Inspired by other studies that analyse the politics of Enoch Powell in light of the legacy of the British Empire, this chapter examines the British radical right’s response to Commonwealth immigration and decolonisation. In both challenging and building on these studies, this chapter argues that the British radical right drew deeply on the vast ideological and experiential reservoir of British imperialism in formulating and articulating their political vision. Drawing mostly on the published output of several of the groups that merged together to become the National Front in 1967, the chapter demonstrates that the activists within these groups experienced decolonisation and Commonwealth immigration as interlinked civilisational crises. In doing so, it considers their presence and activism around the Notting Hill racist riots in 1958 and at their response to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. Against what they termed the ‘coloured invasion’ in Britain and the perceived surrender of ‘white rule’ abroad, they looked longingly at the renegade settler states of South Africa and Rhodesia, eventually reimagining Britain as the metropolitan equivalent of a besieged white-settler colony and white Britons as a variety of endangered white settler. This saw them reject the imperial remnants of the Commonwealth and advocate an imperial solution of a different order: a white alliance of Britain, its Dominions, South Africa and Rhodesia.

This chapter, by Hugh Magennis, considers the theme of the interpretation and application of Christian knowledge as reflected in treatments of the apostles in vernacular writings in Anglo-Saxon England. The acta of the apostles originated in the East but were transmitted and reworked by western writers, not least in pre-Conquest England. Surveying depictions of the apostles in Old English, Magennis’s chapter emphasises the definitive place that the apostles occupy within Christian systems of knowledge and understanding but also examines how traditions of the apostles are appropriated and reconceived by Anglo-Saxon writers (including the poet of Andreas, whose reworking of his source is considered in greater detail in the chapter in this volume by Richard North).

It is hard to argue with Nietzsche: despite countless attempts at familiarising ourselves with revenge, we, 'people', are invariably baffled by it. Whether it is the subject of an analytic inquiry, debate or artistic representation, and, particularly, if it is an act to be executed, suffered or investigated, revenge remains particularly unsettling. It is worth reminding ourselves again that we are only the audience and The Spanish Tragedy, as well as countless other revenge tragedies, is only a figment of human imagination. The value of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy in particular is in their unique ability to expose universality assumed by law and civilisation at the break of modernity as completely illusory and, thus, as the true problem pertaining to the notion of justice. Revenge is a regrettable aberration caused either by a lack of civilisation or by a significant regression from it.

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In his essay, Ivan Phillips explores themes of vision and visibility as they are developed through The Vampyre. He examines Polidori’s distinctive concern with the imagery of eyes, and with acts of seeing (or not seeing) and being seen (or not being seen), in connection with the evolution of the modern vampire. Phillips understands these motifs through Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) as a fantastical challenge to the limits of the human. The vampire, in this sense, enters the fiction of modernity as a threat to stable assumptions about identity, experience, and being. As well as exploring tropes of vision in The Vampyre, this essay also considers other texts by Polidori, notably his medical dissertation on sleepwalking and his novel Ernestus Berchtold, written at the same time as his vampire story and published in the same year. Ultimately, Phillips argues that the work of this remarkable but neglected writer generates an anatomy of the modern vampire that is still influential today.

The Introduction sets out the cultural and political background to the book, detailing the editors’ shared interest in Rhodesia’s surprising influence within Britain and the figure of Enoch Powell. These twin research interests provided the impetus for the conference and later the book. Moving from the ‘shards’ of empire found in rural Norfolk to the ongoing Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, the Introduction demonstrates how the legacies of empire remain an enduring and prominent feature of British culture. This section also works to distinguish what the editors and other contributors mean by ‘culture’ as well as Britishness, distinguishing England from the other constituent parts of the UK, which have their own complex relationships with the British Empire and English imperialism. The Introduction sets out the historiographical and literary works upon which the entire book is founded and engages with key scholars who have shaped the work of all the contributors, as well as given us the tools with which to begin dismantling the legacies of empire. The Introduction also pays close attention to the ongoing ‘imperial history wars’ and apparent ‘cultural wars’ currently raging within British academia and politics.

This chapter explores how one of the first revenge tragedies to be performed on the commercial stage employs gender strategies to problematise the theatrical performance of vengefulness. The Spanish Tragedy's problematisation of revenge tragedy's move to the commercial theatre is highlighted by a reversal of gender patterns. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy shows itself to be very much aware of the dangers of appropriating the Senecan tradition for the commercial stage. The Spanish Tragedy problematises the performance of feminine vindictive passion outside its original context of the English legal institutions of the Inns of Court. The vindictive feminine fury shaped in Inns of Court tragedies with the purpose to support the expanding legal system leaks into the commercial theatre and there 'infects' the lower classes and female members of the audience. The feminine fury of Seneca's women is indeed, as the men of law in Newton's dedication feared, greatly contagious.

Fabio Camilletti approaches Polidori somewhat obliquely at first, via Spiritualism and the various séances attended by the Rossetti brothers, William Michael and Dante Gabriel, who were nephews of Polidori. This prompts Camilletti to consider three topics – the composition of The Vampyre, the history of its publication, and the legacy of Polidori among the Rossettis. Polidori, says Camilletti, observed links between Englishness and the inhuman. Camilletti argues that Polidori’s writings, including those on somnambulism, are much concerned with free will and mechanical determinism, evoking too the discussions at the Villa Diodati. He claims that, through Lord Ruthven, Polidori targets Britishness and aristocracy as well as Byron. He also draws on the psychoanalysis of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok to show how from their readings of their uncle’s diary, the Rossetti brothers were haunted by family memories, which, in turn, were resurrected in later vampire fictions.

This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between the hairy woman and the female werewolf figure and the ongoing complexities of the social attitudes towards fur/body hair and the feminine. Demonstrating the ambivalence towards hirsute individuals, the hairy female body has also been viewed as a manifestation of animalistic lust since at least the Renaissance. Hairy individuals continue to feature in evolutionary debates. Some biologists propose that congenital generalised hypertrichosis (CGH) 'is a manifestation of a genetic atavism'. Lupine body hair visibly manifests the 'mobile, elastic fictions or borders' between humans and animals; however, this perceived proximity to the animal is not necessarily indicative of compromised humanity or a sub-human status. Hirsute individuals are being distanced from their simian heritage as 'missing links' and increasingly attributed lupine lineages through conflation with the werewolf, particularly on screen.

This chapter begins by using the subject of women’s preuytees (or shamefuls, as genitalia might also be termed in Middle English) as a gateway to examining the relationship between shame and the embodied nature of female honour in medieval English culture, focusing on the links between postlapsarian shame and the body in the medieval imagination. It then considers how postlapsarian shame contributed to medieval understandings of pain and shame as universal features of women’s experience of childbirth. Finally, it explores how the prologue of one version of the mid fifteenth-century gynaecological treatise now known as The Sickness of Women, as well as the prologue of The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing, employ strategies to mitigate the social and emotional risks women faced in exposing their bodies even for the ostensibly innocent purposes of medical diagnosis and treatment. While they perhaps inevitably replicate the gestures of concealing and revealing that characterize the practice of female honour, these prologues also present women’s shamefastness as something deserving of sympathy, respect, and protection.