This chapter presents the interview between the author and the director Ultz. In this interview, the author talks to the director Ultz about the production, before going on to reflect, more generally, on his experiences of staging Jean Genet. In October and November 2007, a hip-hop version of The Blacks was performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in East London. The play was commercially and critically acclaimed and was one of the most exciting productions of Genet's work to have taken place in recent years. For all the difficult emotions felt by the actors in The Blacks Remixed, there was a real sense of solidarity and affection in the Theatre Royal during the run. There is a cathartic process at work in Genet. Despite all the anger and aggression, the play takes you somewhere else, somewhere more positive.

Five: I address the cormorant as an unwelcome immigrant, an indigenous bird treated as an invasive species. I reflect on the associations of the cormorant with human migration and on the historical tendency for people to shoot cormorants on church roofs. I then turn to the myth of the invasive starling in the United States to examine the overlap between objections to human immigrants and objections to birds and animals; and I consider the European cultural tendency to look to the east for the source of such ‘invasions’, offering an analysis of the claim promoted by elements in the fishing industry that the inland subspecies of the European cormorant is an ‘alien’, ‘Chinese’ invader that should be exterminated. I conclude with an account of a sketch by German comedian Gerhard Polt fiercely satirising his fellow Bavarians’ objections to the migration both of cormorants and of Muslims.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.

Three: I address the cormorant’s alleged greed, reflecting on the etymological associations of the bird’s name and discussing a range of contexts, from medieval to contemporary, in which the cormorant’s greed becomes a cultural trope. I then outline scientific debates over the bird’s recovery from persecution, numerical resurgence and impact on fish stocks, noting the ways in which zoologists address the bird’s consumption of fish and assessing whether or not it is reasonable to describe the cormorant as ‘greedy’. I conclude by turning away from the consuming cormorant to the cormorant consumed, reflecting on the curious cultural associations, not least in respect of the cultural meanings of blackness, apparent in the history and politics (not to mention the weirdness) of the culinary cormorant.

This chapter presents the interview between the author and US theatre director JoAnne Akalaitis. She is the founder of the influential avant-garde theatre company Mabou Mines. In this interview, they talk about two widely praised productions of Jean Genet's work, The Balcony with the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985-1986, and The Screens at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis in 1989-1990. Genet is the first western playwright to write about Arabs and a revolutionary culture in a way that is not clichéd or necessarily easy to swallow. Genet, like August Strindberg, empowers women in a way that very few playwrights do. He understood the first African rebellions, and the revolutions in the Third World. He's one of the great modern political playwrights: there's no doubt about that.

Chapter 1 chapter presents a revised account of Blake’s relation to two major paradigms in eighteenth-century embryology: preformation and epigenesis. Challenging criticism that aligns Blake with a bio-ontology that privileges open-ended development and plastic self-shaping, this chapter reveals why preformation, which was used to articulate ideas of virtual form and genetic inheritance, might have been appealing for Blake. Tracing the links between Blake and preformationist biologists such as Charles Bonnet via Johann Kaspar Lavater, it shows how Blake’s preformationist influence explains some of the differences between his conception of life to those of major figures in European Romanticism such as Coleridge, Goethe, Herder, Blumenbach, and Kant. Exploring ableist and racist implications of relevant discourses, it discusses how preformationist science supplied Blake with the conceptual means to develop understandings of human difference and selfhood which differed from that of many of his contemporaries.

This chapter presents the interview between the author and Europe's foremost theatre and opera director, Lluís Pasqual. He is best known for his dazzling collaborations with the designer Fabià Puigserver, with whom he reinvented classic Spanish and European plays for contemporary audiences in Catalonia and elsewhere from the mid-1970s onwards. This interview deals with Pasqual's productions of The Balcony in 1980 and 1981 before going on to explore where Jean Genet's contemporary significance resides. His late theatre is a challenge to the Gaullist consensus of the 1950s and 1960s, and its political significance pertains to its critique of European attitudes towards immigrant workers and ethnic minorities. Like Genet's, Federico García Lorca's politics are found in the constant movement and oscillation between two extreme poles. As opposed to the cliché or congealed image, the movement caused by this oscillation is life itself, it can't be represented or pinned down.

This chapter discusses the emergence of psychoanalytic thought in the twentieth century and the historical development of the notion of sexuality. It examines the Freudian libidinal theory model, which re-conceptualised desire and stated that human subjectivity is produced by a struggle between opposing forces of sexual desire and sexual repression.

I introduce the cormorant and its cultural history as ‘hated’ bird, noting that the book is both the history of a bird and a book about greed and prejudice. I distinguish between the zoological cormorant and the cultural cormorant, and I describe the cormorant’s centrality to conflict between the fishing industry and environmentalists, not least in Europe, and I also address the tendency of tree-nesting cormorants to kill their nest trees with their droppings. I then turn to parts of the world (Norway, Japan, China) where cormorants have at times been viewed positively, but I finish by noting the variety of ways – often contradictory ways – in which the bird has been understood as evil and has been the object of prejudice.

This chapter unpacks Jean Genet's theory and practice of political theatre. It concentrates on his writings and explains how his metaphor of the wound discloses an oblique notion of aesthetic politics that evades accepted models of art politique. Genet's desire to make the world unrecognisable explains why he studiously banishes everything real and naturalistic from the stage. The chapter suggests that Genet's blend of negative aesthetics and anti-aesthetics creates a doubly political theatre which disorients spectators. Responding to a question posed by Michèle Manceaux about the possible direction his writing might take in the light of his political commitment to the Black Panther Party, Genet was quick to distance his theatre from that of Brecht. Although Genet's notion of political theatre has little in common with existing models of commitment, his insistence on autonomy and negativity is close to that of Theodor Adorno.

This conclusion discusses the legacy of Bildungsroman in contemporary Irish literature. It highlights Nuala O'Faolain's Are You Somebody (1996) which portrays the social changes that transformed Ireland in the late twentieth century. It also discusses the official inquiries into clerical sexual abuse of children by Irish Catholic priests: The Ferns Report (2005), The Report by the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (2009), commonly known as the Murphy Report and The Report by the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne (2011).