Books by Richard J. Finneran

"Is the American president free to wage a war? What is his leeway with respect to public opinion? This book explores these and other essential questions in understanding post-Cold War and post-9/11 conflicts: interventions characterized by their long duration in distant countries with unclear strategic interests. If public opinion often initially tolerates the president embarking on a military intervention, that support is difficult to maintain in the long term when the troops are on the battlefield and victory appears improbable. In order to maintain public support as long as possible for foreign interventions, the United States often adapts military strategy and tactics to the detriment of the desired objectives. As a result, and contrary to the predominant literature, this qualitative study argues that public opinion has major impact on military interventions"-- "Based on interviews with political decision-makers involved in post-Cold War case studies, this research reassesses the prevalent conclusion in the academic literature, according to which American public opinion has limited influence on military interventions, by including the level of commitment in the study of the decision-making process"--

The development of digital technology and its widespread availability on the personal computer are bringing about a fundamental paradigm shift in the ways that literary texts are created, preserved, disseminated, and studied - a revolution that many scholars have argued is as profound as that created by Gutenberg's invention of movable type. At the same time, a major shift in textual theory - away from the notion of a "Definitive Edition" and toward a recognition of the integrity of discrete versions - has highlighted the fundamental limitations of the printed book. The Literary Text in the Digital Age addresses these developments from a wide range of perspectives. The essays discuss topics from the history of electronic editions to problems in encoding to the relationship between contemporary literary theory and the capabilities of digital technology. Other articles discuss the design of hypertext electronic editions now in progress or projected, including editions of the work of Chaucer, Thomas Hardy, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Individually and together the contributions show how these projects will go beyond the "electronic book" and exploit the full potential of the new medium. Finally, the volume also includes an afterword, in which A. Walton Litz reflects on the importance of digital technology from the perspective of one of the senior scholars in modernist literary studies.