This chapter offers readers perspective on ideals and practices that shaped health-related treatment of former service members from the Revolutionary period through the end of the Cold War. Studying how veterans fought for and accessed health services over two centuries offers a compelling view of the wide-ranging impacts of military endeavors on policy and politics and on the individual lives of service members and civilians. It also brings into sharp relief the extent to which norms of civilian society – for example, changing perceptions of how diseases are classified and what constitutes proper care – influence wars and perceptions of them. Broadly, the chapter shows that, while veterans’ care became more bureaucratized and institutionalized over time, some realities were constant: the nature and extent of available services, and the ways people interpreted them, were dictated by former service members’ advocacy, as well as prevailing notions about governmental responsibility, illness and disease, disability, and medical practice. Most broadly, the history of veterans’ experiences related to health care reveals that war and society are inextricably and intricately linked.

For many U.S. military leaders, the Vietnam War was the first time they confronted the limits of American power overseas. More and more, the word “stalemate” crept into their wartime evaluations, raising important questions for war and society historians. How do uniformed leaders deal with frustration, even failure, in times of war? In Vietnam, how did military officers managing the war effort react when their expectations came up short? What perspectives might we gain from their disappointments? This essay evaluates how the American armed forces in Vietnam handled their frustrations when confronted with disappointment and failure. Exasperation over the limits of their power shaped Americans’ wartime experiences. Dissatisfaction contributed to increased civil-military tensions and to military leaders obscuring the truth from an increasingly war-weary public. Soldiers’ frustrations led them sometimes to elevate personal interests and instigate violence against the local South Vietnamese population when their efforts failed to support larger strategic objectives. Frustration and failure became emblematic of America’s participation in a long and bloody Southeast Asian civil war.

This essay critically examines the temporality of American war and surveys the persistence of armed conflict in U.S. history. “Wartimes” structure U.S. historical memory. Wartime is thought to be episodic, followed by peacetime. Instead, military conflict is endemic in North American history. Armed conflict was a means of European settlement in the Colonial Era. It was a method of westward expansion. War enabled national survival in the Civil War. It was a means of solidifying American power and influence in the world over time. The geography of war ultimately altered the character of the civilian experience. The Civil War deeply affected civilians, but this direct experience was lost when U.S. wars in the twentieth century were distant from North America. Major twentieth-century wars nevertheless affected the home front. As technology changed warfare, however, armed conflict became an abstraction for the U.S. polity. This undermined political restraint, enabling ongoing small wars, since the nation could go to war without U.S. civilians feeling that they were in a wartime.

The torpedoing of the troop transport SS Tuscania on February 5, 1918, was the U.S. Army’s first mass-casualty event of World War I. Along with dozens of British crew members, 215 American soldiers perished. The disaster sent shockwaves across the United States and led to a scandal in the War Department, as angry families demanded more accurate lists of the living and the dead. Several important reforms came in the wake of the tragedy, including the addition of serial numbers to U.S. Army identification discs (or “dog tags”) and new guidelines for the proper care of personnel rosters. While the military struggled to meet the public’s expectations, propagandists responded to the sinking energetically. “Remember the Tuscania!” instantly became a ubiquitous war cry on the American home front. At the same time, visual messaging linked the Tuscania’s fatalities to a new symbology of wartime death, one built around the motivational figure of the Spartan Mother and the icon of the Gold Star. Largely forgotten today, the sinking of the Tuscania offers a revealing case study in the evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the families from which citizen-soldiers are drawn.

If our contemporary understanding of politics begins to emerge during the Romantic period, the very terms “culture” and “aesthetics” owe much of their presiding, definitional energies to that time as well. In both eighteenthcentury Continental and British philosophy, thoughts on a number of related expressions such as the sublime, the beautiful, taste, and genius set the vocabulary for later conversations about the possibility of an aesthetic space independent of other social, material, or psychic practices, with Kant’s wagers on aesthetic judgment especially casting a formidable influence on investigations within and beyond the Romantic period. At the same time, an increased martial and economic awareness of what lies beyond Europe combines with an attendance to past Western and non-Western civilizations, creating a field of inquiry Rousseau and others will delve into, founding the idea of culture as the investigative horizon for anthropological endeavor. As Raymond Williams has shown, in Romanticism culture comes also to mean high, elite aesthetic culture even as art and aesthetics can also be simply construed as one cultural activity among others. Running through the Romantic archive, the energy of that semantic volatility continues to inform studies in literature and humanities to this day, including such foundational debates as ones over the binary between Nature and Culture (with a capital “C”), and inquiries into form and value as well.

The first illustrated book published in the colony of New South Wales was a short, richly ornamental work about Australian birds. Reading this publication, John William Lewin’s Birds of New South Wales (1813), this chapter shows how in the imperial worlding of British Romanticism, colonized nature became coopted into the self-romanticizing stories of early settler colonists. The first tranches of Britain’s invasion of Australia brought immigrants schooled in the then-contemporary literature of sensibility. Translating the special cultural value of nature, and, as this chapter shows, songbirds in particular, to radically different environments, proved an important operation in the colonial project. But as this study shows, choices made in the depiction of birds by colonists like Lewin reveal some of the tensions between ways of feeling about birds promoted by an imported poetic culture, European conventions of natural history representation, and the lives and lifeways of birds themselves.

