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A critical, multidisciplinary examination of Civil War combat that interrogates the technological, medical, psychological, and cultural forces shaping battlefield experience and its enduring national legacy.

“In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes of his generation’s Civil War days. Through the ages, war stories have gleamed with romantic glory, and American memories of the cataclysmic Civil War inspire pageantry and poetry even today.

The essays in Battle form a corrective to such celebratory histories by examining the lethal realities of Civil War combat—Enlightenment science applied to the creation of weapons that maimed and killed, which far outpaced advances in diet, sanitation, and medical treatment. The book reveals that behind the drums and trumpets, sashes and swords, the armies of the Union and Confederacy alike were haunted by fear, pain, and death.

The collection includes an introduction and afterword by editor Kent Gramm, who also contributes an essay titled “Numbers” that reveals the war in statistics. Paul Fussell contributes a powerful essay titled “The Culture of War.” D. Scott Hartwig examines the face of battle at Gettysburg. Bruce A. Evans discusses medical technology in “Wounds, Death, and Medical Care in the Civil War.” Eric T. Dean challenges the meanings and consequences of combat in “The Awful Shock and Rage of Battle.” The collection is rounded out by Alan T. Nolan’s masterful review of the national consequences of battle and the resultant myth of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause.

Between Self and Society explores the psychosocial dramas that galvanize six major British novels written between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The book challenges an influential misconception that has for too long hindered appreciation of the psychological novel. John Rodden argues that there should be no simplifying antithesis between psychological, “inner” conflicts (within the mind or “soul”) and institutional, “outer” conflicts (within family, class, community). Instead, it is the overarching, dramatic—yet often tortuous—relations between self and society that demand our attention. Rodden presents fresh interpretations of an eclectic group of prose fiction classics, including Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.

Far from being merely admirable experiments, let alone daring though interesting failures, these fictions are shown to possess aesthetic unity, stylistic consistency, and psychic force. Between Self and Society thus impels our careful reconsideration of novels that represent major artistic achievements, yet have been either unjustly neglected or appreciated in limiting ways that do injustice to their psychological aspects. Rodden’s vibrant discussion invites an upward revaluation of these works and encourages the full recognition of their value and significance in British literary history.

Beyond the Fourth Wall of War sheds light on forms of embodied performance that emerge in the aftermath of structural violence—war, displacement, and militarism—as individual bodies and bodies politic are shaped by communal disorders. As Elise R. Morrison argues that theater that addresses audiences directly by breaking the so-called “fourth wall”—which allows spectators to see but not interact with the events onstage—can offer embodied frameworks for reckoning with war trauma that move beyond traditions of illusionism and spectatorial distance.

Grounded in performance studies, this interdisciplinary study also draws deeply from digital media studies, peace studies, neuroscientific research in embodied cognition and trauma, and drama therapy. Through a comparative analysis of somatic, interactive methodologies in contemporary trauma-informed therapies, Morrison reveals the capacity of theatrical performance to model “somatic witnessing” and kinesthetic empathy and to cultivate communal practices of repair in response to state-sanctioned violence. Underlying this work is a broader inquiry into war’s performative nature, as participatory theater uniquely reorients spectatorship toward rehearsing “performative ethics” in representational and militarized “theaters of war.” Beyond the Fourth Wall of War makes novel interventions into discourses of contemporary warfare by extending the lens of trauma beyond the battlefield to civilian publics who observe conflict from a distance, yet remain entangled in its machinery.

2002 – Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology and/or Political Theory – Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association

"...awash under a brown tide...the relentless flow of immigrants..like waves on a beach, these human flows are remaking the face of America...." Since 1993, metaphorical language such as this has permeated mainstream media reporting on the United States' growing Latino population. In this groundbreaking book, Otto Santa Ana argues that far from being mere figures of speech, such metaphors produce and sustain negative public perceptions of the Latino community and its place in American society, precluding the view that Latinos are vested with the same rights and privileges as other citizens.

Applying the insights of cognitive metaphor theory to an extensive natural language data set drawn from hundreds of articles in the Los Angeles Times and other media, Santa Ana reveals how metaphorical language portrays Latinos as invaders, outsiders, burdens, parasites, diseases, animals, and weeds. He convincingly demonstrates that three anti-Latino referenda passed in California because of such imagery, particularly the infamous anti-immigrant measure, Proposition 187. Santa Ana illustrates how Proposition 209 organizers broadcast compelling new metaphors about racism to persuade an electorate that had previously supported affirmative action to ban it. He also shows how Proposition 227 supporters used antiquated metaphors for learning, school, and language to blame Latino children's speech—rather than gross structural inequity—for their schools' failure to educate them. Santa Ana concludes by calling for the creation of insurgent metaphors to contest oppressive U.S. public discourse about minority communities.