Graphic Detail Research Articles

‘A Prisoner on the Rack’: Marital Rape, Consent, and the Gothic in Late-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Women’s Writings

ABSTRACT This article explores how marital rape was represented in the fiction and non-fiction writings of four colonial female authors – Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed. It examines how these women conceptualised marital rape as a form of domestic violence or ‘cruelty’ in marriage, intrinsically linked to other forms of marital violence such as physical and mental abuse, and with marital rape representative of the unacceptability and immorality of a husband’s total control over his wife’s body. It also analyses how these literary representations differed from discussions about marital rape and domestic violence by suffrage agitators such as Rose Scott and Maybanke Anderson. The article argues that Baynton, Cambridge, and Lawson used the language and tropes of the Gothic in order to generate understanding for and empathy with wives and their inability to consent in the marital bed. This article therefore illuminates the intersecting conversations by both female authors and suffrage agitators in late-nineteenth-century Australia about married women’s right to consent, domestic violence, and acceptable marital masculine behaviour, highlighting how access to Gothic tropes allowed colonial female authors to foreground women’s bodily autonomy and depict marital rape in the level of graphic detail that suffrage agitators could not.

Brutality on display: media coverage and the spectacle of anti-LGBTQ violence in the Colombian Civil War

During the Colombian Civil War, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people were targeted by armed actors for reasons related to ideology and strategy. Even with the generalised violence in Colombia during this time, there was significant public interest in this specific form of violence, as evidenced by its tabloid coverage. The nation’s main tabloid – El Espacio – covered this violence against LGBTQ people in graphic detail. Twenty years of coverage (1985–2005) includes a range of gory graphics and horrific headlines that show the pain of a persecuted community in a highly violent context. In this article, I focus on this media coverage of anti-LGBTQ violence, notable for its brutality and prejudice, to argue that its spectacle built on a stigma that reinforced the cleavage of its victims from the body politic through a legitimation of the violence. In doing so, the coverage of this violence became a weapon of war that depoliticised the subordination of an entire population in a society beset by an internal armed conflict.

Gruesome nursery rhymes in Chinese Mother Goose rhymes

孺子歌图 Ruzi Ge Tu ‘Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes’ is an anthology cumulated, rendered and illustrated by Isaac Taylor Headland (1859-1942) in 1900, which comprises 152 nursery rhymes predominantly prevailing in Beijing during the Qing (1644-1912) dynasty and aims to nurture sympathy for Chinese children and paint portraits of the masses from both ends of the social spectrum. Chinese nursery rhymes are replete with depictions pertaining to familial bonds and adoration, yet they simultaneously abound with fiendish plots and representations in graphic detail as well as political statements alluding to historical events and personages, parallel to their Western counterparts. In Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes, there is a range of nursery rhymes concerning decease, suicide, impoverishment, dilapidation and animal abuse, whereas only a proportion of them entail educational purposes and convey moral values.

Representing Online Hostility against Women

Representing Online Hostility against Women

Translating Middle English (Im)politeness: The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale

ABSTRACT Some of the bawdy details of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales continue to pose challenges to translators, who must find renderings that are both descriptively and stylistically adequate. The Miller’s Tale provides an illustrative case study, in which the drunken narrator describes Nicholas’s rather physical wooing of the carpenter’s wife Alisoun in graphic detail. Existing translations of the key term queynte range from the flowery euphemism to the straightforward vulgarism. An appropriate translation into present-day English needs to be based not only on sound philological analysis, but also on a careful evaluation of the register of the original Middle English expression. This article offers a corpus-based assessment of relevant candidate expressions in order to propose a translation that captures the appropriate level of (im)politeness, both of the narrator towards his fellow pilgrims and of Chaucer towards his readers.

Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher

Reviewed by: Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944 by Dallas Michelbacher Paul A. Shapiro Dallas Michelbacher. Jewish Forced Labor in Romania, 1940–1944. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 174 pp. The Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, issued in 2004, made it clear that the Romanian state, recognized as Nazi Germany's most significant military ally on the Eastern Front, was also a major perpetrator of Holocaust-era crimes. The Final Report provided a platform for what since has become a significant outpouring of new scholarship on the Holocaust in Romania, most of which has concentrated on topics that were the focus of the Final Report. These fell into five broad categories: Romanian antisemitism; anti-Jewish legislation and crimes committed by the fascist Iron Guard during the "National-Legionary State" (September 1940–January 1941); the effort of Ion Antonescu's wartime regime to rob and rid the country entirely of its Jewish population; Jewish response; and postwar obfuscation and denial. Barely five pages of the four-hundred-page Final Report were dedicated to forced labor,1 and the topic languished largely unaddressed for years. Dallas Michelbacher provides the first monograph in English on Jewish forced labor in Romania.2 He makes ample use of the major document collection published in Romanian by Bucharest's Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania3 as well as other published documents. To this he adds in-depth research in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives and in major oral history collections. The result is a much more granular study of Romanian forced labor than previously available. The book provides a review of the orders and guidelines issued by the multiple civil and military authorities which administered the forced labor regime. But to this Michelbacher adds a nuanced picture of the corruption that permeated the administration of forced labor, with officials at every level encouraging and accepting payments against labor exemption certificates, preferential retention at one's traditional job, assignment to a particular locality, etc. He describes the varying degrees of risk of verbal [End Page 216] or physical abuse faced by forced laborers according to the personality and motivations of the civilian and military officials overseeing laborers performing tasks that ranged from heavy rail, road, and defense construction work in so-called "external" labor detachments, to humiliating snow shoveling duty assigned to Jews able to remain in their home towns. He captures the antagonistic attitude of local non-Jews toward Jewish laborers and the resentment that the need to keep some 75,000 Jews in technical, managerial, and administrative jobs in order to keep the national economy running created in both official and civil society circles. He provides a glimpse of the impact that removing able-bodied men for labor, under threat of deportation to Transnistria, had on Jewish community organizations and Jewish families left vulnerable to intimidation and blackmail, often lacking in basic necessities, and uncertain as to what would come next. A picture of forced labor at the ground level emerges most vividly in Michelbacher's chapters 4 and 5, which trace developments leading up to Romania's planned mass deportation of Jews to the Nazi death camp at Belzec, and then following Antonescu's decision to abandon the deportation plan. In these chapters the author moves beyond reliance on published sources and draws heavily on previously untapped archival and testimonial source material. He introduces survivor voices, largely absent from earlier studies, and provides graphic detail regarding several well-documented and painfully remembered labor sites—railroad track repair, a canal, defense works, a quarry, etc. Given the power of this new material, it is unfortunate that the book's footnotes provide only partial information, clarifying where a document can be found, but not the precise nature of the cited document. There is an aspect of Michelbacher's approach that leads the author to some problematic conclusions. The difficulty stems from the geographic limitation of the study, for the most part, to forced labor inside the borders of the Old Kingdom (Regat) and Southern Transylvania, isolated from the broader context of what was taking place in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria. It...

Bodily Transformations: Goethe and Mann in Venice

Using material ecocriticism, this essay considers how Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Italian Journey portray the experience of Venice’s watery boundaries as transformative of both one’s sense of the body and of body itself. Mann obsessively presents bodies in Death in Venice, including the impact of cholera on the body of his protagonist, Aschenbach, and the idealised form of the Polish boy Tadzio; yet his text also eludes portraying Aschenbach’s death in any graphic detail. In other words, bodies matter in Death in Venice but there appears to be an inappropriate and less bodily gradient for the impact of disease such that the bodies of the workers who succumbed to cholera are portrayed in horrific detail while Aschenbach just quietly falls asleep, transformed visibly only by cosmetics. Goethe, in turn, also embraces both a bodily focus in his Italian writings, and one that similarly looks away from gritty embodiment. His journal depicts more abstract and scientific details of non-human bodies that later shape his writings on botany, optics, and morphology. However, Goethe’s text presents a proto-ecological sense of natural bodies immersed in an animated, lively, and disturbing world of water and life, one clearly inspired by his study of the ocean and lagoon in Venice.

