Anthropology struggled to escape its colonial heritage and find a place for itself in the era of decolonisation. Faced with losing access to colonial field sites, anthropologists at the University of Manchester sought to establish the applicability of anthropological theory to modern Britain throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They aimed to demonstrate how their expertise, which was derived from the study of Africa and other colonial regions, could be applied to labour, community or social relations in Britain. This work sought to position anthropologists as social scientific observers who could use their knowledge of different societies to provide guidance to the British government and public in a period of social change, industrial unrest and shifting ideas about national identity. It also reveals how the end of empire and the loss of the privileges of ‘colonial science’ forced scholars to find new ways to justify their expertise and to adapt their practices to win support from new patrons. This chapter focuses on the work of anthropologists based at the University of Manchester, analysing their research into factory-floor dynamics and rural communities. It connects recent historiography on ‘post-colonial careers’ and the links between imperial and domestic intellectual practices with work on the construction of knowledge within the social and human sciences, in order to highlight how social scientific ideas about modern Britain could make use of models developed to explain the social dynamics of the Empire.

This chapter shows that medieval English conduct texts exhort women to be invested in being hypervigilant against the possibility of shame, and that they function as guides for practising that shamefastness, advocating and describing ‘manipulations of body and mind’ that are intended to intensify and communicate a woman’s sense of shame. The chapter begins by situating conduct literature in relation to the education of girls and young women in medieval England, and in relation to the chaste ideals to which medieval women were expected to adhere. It then turns to the conduct texts themselves, focusing primarily on four examples of conduct literature in Middle English and Middle Scots: the Middle English translation of Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles, and the poems How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, The Good Wife Would a Pilgrimage, and the Middle Scots Thewis of Good Women. The final section of the chapter demonstrates how the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry situates its advice regarding how to secure womanly ‘honoure and goodnesse’ within a recognizably literary frame, one that recasts the pursuit of female honour in heroic terms.

This chapter scrutinises various aspects of the Japaneseness of Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. It touches upon the issue of ascribing Japanese qualities to Ishiguro's prose, whilst concentrating on thematic aspects of the novels. In particular, two specific Japanese motifs, in A Pale View of Hills (ghosts and suicide) shall be examined, as well as the absence of the atomic bomb in its narrative. Throughout, the chapter explores how the novel questions the concept of Japaneseness through its images and discourse, beginning with a general look at how Ishiguro represents Japan in his fictions. A Pale View of Hills has an extremely accomplished structure for a first novel. It tells two main stories, one of which is nested inside the other. The inner story is set in Nagasaki a few years after the war.

Postcolonial literary analysis – that is, analysis directed towards the questions of race, empire and decolonisation that form the purview of this book – is applied typically to Black and Asian writers. Resisting such racial categorisation, this chapter focuses on Graham Swift’s Booker Prize-winning Last Orders (1996) and in particular the novel’s figuration of the Second World War and its aftermath in global and imperial terms. Swift uses this historical framing to examine the effects of decolonisation – the Fall of Aden/Eden – on the dynamics of race and class in postwar England. In this way, Swift takes his readers inside the lived experience of demythologisation, or the difficulties of ‘working through’ (in Paul Gilroy’s well-known formulation) tenacious imperial mythologies. By conveying the power of myth, alongside its painful contradictions and false promises, Swift’s fiction does not offer postcolonial subversion or critique but examines the breaking from and clinging to imperial ideas and desires in postwar England. As this analysis begins to demonstrate, postcolonial questions of race, empire and decolonisation cannot be ‘bracketed’ by authorial ethnicity; these questions are at stake whenever we are reading, teaching and writing about contemporary English literature.

This chapter explores the content of a role-playing game (RPG) by White Wolf Publishing, one of the games in their World of Darkness series, and examines the role and presentation of the female werewolf within this game. It suggests that the corebook for Werewolf: The Apocalypse integrates tropes of femininity and femaleness into a construction of lycanthropy in a uniquely sustained and complex way. Apocalypse offers a counterpoint to the assumption of male identity in the form of the Black Furies, a tribe 'composed almost entirely of female Garou'. Regardless of individual story and character creation, the narratives of this particular RPG posit an undeniable relationship between werewolves and femininity that both draws on and subverts the tropes of each category. The trope of lycanthropic transformation being determined by lunar influence is, largely, a creation of twentieth-century cinema, with few earlier literary narratives making this specific connection.

