—Robert Burgoyne, author of The Hollywood Historical Film and Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History
“Tanine Allison challenges our conventional understanding of Hollywood’s World War II combat movies. She skillfully demonstrates how their scenes of violence and destruction counter the myths about a ‘good war’ or a ‘greatest generation.’”
—Stephen Prince, author of Classical Film Violence and Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism
“Refocusing our attention on World War Two combat sequences, Allison usefully unsettles the generic construction of ‘the good war,’ highlighting the diverse and often contradictory aesthetic forms and affective appeals that structure the representation of violence in American film and media. Through consideration of production histories and contemporary critical reception alongside close textual analysis, the book offers a timely and accessible account of material that remains formative to the cultural imagination of war today.”
—Jonna Eagle, Professor of American Studies at University of Hawai’i, Manoa
“Destructive Sublime is a beautifully written, clearly conceived, and well theorized reconceptualization of how combat sequences offer counternarratives that trouble the notion of World War II as the ‘good war.’ Deploying theorists such as Edmund Burke, Paul Virilio, and André Bazin, Tanine Allison has provided us with crucial formal language to read the spatial relations and aesthetics of combat, from the understudied insertions of documentary footage into fiction films to the visceral pleasures of digital renditions of battles in video games. This is exciting work and should be required reading for anyone in the fields of digital studies, media studies, film studies, and war studies.”
—Anna Froula, co-editor of Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the ‘War on Terror’
“A compelling contribution to research on war and representation.”
—Stacy Takacs, author of Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America