Attitudes Towards Corruption and Women in Children’s Literature and Detective Fiction: A Parallel between Zheng Yuanjie and Zijin Chen

In this article, I explore male writers’ attitudes towards corruption and women in fairy tales and detective novels, by means of hermeneutically scrutinising works of Zheng Yuanjie, the illustrious ‘King of Fairy Tales’, as well as Zijin Chen, the ‘Chinese Keigo Higashino’. Anti-corruption is a prevalent and preponderant theme in both writers’ creation, yet their depictions of barbarous extrajudicial punishment for government officials’ misdeeds allude to karmic retribution and are prone to expatiation in graphic detail. Therefore, some of their fiction appertaining to anti-corruption can be regarded as ‘feel-good writing’ in essence. Furthermore, the writing of Zheng and Chen is sometimes featured by lack of feminist consciousness, in that a proportion of their works manifest gender stereotypes, which can also be attested in other male writers’ fairy tales and detective novels.

Discussion of "Brother's Keeper: Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures"

Discussion of "Brother's Keeper:Robert Smithson's Anti-Elegiac Pictures" Jane Hanenberg (bio) "History decays into images […]" – Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project Dr. Boettger's vivid and absorbing paper about Robert Smithson links us to an abundance of psychoanalytic ideas. We read of grief and mourning in Smithson's work. We learn about a life devoted to writing and art. We are also introduced to Robert Smithson's early paintings, which are depictions of a psychic relationship to a sibling he never met. Her paper expands our thoughts about the complexities of mourning, especially in the life of the replacement child. As we are faced this year with the convergence of pandemic losses and the pressing need to reexamine historic losses, Dr. Boettger also develops our thoughts about grief and the complexities of mourning. I'll begin exactly where our presenter does in her 2010 book about land art, entitled Earthworks. The subtitle, Art and the Landscape of the Sixties, takes me to days of undergraduate study in New York when we demonstrated frequently to protest the carnage of the Vietnam War. We counted our country's losses weekly. In the mid-sixties, the pop artist and sculptor Claus Oldenburg dug a trench in Central Park. He informally titled it Hole. It measured six feet long and seven feet deep. Was it a minimalist "hole," a fundamental shape which Oldenburg sculpted in negative space? Or, was it a grave pit which signified the tragedies of the war? This tension, between creation and mourning, is a central theme in Smithson's work and is the topic of this discussion. We learn that Robert Smithson's body of work was audacious and dark. The critic Peter Schjeldahl called it "poetically sublime" (Schjeldahl, 2004, p. 198). The paintings have deeply religious and spiritual qualities. The blood and suffering they depict can be seen as psychic representations of the dead Harold [End Page 595] and his blood disease. Related to medieval depictions of Jesus' suffering, they are the imagistic descendants of the legacy of Grunewald's 16th century crucifixion, which shows Christ's agony in graphic detail. Some of the images of Smithson's work with full-frontal presentation and luminous color recall the religious clarity of Byzantine mosaics. I wonder, though, if their art historical, more modern cousins may be the German Expressionists. These artists, Otto Dix, Emil Nolde and Max Beckman also made raw and vivid paintings using a symbolic iconography of spirituality and death. They all painted crucifixions. At the turn of the century, these artists felt muzzled by strict bourgeois mores of the previous era and the idioms of naturalism. They found themselves transforming religious themes into a visual vocabulary that expressed anxiety and existential doubt. The works that resulted were, like Smithson's religious paintings, fiercely emotive, and shocking. I recall these artists now since they, like Freud, were deeply affected by the trauma of the First World War. Like Smithson, they painted the unstaunched blood of grief. Psychoanalysis offers many ways of understanding the psychic underpinnings of art and the artist's own relation to it. As you have seen in the photographs of his consulting room, Freud surrounded himself with an audience of art objects and was devoted to the art of antiquity. In understanding the artist, Freud cited sexuality and the drives. Melanie Klein gave us the idea of violence in infantile fantasy and the importance of destruction in all creative productions. Winnicott introduced the idea of play, a creation itself, as a serious and essential activity. He reminded us that artists of all kinds experience an inherent dilemma which belongs to the coexistence of two desires; the urgent need to seek the other and the still more urgent need not to be found. This paradox speaks to the oceanic experience of an artist at work in the studio; time becomes limitless and unbounded. In 1915, when Freud wrote Mourning and Melancholia, two of his sons were on the front lines. The book served as a transformational object for him. His fear for his sons and his mourning for the victims of the war created a work of the mind. His hypothesis, long held...