This chapter explores the creation of Black British beauty spaces for and by African-Caribbean women in postwar Britain between 1948 and 1990 by scrutinising physical spaces and the literary narratives that represented them – previously overlooked in discussions about postwar migration and multiculturalism. In doing so, it considers how negotiations of beauty, often multilayered and divisive, became resources for fashioning Black British identities. African-Caribbean women mediated Eurocentric beauty ideals, using elements of both conformity and subversion, to create innovative beauty spaces. As part of wider anti-racist community building, quotidian beauty consumption played a formative role in nurturing spaces of belonging for African-Caribbean women in Britain. Configurations of hair and skin colour were navigated in salons, Black businesses, beauty contests, and media outputs. I interdiscursively read visual and textual outputs in two pioneering Black-owned newspapers, The West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean news (1958–1964) and The Voice (f.1982), alongside the early novels of Andrea Levy. This interdisciplinary approach, supplemented by anecdotal evidence and testimonies from The Heart of the Race (1985), accentuate the importance of Black beauty discourse in identity formation in modern Britain.

This chapter explores the heated debate over the memory of the British Empire through an examination of the public interventions by scholars Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson and their critics. On either side of the debate, scholars agree that the colonial past is too complex to be reduced to a simple question of for or against. To begin to understand why the debate is nevertheless so fierce, this chapter studies it as a case of disagreement over ‘exemplar empires’. The chapter argues that contemporary British memory culture is marked by a singularisation of the imperial past. Here, the Empire is summed up in a few emblematic images and episodes that are seen as representative of the whole. This gives rise to disagreement over which exemplars are the most appropriate, how they should be judged and a fear that one account will crowd out the other. The chapter explores how Ferguson and Biggar and their critics have discussed the British Empire often using similar rhetorical flourishes: accusing their opponents of reducing past complexities, disagreeing over how best to sum up empire, questioning each other’s moral evaluation of it and worrying that their version of the past will be forgotten.

The Vampyre initiates two tantalising elements in vampire fiction which continue to inform its postmodern iterations today. The disclosure of a terrible secret and the forbidden, if not downright blasphemous, nature of vampirism itself informs a myriad of vampire confessions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn shows how Polidori’s tale incepts several elements that directly inform the literary legacy of Anne Rice and the cinematic vampires of director Neil Jordan. Jordan returns to numerous themes haunting the margins of Polidori’s tale and Byron’s unfinished vampire ‘Fragment’. His own vampire films, Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Byzantium (2012), meditate on the horrid nature of immortality as a brutal, masculine force which threatens to strip away and destroy all remnants of feeling and feminine influence. These tales also foreground vampire subjectivity as a means to liberate vampires from the torment of their lingering human guilt. These rich and cinematic ‘vulgar fictions’ disclose an unpaid debt to Polidori’s tale, and its continued influence in contemporary reimaginings of immortality.

This chapter shows that the young white people who spent their nights sharing music and organising around musical activism in postcolonial London built a shared culture that struck an often-tenuous balance between culturally appropriating Black spaces and music and building friendships and solidarities within them. These spaces had the power to make such interactions banal but, particularly in the case of the Brixton Academy, they also foregrounded the possibility of inter-racial encounters.

Sam George explores vampire theatricals, focusing on the stage progeny of Polidori’s The Vampyre. In 1820, John Robinson Planché adapted Charles Nodier’s Parisian dramatisation Le Vampire of the same year for the English stage. Focusing on Planché, George argues that the Romantic vampire, and the plays that are its legacy, have a shared origin in phantasmagoria, from the German ghost stories that inspired Byron’s vampire fragment at the Villa Diodati, to the spectacular summoning of revenants on stage in Paris. George demonstrates how crucial stage props and stage effects (such as the star trap and vampire trap) are to the changing representation of the vampire, registering important shifts. George argues that it was Polidori, not Byron (nor Bram Stoker, the stage manager at The Lyceum), whose work succeeded in founding the stage vampire.

This chapter identifies some of the cinematic strategies for the visual presentation of the female werewolf. It considers the issue of female violence as it relates to this particular horror monster in terms both of agency and of representation. The chapter focuses on some basic, even mundane, questions that often get overlooked in more straightforwardly ideological analysis, namely 'what does a female werewolf look like?' and 'what does it do?' It is the chapter's contention that a film's posing of, and attempts to answer, such questions informs and shapes both narration and style, and an appreciation of such elements can feed back into and ultimately bring nuance to more ideology-based readings. Horror cinema's female werewolf emerges from this as both more complex and more variegated in her various manifestations than has sometimes been allowed by horror criticism.

The novel The Remains of the Day is far more subversive than the film, and also indicates a change in the national mood. Ishiguro was eager to escape from the stereotyping of his first two books as Japanese. The Remains of the Day moved far beyond these superficial similarities, however. Its representation of Englishness in the impeccable Stevens was widely construed as a shock tactic. The imagery of clothing is profuse in The Remains of the Day. Stevens compares inhabiting his role as a butler with wearing a suit. Whatever the verdict on Stevens and his gentlemanly impersonations, there is no doubting the bravura of the ventriloquism in The Remains of the Day as a whole. In the Prologue of The Remains of the Day, the butler's kerfuffle about the inadequate staff-plan is a smoke-screen.