The current understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is unique relative to other psychiatric disorders in that there are very clear links between basic affective neuroscience and the diagnostic criteria and treatment of the disorder. Current theories of the causes of PTSD, and gold-standard cognitive behavioral treatments, are grounded in foundational knowledge of fear learning and extinction, emotion regulation, attention, memory, and executive functioning. This conceptual alignment allows for clear translational links from molecular biology to systems neuroscience to healthy human studies and, finally, to the clinic. This chapter will outline a number of such translational links, giving a general overview of how affective neuroscience has informed the current understanding of PTSD and the emerging benefits of these insights.

The history of Russia’s peatlands is closely entangled with the environmental issues of our time. Although most peat extraction in central Russia ceased decades ago, the legacy of this history is ongoing. Drainage and industrial exploitation have turned peatlands from carbon sinks into powerful carbon emitters. Recognizing how this issue is rooted in a larger history of economic growth adds depth to our understanding of the current planetary predicament. Even though Russia may not soon become an ally in efforts to cure degraded peatlands, writing their history constitutes an important step in addressing the ecological amnesia surrounding these ecosystems and in developing more caring relationships with them.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

‘Last Wills and Remembrance’ builds on Chapter 3’s findings by examining the social authority and memorial value afforded to the last will. The dramatic potency of a last will centres on its ability to evoke the presence of an absent testator, imposing the latent will of the dead upon the living through the obligation of remembrance. This chapter focuses on Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Thomas Middleton’s The Phoenix, and The London Prodigal (of an uncertain author) to show how consistently this memorial duty elicited a struggle between the will of the testator and their beneficiaries, and that such moments often centre on the manipulation of blank, invalid, or fake wills. I argue that the execution of last wills in these plays illuminates the pitfalls associated with the commemoration of human endeavours, the anxieties related to the endurance of familial dynasties, and the sociopolitical disparities caused by patrilineal succession. The last will, once again, acts as a means by which dramatists could scrutinize and deliberate upon the relative authority or vulnerability of the individual faculty of the will.

This chapter frames the collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in the making of the 1906 portrait of Stein as a struggle over the modernist representation of the face. Having started the portrait with the sitter in front of him, Picasso famously erased Stein’s likeness and subsequently replaced it with a mask. Stein self-styled herself as an author and celebrity using Picasso’s portrait as a prop – as if it were a photograph. In turn, Stein’s literary portraits of Picasso attest to a desire for a radical erasure of the face, from memory and representation alike. The face nonetheless returns in the invocation of the proper name Picasso and through the intermedial dimensions of Stein’s portraiture writing. The chapter concludes by revisiting Nella Larsen’s use of the mask, specifically as the mask of whiteness, in her novel Passing (1929), a re-writing of Stein and Picasso’s experimentation with the racial dynamics of the mask.

This chapter traces the development of the character of Odette in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. If in “Swann in Love” Odette functions as an ekphrastic projection of Swann’s desire (a Botticelli fresco), in “At Mme Swann’s” she reclaims her face, creating a “new, personal style of face.” The text describes a process of facialization as a mode of self-invention, with the help of photography. Thus reinvented, Odette is the only character in the novel who does not age, providing a narrative continuity for the arc of the novel. A reading of the concluding scene in which a gallery of aged characters appear as masks of their younger selves foregrounds Proust’s preoccupation with time and memory. The conclusion: the paradigmatic object of memory retrieval for Proust is the face.

Few figures have been more controversial in the history of modern Italy than Luigi Cadorna. When he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, in summer 1914, he was already popular with his fellow countrymen. Since May 1915, he became an untouchable autocrat. Enjoying exceptional powers, he governed the war zone – virtually the whole of Northern Italy – with an iron fist, more and more explicitly defying government and parliament who were, he claimed, a bunch of weak, inept, radical progressives who would lead the country to ruin. He was too much of a monarchist to aspire to dictatorship, as some of his supporters actually proposed. But he sincerely believed Italy needed a strong man in command and did his utmost to achieve his purpose. Only the catastrophe of Caporetto in autumn 1917 eventually toppled him. He was relieved of his command, held to account for his performance, and turned into the scapegoat for all the woes of the Italian war: bloodbaths in the trenches, iron discipline, firing squads galore, the home territory overrun. For several years he vanished from the scene until Mussolini, firmly ensconced as dictator, decided to call him back to the public eye.

This chapter tackles the question: What opportunities and liabilities did living, breathing veterans of 1930s Cuban antifascism present to Cuban revolutionary leaders beginning in 1959? It explores the convoluted, often transnational trajectories of individual antifascist Cubans from the 1930s forward. In so doing, it intervenes into the historiographies of both transnational antifascism and the Cuban Revolution, the former which has until recently mostly ignored Cuba and the latter which has mostly ignored antifascism. Individual human stories that demonstrate the multifaceted interactions of 1930s Cuban antifascism with the Cuban Revolution counter oversimplification, omission, politicization, and romanticization. The chapter concludes that historical memory of 1930s Cuban antifascism existed in post-1959 Cuba only to the extent to which it stood in explicit support of the Cuban Revolution, at least through the end of the twentieth century, and that it served ideological and pragmatic purposes

This chapter tackles the complex social history of the darkest moment in LFC history, the Heysel disaster. It examines Heysel as a disaster in its own right, rather than as a foreshadowing of Hillsborough. Moving beyond tired narratives about the ‘English disease’ of hooliganism, it focuses on how the disaster was experienced, understood, remembered, and perhaps most often forgotten, in the LFC family.

Chapter 6 discusses the representation of memory in trauma narratives. Accounts of victims of childhood trauma are contrasted with the testimony of Holocaust survivors. I argue that that the distinctive qualities of trauma narratives can also be understood as differences in the culturally constructed landscapes of memory that shapes the distance and effort to remember affectively charged and socially defined events. Landscapes of memory draw from implicit models of memory that influence what can be recalled and warranted as accurate. Trauma narratives involve cultural models and metaphors of personal and historical memory. For them to function as personal and collective history, there must be public places for them to be told, acknowledged, and retold. The political recognition of collective identity and history can help create such a place. Individuals’ stories, in turn, can serve as testimony to ground collective history and call for further moral and political response. Understanding the personal, social, and political meanings of trauma in theory and practice requires tracing the systemic loops that link memory, symptom, and response with a landscape of cultural affordances.