Editor’s Plaisance

Editor’s Plaisance

Sheep, herbs and blood on the beach: discrepant representations of ritual acts for essentialising and reinforcing difference in contemporary South Africa

South Africa’s 2018/2019 summer holidays were marked by a flurry of media reports describing, some in vivid, graphic detail, the ritual slaughter of a sheep on a popular Cape Town beach by a group of #MustFall activists. Their action was in response to reports of a private security company, ostensibly working at the behest of nearby local commercial outlets and residents, having forced Black people off the beach. Focusing on various media reports and responses to the incident, the article shows that there is a revival and regrowth of essentialist expression in the ways contemporary South Africans address persistently overlapping issues of racial and class differences that are made particularly salient through their being marked by everyday discrimination. Through analysis of media reports and responses the article considers the various forms of essentialist expression that manifested during the ritual and in responses to it. In doing that it reveals particular local manifestations of the global turn to a populist politics and it demonstrates that, whilst essentialist expressions take diverse forms, some of which appear to offer empowerment potential in decolonising and other anti-oppressive moments, they also always carry the long-term potential for reinforcing divisive intolerance.

Influence on the user's emotional state of the graphic complexity level in virtual therapies based on a robot-assisted neuro-rehabilitation platform

BackgroundIn recent years, a remarkable trend in neurorehabilitation is the combination of conventional methods and emerging technologies, such as robotic platforms with virtual reality (VR), Serious Games (SG) and other types of sophisticated graphic interfaces. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the influence on the user's mental workload of the degree of graphic detail present in this kind of environments, comparing the experience of subjects working with two graphical environments with the same physical load but radically different graphic detail levels. MethodsThe same therapy is performed by 52 healthy subjects in two totally different graphic environments, one rich in details and visual stimuli, and its schematic version focusing just in the target graphic elements. Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) activity, related to emotional state, is analyzed through the capture and processing of associated physiological signals. The SAM test is used to assess the subjective perception of the participants in order to establish a relationship with the calculated physiological parameters. ResultsIndexes calculated from the ANS physiological signals show significant differences between the basal state and those corresponding to the performance of the therapies but do not allow discriminating between the effects of performing a therapy based on an environment rich in stimuli and an austere one. In the case of subjective perceptions, based on the results of the SAM test, the subjects perceive significant differences between the basal stage and the therapies, and also between each of the two graphic environments. ConclusionsUsers reflected that a graphic environment rich in detail was more pleasant and attractive than a schematic one. However, this is not reflected in values obtained from their physiological activity, which suggests that more research is needed about the online inference of the emotional state of the subject from the record of his physiological activity.

Removing the Traces of Median Filtering via Unsharp Masking as an Anti-forensic Approach in Medical Imaging

Development of post-processing algorithms which cannot be detected by forensic tools is an active area of research in image processing. Median Filter (MF) is one among the denoising schemes which is specifically targeted by the forensic toolsbecause of its wide application in commercial raster graphic editors, simplicity, fast computation and detail preserving characteristics. Methodsbased on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Variational Deconvolution (VD), meant for reducing the forensic detectability of MF by removing the traces of filtering from the output images are computationally intense. A simple and computationally feasible approach for removing the traces of median filtering from the output images, thereby to reduce the forensic detectability of MF is proposed in this paper. In the proposed approach, blurred edges in the output of MF are restored with the help of Unsharp Masking (UM). Optimum value of the amount which controls the degree of sharpening in the UM algorithm is determined via minimum error sense criterion by making use of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) between input and processed images as objective function. Values of PSNR and Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) between input and output images exhibited by the proposed algorithm are found to be higher than those exhibited by methods based on CNN, VD and combined framework of VD and Total Variation (TV) minimisation.

