Wood for the Coffins Ran Out : Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic

Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.”1 In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and the ever-present danger of becoming one; at home, the often haunting absence of bodies to mourn, though this mourning occurred in a place of relative safety. These assumptions miss, however, the sudden erosion of these distinctions in 1918, for in the autumn of that year, dead bodies were suddenly everywhere in Britain, in America, and across the globe; some neighborhoods had streets so full of corpses that no one was left alive to bury them. Death came swiftly and with such little warning that mass graves had to be prepared, and as one witness wrote, “Wood for the coffins ran out.”2 The influenza pandemic of 1918, which stretched its deathly fingers into 1919, was the most lethal plague in human history, killing somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide in an astonishingly condensed period.3 Yet despite inflicting five to ten times more causalities than the First World War, the flu was, for a time at least, seemingly forgotten. British and American literature rarely dwells on it, almost no memorials were built to mark its destruction, and until the last ten years, few historians had told its story; it certainly makes few appearances in modernist studies today.

Environmental Injustice and the Problem of the Law

Over the past fifteen years, legal academia has produced a sizeable body of scholarship on the widely acknowledged problem of environmental injustice. Although there have been positive responses in the policy arena, no similar level of concern is evident in the courts. Most legal claims directly addressing environmental injustice fail, recent developments in civil rights case law are discouraging, and current constructions of environmental laws are proving theoretically inadequate to protect communities already subjected to disproportionate toxic exposure or threatened by new pollution. This Comment explores the state of the law of environmental justice and offers an analysis of why the courts have proven so inhospitable to environmental justice claimants. In approaching this question, I begin with two basic premises: that the documented pattern of disproportionate environmental burden on low-income and minority communities in the United States is manifestly unjust, and that the meager protection our legal system has provided these communities to date is deeply troubling

The Obama Administration\u27s Clean Air Act Legacy and the UNFCC

This article is born of a panel discussion from September 18, 2015, regarding Regulating and Treaty-Making: Addressing Climate Change under the Obama Presidency. The article examines issues that affected discussions shortly before the final negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2015

Intrastate Preemption in the Shifting Energy Sector

The United States energy sector is in a state of transition, at once moving toward cleaner energy resources, but also expanding the use of fossil fuels with new access to oil and gas plays. Although federalism concerns have dominated the literature, I argue here that the state-local relationship and intrastate preemption are shaping energy policy in important and under-examined ways. The energy transition to date has been marked by growth centered on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and commercial wind development, both of which are mostly regulated at the state level. Local governments have exerted authority over both forms of energy production, although state-local tensions in the fracking context have been especially pronounced. Hundreds of localities have opposed or sought to contain the effects of fracking through official action, including bans and moratoria. This striking trend, considered alongside local responses to wind development, provides a fresh lens through which to assess the role of intrastate preemption in the shifting energy sector. By approaching fracking and wind together, this Article represents a departure from the largely resource-segregated literature in favor of greater scholarly coherence on energy transition. As this Article explains, the doctrine of intrastate preemption, though it hews closely to its federal analogue, is uniquely nuanced by the variability of state-local power structures. I develop the claim that the unpredictable legal environment resulting from this variability works to enhance the prospects for local governments, and even more localized property interests, to inform national energy discours

Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia

Midway through E. M. Forster’s Howards End, the newly married Margaret Schlegel Wilcox returns to the titular country house to find it the recipient of an unexpected makeover. Closed since the death of the first Mrs. Wilcox and for months used as a warehouse for the Schlegels’ possessions, the house has been unpacked and reconstituted by the housekeeper, Miss Avery, who creates a new interior built from moments of Margaret’s own history. As Margaret moves through the house in surprise, she takes a virtual tour of her past: her umbrella-stand greets her in the entrance way, the infamous sword of her father hangs on the wall, Tibby’s books make up the library, her mother’s cheffonier stands in the dining room, and everywhere, “many an old god peeped from a new niche” (194). The carefully placed goods even link events from the more distant past with recent ones: Tibby’s old bassinet is, significantly, in the room where Helen stayed during her brief liaison with Paul Wilcox. A newly created space, Howards End is nevertheless temporally dense, showcasing not discrete moments, or even the passage of time from past to present, but suggesting rather a more free-flowing exchange among various times, uniting people, objects, and the house in a connective temporal web

