This chapter explores 1970s American literary and cinematic fantasies of institutionally mediated organ theft, in hospitals influenced by corporate and profit imperatives. Blood and tissue ‘banking’ developed rapidly during the twentieth century, and both the vocabulary and the processes were shaped by trends in neoliberal late capitalism. Through this lens, this chapter examines Robin Cook’s novel Coma (1977), Michael Crichton’s 1978 film adaptation, Robert Fiveson’s film Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979), John Hejinian’s novel Extreme Remedies (1974) and Dennis Etchison’s ‘The dead line’ (1979), and also science fictions from subsequent decades which further develop the trope of corporate transfer Gothic. These works comment on period concerns around organ procurement practices and critique a political economy that erodes compassion in healthcare. To communicate these perils, these fictions use spatial conventions characteristic of Gothic, staging their action in disorienting infrastructural spaces which seem claustrophobic and hallucinatory, through the lens of the protagonists’ vulnerabilities. These fictions also dramatise how tissue transfer can morph into finance’s intricate secondary forms including a language of mortgages, repossession, inherited debt and futures trading. The texts make visible the brutality concealed in the spectralising, deferred logics of neoliberal late capitalism.

Although he was savvy enough to warn his French publisher of ‘this adaptation business’ as requests for English language rights for En attendant Godot began to arrive in Paris in mid-1953, Beckett seems to have had only the scantest idea of how completely commercial theatre was imbricated in it. But Beckett would plunge into the ‘business’ himself by 1962, as he reconfigured Robert Pinget’s radio play La Manivelle as The Old Tune, with the acknowledgement: ‘English adaptation by Samuel Beckett’ (1962). We might say the same of his directorial debut, re-rendering Pinget’s L’Hypothèse, which he directed with actor Pierre Chabert in 1962. As a theatre director, Beckett would freely ‘adapt’ his own works for the stage and vary productions for different actors and stage configurations. This chapter traces adaptations of Waiting for Godot along racial lines with three American productions featuring all or dominantly black actors: what was generally called the ‘Negro Godot’ (1957), the touring Godot produced by the Free Southern Theater as part of the American Civil Rights Movement (1964–65), and the post-Hurricane Katrina production by the Classical Theater of Harlem in 2006, which was re-staged on the still-devastated streets of New Orleans in 2007.

Chapter Five begins with an analysis of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain and Moll Flanders. While Defoe’s geographical survey sees a united England and Scotland working together to increase the prosperity of its inhabitants, the novel explores the nature of class divisions. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela the union of the aspirational, virtuous Pamela and the rakish upper-class Mr. B functions to revivify what might otherwise be a moribund social order. For labouring class poets such as Stephen Duck, whose example inspired the subsequent popularity of such writers, life was undeniably complicated, often hard. Duck’s rapid rise left him with anxieties and a sense of deracination that was exploited by his detractors. Mary Collier, who responded to Duck’s criticism of female indolence, explored the conflicted ways in which women labourers existed within communities of women, as well as agricultural workers. Like Duck, there is a genuine anger in her work, one that laments the lack of opportunities of the many who can never really recover from a lack of education. By 1750 the traditional rural ways of life were disappearing as farming became more mechanized, and many who would once have been employed as agricultural labourers became domestic servants. The chapter concludes with a comparison and contrast of Henry Fielding’s novel, Tom Jones (1749), and Thomas Gray’s poem, Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750). While Fielding’s narrator looks back with nostalgia to a rapidly disappearing way of life, Gray’s acknowledges its class-bound limitations.

This introduction considers tissue transfer as a boundary practice in multiple senses, unsettling conventional distinctions between self and other and between life and death, and challenging the limits of the body's capacity to transform and the ethical limits of scientific practice. It reviews how Gothic tropes and intertextualities have characterised representations of the processes from the nineteenth century to the present. It also reflects on the critical conundrum that attends this historicist reading of Gothic as hallucinatory mimesis, of reality become fantastic in its horrors, and offers an analytic framework for working the terrain between imaginative representation and the suffering that it indirectly refracts: the coinage bodies dis(re)membered describes four ways that Gothic can conduct ambiguous cultural work within these discursive borderlands. I identify Gothic narrative tropes in historiography of transplantation science and immunology, and review how vulnerable bodies, strange time and confining spaces of a Gothic mode may help to express biopolitical dimensions of particular transfer milieux. Finally, I defend the value of work in fantastic modes for medical humanities and comment on how transfer Gothic responds to calls in the critical medical humanities for attention to the distributed nature of health-related practice, in a nexus both global and local.