In Case You Haven't Heard…

Two years after it released the first season of the show “13 Reasons Why” with a graphic suicide scene, Netflix has announced that it has edited it out, NPR reported July 16. The show is centered on the suicide of fictional teen Hannah Baker, and the first season's finale shows her taking her own life. Several organizations, including the National Association of School Psychologists, raised concerns that it could romanticize suicide for vulnerable teens. “Our creative intent in portraying the ugly, painful reality of suicide in such graphic detail in Season 1 was to tell the truth about the horror of such an act, and make sure no one would ever wish to emulate it,” show creator Brian Yorkey said in a statement. The show also has a website, 13reasonswhy.info, containing resources about suicide prevention. It contains videos of cast members discussing topics such as bullying, consent, depression and how to talk with a teen about the series. Netflix's decision has drawn praise from a number of suicide prevention advocates, such as the American Association of Suicidology, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the American School Counselor Association and Mental Health America.

Youth Suicide Rate Climbed After Debut of ‘13 Reasons Why’

Youth Suicide Rate Climbed After Debut of ‘13 Reasons Why’

Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women by Patrick B. Sharp

433 BOOKS IN REVIEW which audiences are shown “in graphic detail … the very real impact of inappropriate and reckless consumption” (83). She incorporates helpful film analysis into her readings and does so with verve, as in her elaboration of a scene in which clinical laboratory footage is juxtaposed with traditional film footage: “While [the doctor] watches the ‘clinical version,’ the version the audience sees is a more emotional version, a version shot on handheld camera, a version that bobs and weaves, as if filmed by a person in the crowded casino rather than by a security camera fixed to a wall” (82). The book would benefit from more sustained readings of this nature, during which Schweitzer’s style, at once approachable and insightful, comes through. Overall, Schweitzer’s monograph would work well as a reader for lowerdivision courses in film studies with a focus on disaster films or in intro-level medical humanities courses. Its tendency to gloss over critical scholarship while presenting big (if sometimes trite) ideas, while niggling to readers well versed in the topic, would make for a good primer for students just getting used to the idea that there is something more to zombies and apocalyptic plague movies than meets the eye.—Kari Nixon, Whitworth University The Descent of Woman. Patrick B. Sharp. Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women. Cardiff: U of Wales P, NEW DIMENSIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION, 2018. ii+193pp. £60 hc, ebk. This well-researched and very readable study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist responses to Darwinian evolutionary theory examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism in a wide range of early speculative fiction by women. For Sharp, “Darwinian feminism” was “a formative moment in the long history of women’s SF” (173) and he sets out to trace the outlines of this moment. He opens by situating Margaret Cavendish’s A Blazing World (1666) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as influential precursor texts that provide model critiques of masculinist science, but his emphasis is on later work, from nineteenthcentury feminist utopias to feminist sf published during the heyday of the pulp magazines. Sharp argues that for Darwinian feminists, “Darwin’s account of sexual selection provided the template for diagnosing the violence of patriarchal institutions that enslaved women” and “also provided an account of the possible mechanisms for their emancipation” (2). He situates Darwin’s work in the context “not only of a colonial grammar of race, but also a Victorian grammar of gender and sexuality” (7), and it is through this complex nexus that he reads women writers’ challenges to “violent Darwinian masculinity” (7), even as they worked within the plot structures and narrative strategies favored by male writers. Sharp outlines five “storytelling tactics” (9) particularly popular in early women’s sf: 1) a revisionary take on sexual selection that gives women the upper hand; 2) a privileging of the domestic sphere to which women have traditionally been confined; 3) a reorganization of the colonial gaze in order to challenge masculine aggression and hierarchy; 4) echoing Mary Shelley, a critique of the dangers of masculinist science; and 5) the representation of women through figures of the Amazon and the angel 434 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) “as the apex of Darwinian feminist evolution” (9-11). Sharp convincingly makes the case that science fiction is “a Darwinian genre” (1) and that evolutionary theory is a key element of sf’s scientific megatext. As part of his analytical framework, Sharp notes how systems of genres become available to writers at specific historical and cultural moments. His first two chapters, “Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents” and “Charles Darwin, Gender and the Colonial Imagination,” provide both a detailed overview of the kinds of scientific “plots” that feminist writers struggled with/against and a very useful outline of Darwin’s work, including its developments and transformations in the socio-philosophical works of Herbert Spencer and others. These opening chapters tracing the rise of the masculinist science project provide an excellent background to Sharp’s study. He pays careful attention to the scientific theories and stories that directly impacted the writing of science fiction in the late...

