The news of Tennyson's death affected Bradley profoundly, propelling her back to a pastoral, “Victorian” past that seems remote from her urban fin de siècle world of the Underground and rapid-cycle tabloid news. Bradley is returned, she writes, to “days when ‘The Miller's Daughter’ bounded my horizons.—My way of looking at the universe was unquestionably determined by Tennyson” (Field, Works 5: 5).

How does language operate as an instrument of warfare? Leaving behind the idea of violence as beyond words, this essay seeks out terms for a reflection on linguistic violence and the weaponization of language in warfare. Using theories of war and examples from current United States engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, the essay examines language as an essential element of violent action and as military weaponry under such rubrics as psychological operations, interrogation, morale building, force multiplication, and cultural awareness. The essay reflects on the semantic work of making warfare and violence meaningful to those who sacrifice for them and on the language predicaments that states of war create and cannot solve.

This essay interrogates Sergei Eisenstein's critique of D. W. Griffith's montage aesthetic, arguing that, in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, historical perspective is constituted in opposition to (rather than as a result of) the forward surge of the film's montage. Griffith represents historical consciousness through the narrative figure of trembling, harking back to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, another text in which the movements of history are registered on the bodies of witnesses who struggle to keep their composure. Both Griffith and Dickens construct a social world driven to extremes by competing ideological forces and imagine historical subjects whose reactions to emergency—witnessing and trembling—hold them apart from it. Ultimately, these gestures of response suggest a tendency in melodramatic texts to construct a normative subjectivity that resists the antithetical underpinnings of melodrama itself.

The treatment of Estella in Dickens criticism has tended to replicate the ways she is explained by Pip and the other characters in the novel. This article reveals a more complex psychology in her by unpacking the significance of three of the novel's intertexts—The London Merchant, Hamlet, and Frankenstein—as those texts seem to have been received by mid-Victorian audiences. Reading the differences between the Estella revealed in this authorial intertextual commentary and the Estella produced by Pip's experiential narration reveals in Dickens a more complicated negotiation with gender ideology and a greater intuition of its destructive forces than he is generally credited with. The article thus suggests a way to understand more fully the complex relations to ideology found even in works traditionally considered “patriarchal” and to recuperate such figures as Estella, who exceed—while seeming to promulgate—the worst stereotypes of their eras.

This essay considers the American reception of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner in the context of the Bush administration's global war on terrorism by examining the customer reviews of the novel posted on Amazon. As many of the responses indicate, identification serves as a paradoxical means of negotiating with fictional representations of foreignness. The intense and painful empathy inspired by The Kite Runner serves a valorizing function for American readers, strengthening their sense of their own humanity—an effect that resists strict political categorization. Hosseini's ambivalent conception of what it means to be human, I argue, supports a diversity of competing attitudes toward the United States' military intervention in the Middle East and central Asia, while simultaneously catering to fantasies of escape from ideological and cultural divisions altogether.

The problems of the representation of warfare are approached from two directions: on the one hand, the formal oppositions between the act and the scene; on the other, that between the individual or existential and the totality or collective. The texts examined include Grimmelshausen, Döblin's Wallenstein, Tolstoy, and Alexander Kluge.

This essay follows closely a long tradition of poets writing about war as winter, emphasizing its most dangerous characteristics: an impersonal force that can bring indiscriminate annihilation, freezing numbness or insensibility, and blank illegibility. These poems tell of modern total war avant la lettre and its capacity to destroy what we can feel or know of its work. Focusing primarily on eighteenth-century British poets (Pope, Thomson, Cowper, and Wordsworth) but turning as well to Homer and our contemporary poets, the essay considers the particular threats of war to poetic creation and the difficult, often desperate means by which poets resist those threats. Perhaps most ominous in these figurations are representations of war as still, inactive, and somehow outside the logic of historical eventfulness. Thus the poets meditate as well on the very possibility of historical narrative amid the violence of war.

As Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz note in their introduction to the 2006 collection Bad Modernisms, “[T]here were numerous ways of being outside in the early twentieth century” (7). Efforts over the past several decades to imagine modernism as an expanded field have been remarkably successful. Female modernism, African American modernism, queer modernism, sentimental modernism, low- and middlebrow modernism, and colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial modernism have all been integrated into a renewed understanding of modernism (or modernisms, as it is often written). In addition, the rethinking of modernism as a set of aesthetic movements in relation to a larger context of global modernity and modernization has turned the inside out. Since few modernists, on closer inspection, appear to have stayed high or dry, bad modernism, outsider modernism, and marginal modernism begin to look more and more like modernism itself.