resisting the tendency of modern war discourse to explain everything modern through the lens of permanent, perpetual war? It is all too familiar an experience to see war books shelved and the terrible human lessons about militarism learned rapidly forgotten, as wars get bracketed off as "states of exception." Conversely, the insights of literary critics have a hard time competing with the expertise of pundits of high tech warfare or of the "war makers" themselves, in a culture which still puts a premium on our collective fantasies about combat experience.Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson have risen to the challenge by offering a remarkably ambitious, richly satisfying, and wide ranging edited collection of essays that pretty much defines this emerging field of study. Both comprehensive survey and incisive intervention into the study of modern and contemporary transatlantic war literature, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature gathers together an extraordinary range of expertise in five editors' introduc- tions and fifty seven tightly written chapters. The result is an exhilarating, provocative, sometimes uneven but endlessly diverting read, which will become essential for both specialist and generalist scholars alike. The edi- tors, both authors of ground-breaking criticism on the British literature of World War II, make clear the critical ambition of the work in their Intro- ductions to the volume's five Parts: "Wars and their Literatures"; "Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures"; "Technology"; "Spaces"; and "Genres." They set the tone and expectations for the volume by zeroing in on key debates within the field, targeting influential theorists and supplementing the contributors' essays with brief case studies drawn from conflicts since 9/11.Piette and Rawlinson emphasize certain compelling through-lines for both the volume and future study in this field. Their claim for the im- portance of war literature is on ethical grounds:War makes literature ethical in this strict sense: the spectacle and imagining of the death of others in state-sponsored conflicts demands writing that pays due witness to that suffering, accompanies that suffering with the attention due to extreme and lethal experience, and accomplishes repre- sentations of that suffering without recourse to the usual contractual conventions that govern polite engagement with a sophisticated or jaded readership. (2)The centre of gravity of their argument is a highly productive pragmatics of genre, rather than a theorization of violence: "War tends to alter the genres it inhabits, like a cuckoo in the nest. It stretches and distorts the normal obligations and expectations, and gives the genre a special ethical edge, as well as menace and dark intention" (6). More contentiously, in their final Introduction they observe: "War exerts pressure on all genres by politiciz- ing them (inevitably since war is a political act), by infiltrating into their forms of representation the morbidity of its themes...and by propagandizing itself into everything it touches, however hermetically sealed and peace- able" (475). The potential limitation of such an approach, however, is that it may remain in the realm of the ethical, of the more privatized literary imagination, rather than considering the specific political consequences of representational or critical strategies.What's missing from the volume's conceptual framework is a sustained discussion or theorization of "war culture," despite the editors' frequent reliance on this concept. …
How viable is 'the transatlantic' as a category for understanding modern literature and c... more How viable is 'the transatlantic' as a category for understanding modern literature and culture? Transatlantic crossings of various kinds have emerged in recent modernist studies as a compelling trope for understanding the period.1 The idea offers a comparative framework for Anglophone writing on both sides of the Atlantic that is at once transnational, familiar, and more manageable than heady notions of a 'global' modernism. For Ford Madox Ford, editor of the transatlantic review which he launched, edited and folded in 1924, transatlantic modernism is a highly unstable proposition. In the dedication to his memoir of the period, It Was the Nightingale (1933), Ford declares, 'So you see that, to date, this fairy-tale has found its appropriate close. The persons of the transatlantic drama are scattered but all active'. The italics allow Ford a typographical pun on the lower case title of the transatlantic review. But the phrase 'transatlantic drama' also evokes the larger migratory crossings between Britain, France, and the United States that transformed his career between 1922 and 1933, along with those of many of his contemporaries. Critics have tended to mine the memoir for historical detail, often emphasizing its unreliability. In this essay, I will consider various ways in which Ford's experimental literary history, It Was the Nightingale, can help us imagine the category of the transatlantic as a 'drama' appropriately concluded. First, as a post-war project that offered an internationalist alternative to the reconstruction of national culture; second, as a space of overlapping histories and temporalities that encouraged experiment; and lastly, as an object of struggle and frustrated desire. As a supposedly 'unreliable' - or impressionist - literary historian, Ford is an ideal guide to the unstable writerly and critical field.In the memoir Ford narrates his release from the closed world of post-war Britain into a more open transatlantic space, in which he could edit a 'Review' and begin his Parade's End novel sequence. As he declares in the dedication:I have tried then to write a novel drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre - a poor man who was once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist - the time-shift, the progression d'effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. (IWN 6)Based in Paris and sustained by American capital and Ford's dwindling resources,4 the transatlantic review revived Ford's passion for editorship and his dream of a 'more or less modern movement' that transcended national boundaries allowing him to publish an extraordinary array of modern writers.5 He had discovered more writers in the English Review, notably Lawrence, Pound, and Lewis, but the transatlantic review's roster is remarkable, offering, as Max Saunders observes, 'a discriminating