Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.
Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle’s golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war’s just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on.
The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.
The French Revolution was marked by a wealth of imagery and visual symbolism that inspired the masses to fight for freedom. Visualizing the Revolution surveys the rich and multifaceted visual culture of the French Revolution, exploring its creation and how it conveyed the new revolutionary sensibilities of the era.
Unlike most studies on art of the French Revolution, Visualizing the Revolution embraces a wide range of artistic genres—including prints, architecture, painting, and sculpture—and also draws upon archival documents to investigate the period’s aesthetic concerns. The authors break new ground in methodology and interpretative practice as they tease out the web of connections between these various historical artifacts and argue for the central place of the arts in the transmission of ideas and the political manipulation of the populace. The book translates the provocatively new visual language revealed in these artworks and writings and shows how its emphasis on metaphor, allegory, and symbolism transformed French mass visual culture. An innovative and lushly illustrated study, Visualizing the Revolution is a worthy new contribution to scholarship on the French Revolution and the history of French art.
In A Voltaire for Russia, Amanda Ewington examines the tumultuous literary career of Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov in relation to that of his slightly older French contemporary, Voltaire. Although largely unknown in the English-speaking world, Sumarokov was one of the founding fathers of modern Russian literature, renowned in his own time as a great playwright and prolific
poet.
A Voltaire for Russia polemicizes with long-accepted readings of Sumarokov as an imitator of French neoclassical poets, ultimately questioning the very notion of a Russian “classicism.” Ewington uncovers Sumarokov’s poignantly personal devotion to Voltaire as a new framework for understanding not only his works but also his literary allegiances and agenda, as he sets out to establish a Russian literature and cultivate a reading public.
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