Chapter 6 interrogates the notion of Birmingham as a ‘non-place’, seeking clarity on where this (mis)conception originates and emphasising the city’s unique creative aesthetics. It achieves this through close readings and original interviews with Costa prize-winning Irish-Brummie author Catherine O’Flynn. Her fictional representations of Birmingham are considered in parallel with the ‘grand narratives’ of the city as it developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, in order to understand how the personal sub-narratives of the city are both critical of, and informed by, the bigger vision.

Chapter 2 examines issues of class, hierarchy and class consciousness in the late fourteenth century, principally through a study of three major works: William Langland’s Piers Plowman, in particular the relationship between this literary text and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and its relationship to the genre of medieval estates satire as well as social reality; and John Gower’s Vox Clamantis. Piers Plowman emerges as an excoriating attack on the corruption of English society in the late fourteenth century, as principles of profit threaten to sweep away the last vestiges of society’s moral order. Langland celebrates the dignity of ordinary labour but concludes that a self-sufficient, functioning society cannot be achieved until a point in the distant future, if at all before the return of Christ. Instead, the task of the dutiful Christian citizen must be to save souls not society. Chaucer has often been contrasted to Langland as a poet who sneered at the pretensions of social climbers. Through an analysis of The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale the chapter shows that, like Langland, the more urban-focussed Chaucer also saw a society in disarray, falling prey to the forces of greed and commercialization. His satirical attacks are less concerned with individual classes than the failures of the collective whole. In contrast, Gower has no problem in blaming the rebellious peasants for England’s social ills and, accordingly, he dehumanizes them as ignorant beasts.

Chapter 6 studies the relationship between literature and class from the onset of the agricultural revolution to the impact of the French Revolution. Adam Smith saw the benefits of the division of labour, which could create hitherto unimaginable prosperity. Others saw a future characterized by alienation from nature and the destruction of stabile communities. While enthusiasts for ballads and the poems of the bardic Ossian looked to recover what they could of the past, the middle-class cult of sensibility, introduced by Henry McKenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling and other works, created a culture that enabled readers to condemn what they witnessed without having to take action. Frances Burney’s novels condemn the exploitation of servants, and the ways in which a culture of politeness is deployed to disguise vicious class bullying. George Crabbe and William Cowper demonstrate that other writers were also aware of the increasingly dangerous class divisions that were emerging in the 1780s. Robert Burns also developed his belief in a common humanity, writing in support of the American War of Independence against British occupation. Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution led to a number of responses. Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine argued that the upper class had to be removed in order for society to progress. William Blake opposed Adam Smith’s belief in the division of labour through his integrated artistic practices; William Wordsworth (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) produced poetry that used ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’.

This chapter examines how three choreographers from different generations as well as countries – Maguy Marin with May B (1981) and Dominique Dupuy with La petite dame (2002) in France, Joanna Czajkowska (Sopot Dance Theatre Company) with All This This Here (2015) in Poland – have re-enacted Beckett’s works for theatre and television through dance gestures, engaging in a creative dialogue with them. Rather than the one-to-one correspondence or relationship typically associated with ‘adaptation’ or (intermedial) ‘transposition’, these productions are analysed as what Bruno Genetti calls ‘choreographic projections’, i.e. performative extensions and transfigurations of the works on which they are based, sometimes beyond the point of recognition. These three choreographers are similar in that their encounter with Beckett’s work was very important for their own artistic careers. It urged them to question norms, to dance differently. It changed their aesthetics, creating new possibilities of gesturing for dancers and choreographers. As such, this chapter will examine not only how Beckett has transformed dance but also to what extent choreographic art has transformed our reception of his work, and how it has been historically influenced by dance.

Monsters and spectres might seem to be opposites: one embodied, tangible, chthonic; the other incorporeal, insubstantial and ethereal. They may conjure different fears too: horror, visceral shock and corporeal repulsion or uncanny sensations of psychic displacement, temporal disturbance and haunting. Yet both figures circulate around emergent media from the nineteenth century to the present, colliding with and contaminating one another. This chapter provides an introduction to the themes of the volume as a whole, showing how Gothic figures flourish, cross-contaminate and multiply, emerging in gaps and breaks, in ruptures between being and appearing, reality and representation, past and future. The media in question are, furthermore, crucial to this process: whether voice, writing, type, image, projection, vibration, hand, body, or something else, the modes that spectrally body forth or conjure up the Gothic articulate the crises, emergences and ruptures of which they are born(e).

This study of selected post-war texts from Birmingham looks to the built environment to better understand the development of a unique, multi-faceted literary aesthetic. Perhaps more than any other city within the pages of this book, Birmingham tears down and rebuilds; funds and defunds; nurtures and neglects. This introduction interrogates the interplay between the evolution of the physical fabric of the city and the ‘super-diversity’ of the communities who inhabit it. In doing so, it establishes the sociohistorical contexts which are preconditions for the wealth of vibrant literature inspired by multicultural Birmingham.

Bizarre magic is a form of performance magic that favours theatrical character, storytelling, overt allegory, symbolism and metaphor, and themes of the supernatural, fantastic, amazing and weird. While the form has its roots in Victorian stage magic, it realised itself as a movement in the 1970s through a counter-cultural reaction against the big boxes and card flourishes of a disenchanted, contemporary, mainstream stage magic. Bizarre magicians sought to re-enchant performance magic with the mysterious and the spiritual, (re)discovering meaning through storytelling and theatrical character.This chapter examines the adoption of popular Gothic representations in the stage persona of a number of key figures in bizarre magic. In performance, bizarre magic presents a complex series of meta-narratives within the form, often supplanting the literary in favour of popular Gothic (re)imaginings. These, often twice-removed, transformations/translations of classic and contemporary Gothic form and fiction are considered in the context of the bizarre performer's engagement, through both performance and theoretical writing, with the fabulously monstrous.

Chapter 1 outlines the principal issues in the study of class and applies them to the history of England – then a ‘united’ Britain – from the late Middle Ages to the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. The chapter shows how unstable English society was in the late fourteenth century. Ravaged by the Black Death, it was seriously under-resourced with pressures on both knights and peasants, as well as urban society, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the predictable result. An analysis of a series of revolts throughout the late Middle Ages enable us to understand the fractious nature of late medieval society in England, one in which class consciousness developed as both a reality and a concept. While we cannot see an obvious transfer of power from one class to another, we can observe social relations changing as the material conditions of existence alter. The move towards a more commercial and commercialized society was accelerated by the sale of monastic lands after the Reformation and subsequent technological developments enabled the development of agrarian capitalism. There was a significant growth in urban society, most pronounced in London, which precipitated further class conflict. Class distinctions were as often local as they were national. By the end of the eighteenth century, England was a country characterized by, in E. P. Thompson’s words, class struggle without class society. Daily life has always been structured in terms of class: if issues of class are ignored or disguised literary history is accordingly distorted and impoverished.

This coda considers a woodcut from Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corpus Fabrica (1543) depicting a flayed human body in motion. The image distils a preoccupation that has run throughout Transplantation Gothic: a focus on bodies opened, their incisions not closed, yet life ongoing. This book is concerned with bodies wounded in ways that are not yet finished. It respects stories that do not end or stories that do not end neatly: the wounds of donors that spread to include intangible wounds like reduced earning capacity, pain or stigma, and recipient wounds that keep the body open for more changes – immunosuppressant pharmacology, the medical gaze, and interventions. This book is concerned with extended durations of time and affect, the slow violence of long legacies of health inequality and the long aftermath of care.