Sam George’s Afterword indulges in a spot of Gothic tourism and investigates John William Polidori’s links to St Pancras Old Church, the site of his burial, together with its associations with the group of visionary writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary and Percy Shelley.

The original folkloric vampire was a very different notion from its modern conception – at some point in time a transformation occurred, moving the vampire from a repulsive undead peasant-corpse into a sexually alluring, frequently aristocratic supernatural being. John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the critical culmination of a variety of changing views about who and what a vampire is. In his essay, Marcus Sedgwick considers that a considerable part of this monster-makeover was due to contemporary beliefs about tuberculosis, with which Polidori, as a newly qualified doctor, would have been very familiar, and which he drew on in his recreation of the mythic beast. An implicit intertwining of the natures of the tubercular and the vampire occur, specifically that certain physical characteristics of the sufferer of late-stage TB, together with heightened sexuality and sensibility, become at this time permanently attached to the conception of the vampire, such ideas being reinforced by the already current metaphorical use of the word ‘vampire’ in popular parlance, as well as in medical textbooks.

This chapter explores the connection between music and alchemy in The Tempest by developing an alchemical interpretation of Ariel’s songs. Ariel–Mercurius is the alchemist Prospero’s attendant spirit, without whom the great work cannot take place. His role as chemical spirit recalls Ficino’s spiritus, whose nature is similar to that of musical sound: it is thanks to his Orphic music that most of the characters on the island are led on the path to spiritual purification. Four of Ariel’s five songs contain alchemical allusions: ‘Come unto these yellow sands’, ‘Full fathom five’, ‘Earth’s increase and foison plenty’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’. The settings of ‘Full fathom five’ and ‘Where the bee sucks’, attributed to Robert Johnson, are shown to enhance the chemical meaning of the lyrics. Even though musical magic is occasionally ironised, Ariel’s songs all partake of the idealising current of the play: they adumbrate the chemical wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda, Alonso’s regeneration and Ariel’s well-deserved freedom. They therefore strengthen the case for The Tempest as an alchemical palimpsest.

Critical interpretation, according to Pierre Macherey, is like the lantern: it may illuminate, but it also creates dancing shadows, flickering forms insubstantial next to the radiance of the work itself. Criticism might bring to light some hidden aspects of the discourse of the work, but it can also diminish the text and reduce its range of meanings. One of the interpretative limits in relation to Ishiguro's work is the paucity of critical response to his short stories and television plays. On the whole, the reviewers of The Remains of the Day shared Rushdie's enthusiasm for the novel. Joseph Coates thought it was 'an ineffably sad and beautiful piece of work - a tragedy in the form of a comedy of manners'. There have been other dissenting voices about the merits of The Remains of the Day. Michael Wood thinks the novel lacks the misty suggestiveness of the Japanese novels.

When We Were Orphans is an elegant solution to the dilemma. It marries the outward realism of An Artist of the Floating World or The Remains of the Day with the perpendicular dreamscapes of The Unconsoled. The first half of the novel presents a convincing portrait of detective Christopher Banks as he rises in the society of 1930s London. In the second half, Banks travels to Shanghai to solve the case of his parents' mysterious disappearance there eighteen years earlier. The obsessions of his boyhood return to dominate his mature behaviour. When We Were Orphans invites comparisons with J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. Ballard, himself born in Shanghai in 1930, gained a wide audience with his semi-autobiographical account of the internment of young James Graham and his family in a Japanese camp following the collapse of the International Settlement.

Unlike his progeny, Count Dracula, Ruthven is able to pass in polite society, making his seductive nature more insidious and damaging. Thus he anticipates the arrival of late-twentieth-century vampires such as Anne Rice’s much-lauded sympathetic vampires. Kaja Franck, in her chapter, concentrates on Ruthven’s twenty-first-century children, the sparkling vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, through the intersections of gender, the Gothic, and consumerism. Where Polidori’s narrative is focalised through Aubrey’s increasingly disturbed viewpoint, Meyer’s novels usurp the masculine voice, replacing it with the object of the vampire’s desire, Bella Swan. Ruthven’s ‘deadly hue’ is replaced by sparkling attraction. Polidori’s narrative, and its critique of social mores, is reimagined for a twenty-first-century audience who are attracted to rather than repulsed by the Other. Like Ruthven, the Cullens are at once embedded within and yet permanently removed from their society. However, rather than being symbols of social degradation, they are held up as an aspirational, wholesome family. Franck shows how Meyer’s vampires act as reflections of consumerist desire in a society shaped by social media and celebrity culture.

Building on the insights of S. F. Johnson and Ronald Broude, scholars have delineated the anti-Spanish themes of The Spanish Tragedy. Thomas Kyd creates a political subtext that is related to the play's anti-Spanish themes. Kyd combines aspects of the anti-Leicester tradition with elements of the Spanish Black Legend as expressed in Antonio Pérez's Las Relaciones in order to depict Spain under Philip II as the evil enemy of Protestant England. First published in France in 1591, Las Relaciones perhaps did more to undermine Philip II's image as a responsible and prudent monarch than any work in the anti-Hispanist tradition. Kyd develops sensational images of romantic rivalries, betrayals of secrecy and political murder depicted in the anti-Leicester tradition and the Spanish Black Legend of Pérez's Las Relaciones in order to create a play which depicts the fall of Babylon/Spain.

The film The Company of Wolves, was directed by Neil Jordan from a script he co-wrote with Angela Carter. It is necessary to frame the discussion by engaging with the discourse surrounding Neil Jordan's and, especially, Angela Carter's work. When Carter published her werewolf stories, folklorists were debating how to categorise 'Little Red Riding Hood'. The story 'Peau d'âne' resembles werewolf stories because of the shared animal skin. Female werewolves were very hard to find in Western European folklore texts, with their overwhelming majority of male werewolves. The medieval incest stories seem to stand apart from the werewolf stories. There is a transgression in the other main incest story cluster: the Maiden Without Hands, where the father-daughter union is first consummated and later avoided. Father-daughter incest was a theme in many medieval narratives and its history reaches back into the thirteenth century, to the French poem La Manekine.

This final chapter examines Hoccleve’s engagement with both female shamefastness and masculinity in two of his early works, the Letter of Cupid (his translation of Christine de Pizan’s anti-misogynist Epistre au dieu d’Amours) and La Male Regle, through the lens of what has been characterized as Hoccleve’s distinctive pattern of self-effacement. It argues that, in presenting himself as a ‘poore shamefast man’, Hoccleve plays on two of the key beliefs underpinning the medieval practice of honourable female shamefastness: the belief that such emotional practices can be learned, and the belief that they can also be counterfeited. The chapter begins by taking a closer look at the Middle English language of ‘manhood’ and ‘manliness’ in relation to shamefastness. It then turns to Hoccleve’s treatment of misleading appearances in his Letter of Cupid, in which Hoccleve claims to have proto-feminist intentions but ultimately suggests that the behaviour of neither men nor women can be taken at face value. Finally, it considers La Male Regle in order to show how Hoccleve exploits the idea of shamefastness as a replicable practice, transforming what medieval women were encouraged to make an apparently artless performance of virtue into a performance of conspicuous artifice.