A principle and practice of sufficiency informs Immanuel Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), which concludes by condemning the rapaciousness of Europeans. Responding to that too-muchness, the philosopher experiments with the thought of what he calls “mere hospitality.” Hospitality is not opposed to inhospitality but a species of inhospitality that welcomes the possibility of being alone, together rather than either alone and apart or together as one. Because human beings cannot forever part ways on the curved surface of the planet, and because they must also live among each other on one and the same planet, if they are to live at all, they are obliged, against their inclinations to fight or flee, to dwell alongside others whom they do not necessarily wish to be nearby. The earth’s surface speaks a bare truth to an enclosed, Europeanized world, a world in which so many are denied a place: It is enough.

Taking as its occasion the Hindi verse of Suryakānt Tripathi “Nirala,” this chapter delineates how the two-way traffic of translating romanticism in South Asia brings us to rethink the concept. In Hindi, romanticism was first designated swaćhandatāwād and then ćhāyāwād. The first term signifies a speaking in “one’s own meter,” and a speaking of “one’s own desire”; it has obvious and important resonances with the ideology of national self-determination in South Asia, which too was called swaćhandatāwād. The second term, which gestures to a “shadow-voice,” emerges from within swaćhandatāwād as an immanent critique of the notion of self-identity inherent in the discourse of “one’s own.” In translating both these renderings of romanticism back into English we must find a way to think their contradictory coincidence, and the way that Nirala’s verse offers us, also leads us to a rethinking of romanticism’s longer, transnational history.

This chapter traces an English Romantic poetics of heteromasculinist expression, a key example where heterosexual love dictates which works are worth reading globally as serious literature, to late eighteenth-century translators who “straightened” the famous Persian poet Shamsoddin Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi (ca. 1325–89) into a model of world literature. From Sir William Jones’s A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859), English translations that equate classical Persian poets with Anacreon (570–488 BC) – the Greek lyricist renowned for his bawdy drinking songs dedicated to beautiful male youths – transmitted to Romantic lyricism queer practices of imitative poetry-writing. Such contrasting social-literary relations counteract the heteronormativity universalized by colonial (mis)translators in homophilic collaboration with their Indo-Persian instructors. A salient example is the Lucknow-born Muslim nobleman Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752–1806), whose Hafiz-style “Ode to London” shows how contentious were the (homo)erotic Romantic poetics of untranslatable genders for reading world literature straightly.

To consider Romanticism, world literature, and empire together entails reexamining the position of authors like Byron not only within the British Empire but also within other imperial formations, such as the Ottoman Empire. Focusing on Byron’s Ottoman Turkish reception, where he seems to exert no influence on local literary-cultural sensibilities, this chapter explores possibilities of envisioning a world literature that does not reproduce Western capitalist value systems. Byron’s “insignificant” presence in the Ottoman Turkish textual-visual landscape undermines the Eurocentric romanticization of the cultural capital attributed to Western icons among non-Anglophone audiences; simultaneously, it fuels a critical reflection on the empire-empire nexus that complicates the conventional geocultural hierarchies (e.g., East versus West, Orient versus Occident, etc.) shaping the contours of world literature.

This chapter examines Simón Bolívar’s political legacy through the lens of Romantic aesthetics, arguing that the myths surrounding “the Liberator” ultimately obscure the true nature of revolutionary change. By situating Bolívar within the cultural currents of his time, it traces how his life and actions were framed in a messianic light, portraying him as a redeemer. This process of mythmaking, it contends, conceals the popular agency that was the essential force driving struggles for freedom. Drawing on a critical tradition that challenges the cult of Bolívar, the chapter concludes that ritual devotion to his messianic figure generates a powerful yet hollow symbol, one that embodies the central contradictions of modern politics and the unfinished business of the Romantic-era revolutions in the Americas.

This chapter focuses on Thomas Percy’s multiple roles as antiquarian, archivist, translator, and literary historian in order to analyze the relationship between romantic periodization and world literature in translation. By placing Percy’s famous Reliques in the wider context of his published and unpublished “translations” from the Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Icelandic, Portuguese, and Spanish languages, this chapter argues that Percy’s protoromantic poetics is critically informed by his discovery of ancient world poetry. Percy’s romantic theory of primitive poetry as the most universal and therefore most translatable literature arguably grew out of his translation work; correlatively, his ambition to collect and popularize world literature conditioned and made possible his national poetics. Percy thus serves as a particularly rich case study of the complexities involved in using periodization in global contexts, and in defining national literary traditions in relation to a larger, imaginary archive of world literature.

In terms of references, themes, translations, Percy Shelley’s cosmopolitan poetics presents what is arguably the most sustained and adventurous British Romantic version of “world literature.” And yet at decisive moments, Shelley’s poetry offers a radical “unworlding” that takes leave of the world and, in its leave-taking, withdraws from contemporary notions of a “world literature.” The chapter explores a Shelleyan mode of abstraction that exhibits what in other contexts Edward Said described as “unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies.” Supported by contemporary correspondences with Said, Deleuze, and Radiohead, the essay features a sustained reading of “To a Sky-Lark,” in which the “exilic energies” of Shelley’s “intellectual mission” of are generated not by “loving” the world but by leaving it. The chapter concludes by placing Shelley’s “skylark-image” alongside Ocean Vuong’s “The Bull” (2022) to suggest how two poetic correspondents and their animal addressees propose a aesthetic apprehension of a poetics of unworlding.