cross-section of post-war international modernism'.6It Was the Nightingale recounts in three overlapping parts Ford's struggle to overcome the crushing effects of his Great War experience as he leaves behind 'the last of England' for Paris, New York, and the Mediterranean. Part One explores his decision to abandon rural self-exile and an increasingly hostile English culture for Southern France (1919-22). Part Two celebrates the simultaneous making of his reputation in the United States and the importance of an American audience to his conception of the Parade's End novel sequence (1923-28). Finally, in Part Three, he dramatises the 'frenetic slapstick,' as Saunders puts it, of the rise and fall of his editorship of the transatlantic review in Paris and his subsequent move to New York and Provence (1924-29). The book's initially exhausting quality comes less from Ford's time shifts and digressive structure, than from descriptions of his claustrophobic rural existence after the war. Then the narrative shifts from the closed form of repetition, description and isolated anecdote to a more open and playfully comic mode driven by dialogue, sociability and incident. …
Introduction 1. From the panorama of battle to the labyrinth of total war: British war writing, 1... more Introduction 1. From the panorama of battle to the labyrinth of total war: British war writing, 1914-1929 2. The Empire of the Air: British Air Power and the Second World War 3. Culture in the Blackout: Living Through the Blitz, 1940-44 4. Ghosts inside the 'island fortress': Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Haunting of the Home Front 5. 'When in a year collapse particular memories': the battle over culture and memory in Second World War writing Conclusion. The Boom Ends: The war on the British literature of the 1940s Bibliography
We reflect on our experience co-teaching a medical humanities elective, "Pandemics and Plagues," ... more We reflect on our experience co-teaching a medical humanities elective, "Pandemics and Plagues," which was offered to undergraduates during the Spring 2021 semester, and discuss student reactions to studying epidemic disease from multidisciplinary medical humanities perspectives while living through the world Covid-19 pandemic. The course incorporated basic microbiology and epidemiology into discussions of how epidemics from the Black Death to HIV/AIDS have been portrayed in history, literature, art, music, and journalism. Students self-assessed their learning gains and offered their insights using the SALG (Student Assessment of their Learning Gains), describing how the course enhanced their understanding of the current pandemic. In class discussions and written assignments, students paid particular attention to issues of social justice, political context, and connections between past pandemics and Covid-19. Student responses indicate enhanced understanding of the scientific and medical aspects of epidemics and also increased appreciation of the insights to be gained from the medical humanities. We discuss co-teaching the class during a real-time, twenty-four-hour-news-cycle pandemic, and the ways in which that experience underlines the value of a "critical medical humanities" approach for undergraduates.
RSAJournal (Rivista di Studi Americani), Rome, Italy, 2019
from the 2019 Special Issue of RSA Journal, Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Betwe... more from the 2019 Special Issue of RSA Journal, Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Between Social Activism, Academic Discourse, and Cultural Representation
Crime fiction and war narratives have long been intimately connected, with military conflicts pro... more Crime fiction and war narratives have long been intimately connected, with military conflicts providing material for criminal plots, villainy, victims, mysteries, clues and detectives since the Golden Age of crime fiction that followed World War I. With their emphasis on crime, corruption, detection and policing within the framework of the sovereign nation-state, crime narratives have also proved particularly apt at registering postwar challenges of conflict zones. As literary genres, crime fiction and war narratives also share long-established ties to popular fiction, film and TV adaptations. Yet, as I will discuss here, their relations can be fraught: When these forceful genres collide, they often do so disruptively and agonistically, with powerfully productive results. Strikingly, the era of seemingly permanent war of the early twenty-first century has seen the ascendancy of crime fiction, most notably in the "Golden Age" of television and streaming video, while war stories occupy a much more uncertain place in contemporary culture. Indeed, with a few exceptions, Iraq and Afghanistan war movies have been deemed "box office poison" for domestic audiences eager to consume the fantasy of lawless cruelty offered by series such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones. Crime fiction reigns supreme in the "Forever War era", where recent war narratives appear to need the crime genre to impose coherence and interpretive order on their fictional worlds. The uneven relations between crime and war genres were delineated early on in Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887). As Sherlock Holmes's hierarchical partnership with the ex-military Dr Watson made clear, when the crime genre and war narrative overlapped, crime fiction would typically have the upper hand. During the interwar years of the Golden Age of detective fiction and hardboiled fiction, the genres consolidated their respective identities and fictional territories. While both detective fiction and hardboiled crime writing often reflected the social fragmentation and ironic disillusion that followed World War I, as in Dorothy Sayers's shell-shocked detective Lord Peter Wimsey or the hardboiled detectives of Chandler or Hammett, their domestic settings tended to be on the home front and feature a civilian cast of characters. Indeed, Alison Light has argued that the whodunit between the wars was consciously constructed by post-World War I writers like Agatha Christie as a feminised "literature of convalescence" (Light 1991: 69-75). World War II saw some further intermingling of the genres, in the wartime noir of Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), or in the tropes of the returning veterans in Raymond Chandler's The Long The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Janice Allan, et al.
