This introduction outlines the critical aims of thestudy, identifying the authors covered and placingthem within the context of post-millennial writingin Britain. It also centrally addresses the problemsinvolved in practising literary criticism on verycontemporary material, and contextualises debatesaround the end of the postmodern and its aftermath.It seeks to establish (and justify) a criticalmethodology that eschews broad synopticism in favourof close attentiveness to the reflections andrefractions of one author beside another. It alsointroduces the themes of Materiality, Connectivity,and Authenticity that emerge repeatedly in theanalyses that follow.

John Buchan mixed art and politics to a greater extent than any British writer between Disraeli and Jeffrey Archer. Imperialism, with its clash of opposites (civilisation and barbarism, brain and brawn, East and West), is analogous to the human soul in the cloudy neo-Hegelian conception. In Buchan's version, it was men at the pinnacle of society who were stirring up crime and revolution. Buchan moved beyond metaphor to postulate a causal connection between discord in society and discord in the psyche. To make his meaning clearer Buchan offered one of his favourite inventions, the story of the upright Victorian statesman with an extraordinary secret life. 'The Loathly Opposite' features a German cryptographer, code named 'Reinmar', who turns psychiatrist after the war. In The Thirty-Nine Steps a gang of German spies hopes to precipitate a world war by assassinating the Greek premier on his visit to London.

This chapter suggests that John McGahern's work is in many ways emblematic of an exploration of the condition and reality of the foreign that is lacking in the collections of stories. By surveying the depiction of the foreigner in contemporary Irish fiction, it shows the failure to consider the stranger as anything other than a means to expand upon the state of the Irish nation as increasingly fractured and lost. The chapter also shows how McGahern's novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, offers ways for us to understand the complexity of exile, migrant existence and homecoming. It argues that the immigrant characters in twenty-first-century Irish literature come from a 'nowhere-in-particular', have no history and are driven by the desire to be assimilated into Irish society, thus absolving the reader from having to engage with their dual existence. The chapter focuses on Julia Kristeva's theories of the stranger.

Accustomed as we are to the presence of nuns in the religious landscape of early modern Europe, we imagine a straightforward trajectory by which secular women who entered a convent took vows and donned a veil. This chapter interrogates the seemingly simple process by which laywomen were “converted” into nuns. Upon entering convents, women crossed a border that separated the profane from the sacred. The cloister setting, in turn, required them to adapt to a very different type of existence. They were expected to adhere to monastic principles, many of which were distinctly gendered. Using evidence from English and Spanish convents between 1450 and 1650, this paper will analyze the mechanisms, and the material considerations, that shaped this transformation. How did religious rules, convent architecture, male ecclesiastical oversight, material culture, the rhythms of daily life within the convent, and other factors shape the process by which secular women became nuns? Ultimately, the chapter argues, these conversions were uneven or incomplete. The mechanisms listed above that conditioned this conversion permitted and sometimes even encouraged a complicated identity that blurred the distinction between sacred and secular worlds.

This chapter examines religious identity, and in particular conversion, in the early modern Mediterranean through the prism of gender. It surveys attitudes towards women’s religiosity and their susceptibility to conversion from Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives, and will compare and contrast the motivations for conversion of men and women. I argue that sweeping generalizations about women’s religiosity must be approached with caution. Women were probably no more or less inclined to conversion than men, they voluntarily chose or rejected conversion, or could be compelled to convert; their ‘apparent greater religiosity’ was itself a social and polemical construct, deployed to particular ends on varied occasions.

This chapter discusses in detail two projects that were a direct result of developing a sense of familiarity with the subject before ever undertaking any image production. The two projects are 1000 Yards; Or So and discarded dog shit bag (DDSB). The chapter discusses thought processes when undertaking the work and the key factors that initiated the projects. It describes how the work fits firmly within the sense of being 'about' something and how issues raised within the work have a resonance to wider issues appertaining to environmental concerns. The chapter undertook three major bodies of work exploring global nuclear history, including visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Chernobyl exclusion zone and to nuclear sites in Cumbria. It talks about the possibility of developing the work as an online mapping project, visualising the distribution and density of DDSBs on both a national and a global basis.