The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey

Reviewed by: The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey H. A. Drake The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. By Catherine Nixey. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2018. Pp. xxxvi, 315. $28.00. ISBN 978-0-544-80088.5.) Scholarship, like the heavenly orbs, has its cycles. For the better part of two centuries, the narrative of Christianity's role in Rome's fall followed a path laid out by the philosophes in the eighteenth century—a story of a robust, enlightened, and sexually liberated civilization brought low by a swift descent into barbarism and superstition (readers will recognize the footprints of Edward Gibbon). Then, about fifty years ago, a new narrative exploded into view with Peter Brown's exuberant World of Late Antiquity (1971). Rejecting the model of "decline and fall" as artificial, scholars in this new field insisted on understanding the centuries between Rome's high point in the second century and the fragmentation of the Middle Ages as a time of "change" rather than "decline." The problem with the old view, these scholars argued, was that it focused almost exclusively on the fledgling states of western Europe, treating vital parts of this new culture as either foreign (the eastern Roman empire, now relabeled "Byzantium") or hostile (Muslims in Spain and North Africa). Then came the inevitable pushback, about twenty years ago, when more traditional scholars began to complain that their colleagues in Late Antiquity were ignoring clear signs of political disintegration and cultural decline, and most of all the baleful impact of Christianity. Seemingly, Catherine Nixey's The Darkening Age is just another broadside in this ongoing battle: even its title harks back to a time when "the Dark Ages" that followed Rome were dismissed as "a thousand years without a bath." But Nixey has an entirely different agenda. Her target is not a bunch of greybeards but all those complacent readers in the West who reacted with shock and indignation when the Taliban blew up millennia-old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan or, more recently, Islamic State did the same to the monumental temples of Palmyra. Nixey wants this audience to know that their forebears did all this and much more to the treasures of the ancient world. With vigorous prose and an eye for graphic detail, she writes of the destruction of ancient temples like the Serapeum in Alexandria and [End Page 708] the Parthenon in Athens, the murder of the philosopher Hypatia and relentless condemnation of her peers, and the burning of classical texts and statues. Nixey tempers this dismal story with disarming candor and wit, and her prose sparkles. But her point comes at a cost. Readers of this journal will frequently catch themselves saying, "Yes, but…," for Nixey's account is frequently one-sided, ignoring a broader context that, admittedly, would not excuse the destruction she narrates but would give readers a better perspective on the world in which it happened. Christian judges, for instance, did torture pagan philosophers, as she writes in chapter 16, but as Ramsay MacMullen noted long ago, elites had lost their exemption from torture much earlier, in a process that Christians had nothing to do with ("Judicial Savagery in the Roman Empire." Chiron, 16 [1986], 147–66). Similar observations could be made about the contrast Nixey draws between the playfully sexual banter of an Ovid and the stern moralizing of Christian homilists. As Nixey herself points out, "an increasingly moralizing tone" had emerged in the four centuries that separate Ovid from John Chrysostom, and "the rise in Christianity might even have been in part a symptom of such moralizing" (p. 191). This deliberately one-sided account is by design, justified by what Nixey sees as the whitewashing that Christianity has gotten in modern scholarship (p. 107). Specialists will lament the missed opportunities to draw wider conclusions about causality (by juxtaposing, say, the defiant language philosophers hurled at their torturers with the similar language of Christian martyrs). But that would be to call for a different book. If the one Nixey has written leads non-specialists to recognize that, just as Christian thugs do not define their faith...

Distortions of the Hero: Felix Krull and Cú Chulainn

A significant amount of the graphic detail of the feigned epileptic seizure before the military review board in Thomas Mann’s Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull is traced to Ernst Windisch’s German translation of the medieval Irish epic, The Cattle-raid of Cooley, from 1905, the same year that Mann appears to have begun work on the novel. The hero Cú Chulainn undergoes a pre-battle physical transformation accompanied by martial fury, in which the key Irish word is ‘ríastrad’, ‘Verzerrung’ in Windisch’s rendering, the very concept with which Mann’s description begins (‘Mein Gesicht verzerrte sich’). This archaic shape-shifting sets the stage for the many additional instances of overt and covert dualities, and manipulated identities throughout the novel.