The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Edited by Adam ... more The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Edited by Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (distributed by Oxford UP USA), 2012. 590 pp. £150.00 cloth.Critics of the literature and culture of war face a formidable challenge. How are they to insist on the relevance of warfare beyond the ends of particular conflicts, while resisting the tendency of modern war discourse to explain everything modern through the lens of permanent, perpetual war? It is all too familiar an experience to see war books shelved and the terrible human lessons about militarism learned rapidly forgotten, as wars get bracketed off as "states of exception." Conversely, the insights of literary critics have a hard time competing with the expertise of pundits of high tech warfare or of the "war makers" themselves, in a culture which still puts a premium on our collective fantasies about combat experience.Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson have risen to the challenge by offering a remarkably ambitious, richly satisfying, and wide ranging edited collection of essays that pretty much defines this emerging field of study. Both comprehensive survey and incisive intervention into the study of modern and contemporary transatlantic war literature, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature gathers together an extraordinary range of expertise in five editors' introduc- tions and fifty seven tightly written chapters. The result is an exhilarating, provocative, sometimes uneven but endlessly diverting read, which will become essential for both specialist and generalist scholars alike. The edi- tors, both authors of ground-breaking criticism on the British literature of World War II, make clear the critical ambition of the work in their Intro- ductions to the volume's five Parts: "Wars and their Literatures"; "Bodies, Behaviour, Cultures"; "Technology"; "Spaces"; and "Genres." They set the tone and expectations for the volume by zeroing in on key debates within the field, targeting influential theorists and supplementing the contributors' essays with brief case studies drawn from conflicts since 9/11.Piette and Rawlinson emphasize certain compelling through-lines for both the volume and future study in this field. Their claim for the im- portance of war literature is on ethical grounds:War makes literature ethical in this strict sense: the spectacle and imagining of the death of others in state-sponsored conflicts demands writing that pays due witness to that suffering, accompanies that suffering with the attention due to extreme and lethal experience, and accomplishes repre- sentations of that suffering without recourse to the usual contractual conventions that govern polite engagement with a sophisticated or jaded readership. (2)The centre of gravity of their argument is a highly productive pragmatics of genre, rather than a theorization of violence: "War tends to alter the genres it inhabits, like a cuckoo in the nest. It stretches and distorts the normal obligations and expectations, and gives the genre a special ethical edge, as well as menace and dark intention" (6). More contentiously, in their final Introduction they observe: "War exerts pressure on all genres by politiciz- ing them (inevitably since war is a political act), by infiltrating into their forms of representation the morbidity of its themes...and by propagandizing itself into everything it touches, however hermetically sealed and peace- able" (475). The potential limitation of such an approach, however, is that it may remain in the realm of the ethical, of the more privatized literary imagination, rather than considering the specific political consequences of representational or critical strategies.What's missing from the volume's conceptual framework is a sustained discussion or theorization of "war culture," despite the editors' frequent reliance on this concept. …
How viable is 'the transatlantic' as a category for understanding modern literature and c... more How viable is 'the transatlantic' as a category for understanding modern literature and culture? Transatlantic crossings of various kinds have emerged in recent modernist studies as a compelling trope for understanding the period.1 The idea offers a comparative framework for Anglophone writing on both sides of the Atlantic that is at once transnational, familiar, and more manageable than heady notions of a 'global' modernism. For Ford Madox Ford, editor of the transatlantic review which he launched, edited and folded in 1924, transatlantic modernism is a highly unstable proposition. In the dedication to his memoir of the period, It Was the Nightingale (1933), Ford declares, 'So you see that, to date, this fairy-tale has found its appropriate close. The persons of the transatlantic drama are scattered but all active'. The italics allow Ford a typographical pun on the lower case title of the transatlantic review. But the phrase 'transatlantic drama' also evokes the larger migratory crossings between Britain, France, and the United States that transformed his career between 1922 and 1933, along with those of many of his contemporaries. Critics have tended to mine the memoir for historical detail, often