This chapter unveils the utopian elements in Jean Genet's post-1968 revolutionary thought, and shows how they were anticipated by the themes and practices of his late theatre. Genet's renunciation of theatre and subsequent commitment to revolutionary politics allowed him to continue his aesthetic project by other means. In an ironic twist that would have surprised Jean-Paul Sartre, Genet was, from 1968 until his death in 1986, the consummate political activist. The two movements that exerted the greatest influence on Genet in the 1970s and 1980s were the Black Panther Party and the Palestinians. Supporting oppressed peoples in the USA and Middle East, Genet was also committed to the plight of immigrant workers in France. Genet's rejection of the imperialist tendencies of the nation-State elucidates the politics of his late theatre. Against imperialism's abstract and incarcerating production of space, Genet posits the transgressive force of the Spieltrieb.

The brief conclusion summarises the book’s argument about Blake in relation to the critical terms of humanism and posthumanism. It argues that Blake’s nuanced representation of the body, which, in his universe, is simultaneously preformed and self-organised, aligns him with a distinctly Romantic humanism while also allowing him to anticipate the insights of posthumanism. Finally, it suggests that Blake’s works offer the concept of elasticity as an alternative to plasticity – a concept which acknowledges the complexities of embodiment while insisting on the importance of resilience and identity.

This chapter contains collection of texts between 1670 and 1826 connected with the Gothic Aesthetic. A rash of translations from the German in the early 1790s, including Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's novella The Ghost-Seer, had a decisive impact on the development of Gothic fiction in Britain. Ann Radcliffe's final work of fiction, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously in 1826. This was first published separately in the New Monthly Magazine, as an independent essay in aesthetic theory. It suggests the continuing importance of Shakespeare, and contemporary methods of staging his plays, as an example for modern writers employing effects of terror, specifically the supernatural. The originality of William Collins's Ode lies in the fact that personified Fear is positively wooed rather than avoided by the aspiring poet. It can be measured against another, far more conventional, 'Ode to Fear' by Andrew Erskine.

The Swedenborgian-cum-Yeatsian notion of 'dreaming-back' one's earthly experiences after one's death is not simply a dramatic device existing in isolation from any larger body of belief. Swedenborgian correspondence provided a means whereby a central doctrine is extended to account for every detail of the visible world: The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, not only the natural world in general but also in every particular. Uncle Silas, being the best known of Le Fanu's novels, can stand as typical, and it has the additional merit of explicitly citing Swedenborgian texts. Le Fanu's fiction deals with a number of themes which occur prominently in Honore de Balzac. These include Swedenborgian doctrines concerning not only ultimate spiritual truth but matters as immediate as marriage and sexuality.

At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, both Gothic literature and the history and theory of fashion have achieved increasing prominence within academic discourse. They have been reinstated from marginal disciplines to vital and important areas of intellectual enquiry. The emphasis on the surface in Gothic narratives can also be related to the emergence of the sensibility now known as camp. Judith Halberstam's contribution is most significant in her gesture towards the Gothic body as a kind of patchwork entity, stitched together from fragments and scraps of discourse. The concentration on fashion 'technologies', or 'techniques of fashioning the body' inspired by Michel Foucault's work, has enabled fashion theorists to evade the conventional dichotomies of primitive and civilised, natural and artificial which have plagued the constructions of dress.

Victorian Gothic fiction traces the complex paths between madness, self-presentation, and consumerism, representing all three in terms of a Gothicised subjectivity fashioned from clothes. Self-presentation became an essential element of social advancement and tied into discourses of self-help. The notion of concealment is a vital element of selfhood in the Victorian period. It is the process of concealment that is of importance to Victorian self-fashioning and not what is actually being hidden. Clothing plays a more complex role than a mere 'disguise' for an implicitly 'true' identity or 'deeper' emotions. Attention to dress played a small but significant part in discussions of madness. Under the broader doctrine of moral management, it could provide a means both of identifying insanity and of treating it. The practice of a kind of moral management through clothing by female characters is a frequent feature in novels of the 1860s and 1870s.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century, women's clothing underwent a series of radical changes that costume historians often describe as comparably revolutionary to fashion as the French Revolution was to politics. Indeed the two were frequently connected in contemporary discourse, in which the moral debates over the proprieties and improprieties of female dress became part of a rhetoric of decolletage, deployed in political discussion. This discussion did not produce a unitary reading of the exposed female form, but rather mobilised a variety of meanings. In these meanings, women were alternately natural and artificial beings, victims and aggressors, appropriated for radical and conservative politics. The Gothic novel of the period participates in this discussion, and its heroines' bodies are fashioned by it. The preoccupation with revealment and concealment thus becomes a crux around which numerous political issues circulate.

The apocalypse preoccupied W. B. Yeats not only as an aspect of his theosophical system but also as a metaphor in the political domain. In the late nineteenth century, Yeats was associated with a series of subversive movements in which violent politics, irrationalist philosophy and sexual irregularity overlapped. Like Honore de Balzac with regard to Emanuel Swedenborg, Yeats was perhaps never fully convinced of, or committed to, the doctrines he espoused from time to time. Nevertheless, the name of Aleister Crowley will serve as an adequate shorthand for some of his activities. In the later stage of his career, when Yeats was preoccupied more with the politics of the dead, Le Fanu's Uncle Silas featured in Yeats's early drafts of the play about Jonathan Swift's post-mortem existence.

Charles Robert Maturin's deployment of a vast body of literary allusions in Women; or pour et contre allows the voices of other authors and several literary forms to speak to and inform the reader. To speak of the burden of words in Women is to point to the central role that speech, words, and plurality play in the narrative as in its construction. Women explores the current state of religious sectarianism in Ireland, focusing on the internal segregation of the Church of Ireland into competing orthodox and evangelical groups. Disrupted by Emancipation and the Evangelical movement, Maturin's Ireland 'limp(s) along', like marriage in Romantic fiction, but it does so in a confused and disorderly state of incomprehension.