Reflections on place, mobility and belonging in Gujarat

This article translates four essays from the memoirs of Gujarati writer Sharifa Vijaliwala that are replete with sociological insights. Methodologically, the genre of memoir affords a rich source portraying the everyday social fabric of rural Gujarat in the 1970s and the changing landscape of the state in later years. In the course of essaying her life stories, she depicts the predicaments and contestations about place, mobility and social interactions within the larger matrix of Gujarati society. What is depicted in graphic detail is the transformation in the web of social relations at the margins of Gujarati society and the present ‘crisis of faith’ that underlies its civil society.

Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich

Reviewed by: Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich Todd W. Wahlstrom Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867. By Andrew E. Masich. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. x, 454. $34.95, ISBN 978–0-8061–5572-2.) In the spirit of Karl Jacoby's Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York, 2008), Andrew E. Masich's Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–1867 examines the conflicts between and among Anglos, Hispanos, and Indians (the author's preferred terms) that he claims were unleashed by a power vacuum that the Civil War created. This macroscopic view, which emphasizes a shared culture of "martial masculinity," is effectively balanced with a microscopic analysis of topics including the role of the California Volunteers in the Southwest during the war (p. 31). At its core, this book is a multiwar military history that engages well with the surrounding milieu of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and intersects with central works such as James F. Brooks's Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002). Masich focuses on battles in the borderlands in graphic detail that brings in multiple combatants, making his work a notable contribution to western U.S., Civil War, and borderlands history. The first three chapters examine the shared nexus of martial masculine cultures through an analysis of "warlike Texans," such as John R. Baylor, who fought for the Confederacy and participated in Indian extermination in Arizona (p. 50). With a detailed account of the battle of Valverde, which took place in New Mexico in February 1862, Masich captures how the battle "set a new benchmark for violent conflict in the Southwest borderlands" that engulfed Union, Confederate, Anglo, and Hispano soldiers (p. 90). In chapter 4, the Indian Depredations Case Records from the National Archives surface as a foundational source for the book (a research feat in itself) to reveal Apache and Navajo raiding and insights into warrior cultures. Masich balances his inspection of Christopher "Kit" Carson's "war of attrition" that severely diminished Indian raiding with accounts of Hispano warfare against Apaches and Navajos as reprisals for stock raids (p. 122). Here we gain a crucial window into overlapping concepts of warfare that were distinct from the "systematic extermination of an entire people," which "white exterminationists" espoused (p. 153). For Hispanos, the Civil War years were filled with suffering due to livestock and captive raids as well as compulsory service with U.S. military forces. In chapter 5, Masich weaves French intervention into the thread of warring powers, but his analysis neglects the migration of Confederates to Mexico and colonization plans under Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. Despite the book's attention to raiding, the chapter also misses the livestock and property raids that Mexican Republicans deployed against Imperialist forces in the borderlands. [End Page 167] Nonetheless, Masich ably captures these areas when describing raids on the Santa Fe Trail as well as Kit Carson and his mixed Anglo, Hispano, and Indian force's pivotal role in postwar Indian removal campaigns. Masich maintains that logistics, leaders such as James H. Carleton, and Indian scouts and troops shifted the balance of power in the Southwest borderlands. Attention to mining, mapmaking, U.S. military occupation, and declining morale among occupying California Volunteers fills out the study effectively. Chapter 6 reasserts the common binding thread of "martial masculinity, honor, and vengeance" among Anglos, Hispanos, and Indians along with key distinctions such as an "ethic of restrained martial manhood" among most common Anglo fighters as opposed to the genocidal strategy previously outlined (pp. 269, 273). This chapter also depicts slavery in the borderlands with its adoptive components, the disintegration of Indian communities, and the violence that indirectly sprang from the Civil War in a way that fanned "the smoldering embers of cultural and economic insecurity into flames of war" (p. 286). This study ultimately encapsulates those flames for academic and public audiences remarkably well. Todd W. Wahlstrom Pepperdine University–Seaver College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association