emphasizing its unreliability. In this essay, I will consider various ways in which Ford's experimental literary history, It Was the Nightingale, can help us imagine the category of the transatlantic as a 'drama' appropriately concluded. First, as a post-war project that offered an internationalist alternative to the reconstruction of national culture; second, as a space of overlapping histories and temporalities that encouraged experiment; and lastly, as an object of struggle and frustrated desire. As a supposedly 'unreliable' - or impressionist - literary historian, Ford is an ideal guide to the unstable writerly and critical field.In the memoir Ford narrates his release from the closed world of post-war Britain into a more open transatlantic space, in which he could edit a 'Review' and begin his Parade's End novel sequence. As he declares in the dedication:I have tried then to write a novel drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre - a poor man who was once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist - the time-shift, the progression d'effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. (IWN 6)Based in Paris and sustained by American capital and Ford's dwindling resources,4 the transatlantic review revived Ford's passion for editorship and his dream of a 'more or less modern movement' that transcended national boundaries allowing him to publish an extraordinary array of modern writers.5 He had discovered more writers in the English Review, notably Lawrence, Pound, and Lewis, but the transatlantic review's roster is remarkable, offering, as Max Saunders observes, 'a discriminating cross-section of post-war international modernism'.6It Was the Nightingale recounts in three overlapping parts Ford's struggle to overcome the crushing effects of his Great War experience as he leaves behind 'the last of England' for Paris, New York, and the Mediterranean. Part One explores his decision to abandon rural self-exile and an increasingly hostile English culture for Southern France (1919-22). Part Two celebrates the simultaneous making of his reputation in the United States and the importance of an American audience to his conception of the Parade's End novel sequence (1923-28). Finally, in Part Three, he dramatises the 'frenetic slapstick,' as Saunders puts it, of the rise and fall of his editorship of the transatlantic review in Paris and his subsequent move to New York and Provence (1924-29). The book's initially exhausting quality comes less from Ford's time shifts and digressive structure, than from descriptions of his claustrophobic rural existence after the war. Then the narrative shifts from the closed form of repetition, description and isolated anecdote to a more open and playfully comic mode driven by dialogue, sociability and incident. …
Introduction 1. From the panorama of battle to the labyrinth of total war: British war writing, 1... more Introduction 1. From the panorama of battle to the labyrinth of total war: British war writing, 1914-1929 2. The Empire of the Air: British Air Power and the Second World War 3. Culture in the Blackout: Living Through the Blitz, 1940-44 4. Ghosts inside the 'island fortress': Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and the Haunting of the Home Front 5. 'When in a year collapse particular memories': the battle over culture and memory in Second World War writing Conclusion. The Boom Ends: The war on the British literature of the 1940s Bibliography
We reflect on our experience co-teaching a medical humanities elective, "Pandemics and Plagues," ... more We reflect on our experience co-teaching a medical humanities elective, "Pandemics and Plagues," which was offered to undergraduates during the Spring 2021 semester, and discuss student reactions to studying epidemic disease from multidisciplinary medical humanities perspectives while living through the world Covid-19 pandemic. The course incorporated basic microbiology and epidemiology into discussions of how epidemics from the Black Death to HIV/AIDS have been portrayed in history, literature, art, music, and journalism. Students self-assessed their learning gains and offered their insights using the SALG (Student Assessment of their Learning Gains), describing how the course enhanced their understanding of the current pandemic. In class discussions and written assignments, students paid particular attention to issues of social justice, political context, and connections between past pandemics and Covid-19. Student responses indicate enhanced understanding of the scientific and medical aspects of epidemics and also increased appreciation of the insights to be gained from the medical humanities. We discuss co-teaching the class during a real-time, twenty-four-hour-news-cycle pandemic, and the ways in which that experience underlines the value of a "critical medical humanities" approach for undergraduates.
RSAJournal (Rivista di Studi Americani), Rome, Italy, 2019
from the 2019 Special Issue of RSA Journal, Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Betwe... more from the 2019 Special Issue of RSA Journal, Post-racial America Exploded: #BlackLivesMatter Between Social Activism, Academic Discourse, and Cultural Representation
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