This chapter follows the adventures of the Doctor in the late Thatcher era, 1983–89. Doctor Who (1963–89) had been in production for many years before Thatcher’s rise to power, but during Thatcher’s time in office the series changes considerably. The character of the Doctor becomes more Machiavellian, the series darker and more brutal. Doctor Who of this era attacks Thatcherism head-on (and intentionally on the part of the writers), but also brings about themes that appear pro-Thatcher in their implications. Doctor Who is the most inconsistent of the three series studied, in part because there were many hands involved in producing the series. In the era of Sylvester McCoy – the seventh actor to play the Doctor (1987–89) – Andrew Cartmel took over as script editor. Cartmel assembled a team of writers who, along with McCoy himself, were stridently anti-Thatcher, and this sentiment was often reflected in the themes of the series. Yet Cartmel, in an effort to reintroduce mystery into the series, also reimagined the character of the Doctor as dark and manipulative. This was known in fandom as the ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ or ‘Andrew Cartmel’s Dark Doctor’. The ironic consequence of this characterisation is that it turns the Doctor himself into a more Thatcherite figure, as he acts as the ultimate authority in the universe, deciding when it is appropriate to kill, to manipulate others, and even to commit genocide.

Ginsberg was not just a primary figure in the literary and countercultural movements of the decades following World War II. As this chapter details, he also provides a crucial link, too infrequently acknowledged, between these postwar movements and the Old Left ideals and communities of the 1930s and early 1940s. Touching on the numerous moments in Ginsberg’s poetry and biography where he recalls a youth shaped by his parents’ communist and socialist commitments, including their support for labor unions, this essay explains briefly why those commitments needed to be reformulated as Ginsberg began his poetic career in the mid 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

I begin this study with the work of Clifford Geertz because he articulates what he calls the “interpretive turn” in his field of anthropology from science to the humanities, in particular to the mode of textual analysis used in literary criticism. Geertz emphasizes that in his discipline science provides a thin description using rules and laws that explain little about the specific situation. For a “thick description” Geertz turns to literary critical practice. These two terms, the interpretive turn and thick description, will be key throughout this study. In this chapter, Geertz points to three aspects of culture that would profit from the thick description of literary analysis: serious game theory, sidewalk drama, and behavioural text. Each of these topics is the subject of a section of this chapter. With regard to serious game theory I analyse “Quartet” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”. The next section, on sidewalk drama, looks at “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” and “Spiderman II”. In the final section, on behavioural text, my focal points are “Iron Man 2” and “Iron Man 3”. The central thesis of this book is that the phase of literary theory that emphasized cultural critique was the direct result of the interpretive turn to thick description.

This chapter considers the relationship between the rational-discursive faculty and species identity through the lens of the concepts of error and errancy. In a variety of cultural contexts, medieval audiences imagined that the act of “erring” – both in the etymological sense of wandering and the extended sense of moral fault – could function as an experience that troubled distinctions of species. The chapter uses this recurring fantasy as a lens to explore an intriguing phenomenon observable in manuscripts of the Roman de Renart: Scribes and the trickster fox whose tales they copied sometimes “err” in tandem with one another, with scribal slips of the pen overlapping ambiguously with beastly slips of the tongue. It argues that these disruptive situations enable unresolved questions about the place of the rational-discursive faculty to come to the fore, confronting readers with a surprising question: In whose subjectivity do the errors in question originate?

Draws together all the strands of the book’s analysis, and compares the series to show similarities, examining how science fiction from the Thatcher era can be explored as commentary on its political context.

It is hard to overstate the importance of William Blake (1757–1827) within Allen Ginsberg’s life and poetry. The numinous event that Ginsberg experienced in 1948, which he would later call his “Blake vision,” became a key part of his self-fashioning as a countercultural visionary, a prophet in a tradition that stretched back through Blake to Milton and the Bible. As an expert salesman, Ginsberg also became a dedicated proselytizer for Blake, whose work he promoted not only through poetry but also college classes, interviews, music, and his vast personal network. Ginsberg thereby positioned Blake as a lodestar of the counterculture and ultimately influenced Blake’s position within popular culture and academia itself. However, Ginsberg’s narrative of his “Blake vision” also changed significantly over time, and Ginsberg’s strong link to Blake has sometimes obscured the importance to Ginsberg’s work of other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth.

This essay interprets Carpentier’s American cycle of novels from the perspective of the environmental humanities. It defines Carpentier’s “ecological marvelous realism” as a literary motif in which organisms interact with their environments in ways that are ordinary yet marvelous. Most important, Carpentier’s ecological marvelous real features surprising shape-shifting capacities of peoples, plants, animals, and insects in the New World that destabilize boundaries and hierarchies between humans and nonhumans.This new ecocritical reading of the Cuban author’s most famous works aims to reassess his status in the canonical Latin American literary tradition and question a central tenet of the field of multispecies studies.

This chapter discusses the circumstances of Ginsberg’s arrival and deportation from Czechoslovakia in 1965. Although it is often thought otherwise, Ginsberg did in fact have long-formed plans to travel behind the Iron Curtain, and his expulsion from Cuba only expedited, rather than facilitated, his arrival to Europe. During his stay in Czechoslovakia, Ginsberg had the opportunity to look behind the façade of the Communist Party and observed firsthand that Czechoslovaks lived in an oppressive regime they increasingly tried to challenge through various means, one of them being the publication and performance of Beat poetry. However, he underestimated the surveillance practices of the regime, which only intensified after Ginsberg was elected the King of May in front of a 100,000-strong crowd during May Day celebrations. Ultimately, his often frank discussion of his views and experiences not only placed several of his associates in danger, but also led to his deportation from the country.

El recurso del método (Reasons of State), published in 1974 by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, has often been analyzed along with other dictatorship novels focusing on recurring themes, such as violence, rebellion, US imperialism or the dictator’s solitude. This essay introduces a “sensory approach” arguing that Carpentier revisits the traditional hierarchy of the five senses. Thematically, the novel emphasizes the “spectacular” and panoptical dimension of the dictator’s regime; however, this visual (and aural) domination is questioned by the Marxist opposition embodied in the character of the Student. From an intertextual perspective, Carpentier’s use of quotations from Descartes paradoxically undermines the Cartesian cogito, and the protagonist’s behavior ultimately evolves toward an anti-Cartesian and anti-ocularcentric stance, as epitomized by the figure of Mayorala Elmira. Reflecting on these two dimensions of the novel from a sensorial point of view contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Carpentier’s poetics.