Shape-changing in Hell: Metamorphosis and Katabasis in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

On the evening before the start of hostilities in Iraq in March 2003, an American soldier sat in the sand, reading Dante’s Inferno in an English translation by Robert Pinsky. What should we make of such an image, broadcast nationwide on the British TV News (BBC, 10/03/03)? Should we be reassured that the military are engaging with serious literature at such a time? Or disturbed that a soldier might be thinking of Iraq as a region of damned souls? I took it as a sign, singular but chilling, of..