Crossing the Great Divides: Selfridges, Modernity, and the Commodified Authentic

This article takes these critiques as a given. Incisive critical commentary on advertising and on marketing abounds, and exploring the false claims and schemes within a commercial culture is an essential and ongoing project. This critical approach, however, is not the end of the story, for armed only with skepticism, we are blinded to the dramatic commercial revolution offered by Selfridges, one that is intrinsically tied to British modernism. Selfridges embodies and deploys a surprisingly modernist set of tensions between low and high culture, and between the specter of the mass market and an alternative, non-commercial aesthetic. As this article will explore, at the same time that Selfridges’ marketing strategies seem to exploit these tensions, they also anticipate the work of recent modernist critics by dismantling them, deliberately highlighting the commercial production of a realm theoretically independent of the market. In the advertisements, philosophy, and physical space of the store, Selfridges offered an intoxicating promise: be awash in in a modern sea of plentiful and accessible goods, yet maintain (or obtain) a sense of authenticity, of originality, of non-commercial purity. Examining such a blending from the perspective of the mass market offers a vital new strategy for assessing a divide that has been intrinsic to modernist studies since its inception: the alleged separation of aesthetic modernism from mass culture. Exploring how a commercial venture not only represented this divide, but in face offered a way for its customers to negotiate it, in turn allows us to re-assess some of our own critical divisions within modernist studies

Dead Men, Walking: Actors, Networks, and Actualized Metaphors in Mrs. Dalloway and Raymond

This article takes up Rita Felski’s recent call to modernists to explore how Bruno Latour’s latest work on actor-network theory might be adapted for literary studies. It examines two accounts of World War I soldiers who (allegedly) return from the dead in material form: Virginia Woolf’s fictional account of Septimus Smith, who is convinced his friend Evans has come back from the dead, and Oliver Lodge’s best-selling memoir, Raymond, or Life and Death, which recounts in detail how Lodge believed his dead son sent messages to the family to assure them of his continued material existence. That these moments may be read as obvious signs of delusion or unresolved grief tell us little about the power such images had in the early twentieth century or about how metaphors at a particular historical moment might be read, shaped, disrupted, and made real. A Latourian approach, instead, demands a shift in interpretive practices: rather than reading vertically for a latent meaning that might lie hidden beneath a text, we read horizontally, tracing actively a network of places, times, and objects, a network that offers a new understanding of the interactions between historical contexts and literary studies

[Introduction to] Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic

In an unprecedented phenomenon that swept across Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, writers, advertisers, and architects began to create and sell images of an authentic cultural realm paradoxically considered outside the marketplace. Such images were located in nostalgic pictures of an idyllic, pre-industrial past, in supposedly original objects not derived from previous traditions, and in the ideal of a purified aesthetic that might be separated from the mass market. Presenting a lively, unique study of what she terms the commodified authentic, Elizabeth Outka explores this crucial but overlooked development in the history of modernity with a piercing look at consumer culture and the marketing of authenticity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. The book brings together a wide range of cultural sources, from the model towns of Bournville, Port Sunlight, and Letchworth; to the architecture of Edwin Lutyens and Selfridges department store; to work by authors such as Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1053/thumbnail.jp

NEPA and Environmental Justice: Integration, Implementation, and Judicial Review

The purpose of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is to assure “for all Americans safe, healthful, productive, and esthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings,” a goal that is essential to environmental justice. Although NEPA provides the structure for federal environmental decisionmaking, is it effective as a tool for addressing environmental justice concerns? This Essay addresses NEPA’s limitations and potential for this purpose, and assesses the role of case law and judicial review in shaping this integrative process. To do so, it considers the environmental justice implications of NEPA’s structural gaps—including exemptions, categorical exclusions, and so-called “functional equivalents”— and evaluates judicial review of agencies’ environmental justice analyses to date