Antoinette Nwandu’s provocative play Pass Over places two philosophically opposed source texts into conversation: the Biblical Exodus story and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. She situates this encounter in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement since the election of President Donald Trump. On one hand, Nwandu joins a long line of African American artists and activists who invoke the Exodus story as an archetype of hope, deliverance and freedom. On the other hand, she uses Godot as an emblematic counterforce to the Moses myth, where dreams of the elusive Promised Land remain perpetually deferred. Nwandu leverages Beckett to expose the dangers of moral atrophy, emphasising the lethal consequences of white privilege in perpetuating systemic oppression against African Americans. In this chapter, I similarly leverage Nwandu to expose Beckett’s own troubling complicity in his theatrical legacy of discrimination. For decades, first Beckett and later his estate representatives have repeatedly, forcefully and litigiously discouraged, denounced and banned transgressive productions featuring women and people of colour. My final section catalogues several instances of this targeted discrimination and calls for an end to these exclusionary practices.

This chapter explores the literature of possession through its persistent evocation of the ‘impressionable mind’, a trope that submits photographic technology as a privileged figure for the subject’s permeability. It centres on Sydney Atherton, the peculiar hero of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), who is a narrator less inclined to write than to be written upon. Before resorting to descriptive narrative techniques, he appeals to his own body as an archive of the event. Atherton’s ‘retinal print’ is conversant with the Victorian urban legend of the optogram—the scientifically spurious hypothesis that traumatic events physically imprint themselves upon the eye in a manner resembling the photographic process.The Beetle’s association of hypnosis with photography impels us to consider the contemporaneous development of ‘the negative’ within photographic and psychoanalytic discourse. Integrating Victorian optics and the psychophysiology of perception, Marsh’s novel intimates that the gaze radiates not from within the subject, but towards it from the objects it views. The ‘negative’ bears witness to the impact of that inverse gaze, embodying the dimly understood influence of another that founds the shadowy substrate of our being.

This chapter develops a critique of official discourses of multicultural Leicester, using the literary genre of Young Adult fiction as its source material. The writer Bali Rai is from the city and has a global reputation. He is signed to Penguin Random House and his debut novel has been translated into 11 languages worldwide. Original interviews with Rai and close reading of his novels feed into broader debates about representations of diversity – whether in terms of race, gender or socioeconomic status – in books for young people. Rai’s fiction directly concerns the lived experience of young people living in Leicester and reflects upon how some of the challenges associated with multiculturalism impact on their lives.

The conceptual frameworks through which we understand human corporeality and agency are under stress and need now to be reconfigured. The chapter examines theories of the posthuman, particularly those of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, to analyse how two exemplars – Rebecca Horn and Jess Thom – draw on Samuel Beckett’s work to question normative categories of human embodiment. It explores the interface between the machinic, the prosthetic and the corporeal in Horn’s body sculptures and machine installations (1970–2010) and examines how neurodiverse theatre performance reconfigures modalities of subjectivity and agency in Jess Thom’s Touretteshero production of Not I (2017), drawing into the discussion an analysis of ideas of silence and the somatic in Anne Niemetz and Andrew Pelling’s sound work Dark Side of the Cell (2004). The chapter concludes that the mutability of contemporary art is an essential experimental space for performative adaptation within posthumanism.

Despite being the best-known and most widely produced play by Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot can boast of few adaptations in other media, and even less research in the field of adaptation studies. Although Beckett’s transformation of theatrical vocabulary has incited playwrights and directors to redefine his work, Linda Hutcheon has argued in her Theory of Adaptation that experimental texts such as his are less easily and less frequently adapted than linear realist novels. As a media-specific artist, Beckett was not always welcoming towards adaptations of his plays and, of the few transpositions of Godot to other media, most have been ‘reverent’ and ‘faithful’. We focus on two ‘irreverent’ texts that stray from Beckett’s play and that represent different phases in intertextual and intermedial engagement with Godot: Matei Vișniec’s Le dernier Godot (play, 1987/1998) and Rudi Azank’s While Waiting for Godot (webseries, 2013). A postscript to Beckett’s play, Vișniec’s Le dernier Godot recreates and recontextualizes Godot and, by ‘toning down’ the violent vocabulary originally employed, indirectly explains why he, in Beckett’s text, needs to remain absent. Azank’s While Waiting for Godot instead focuses on the dominance of audio-visual, cinematic narration over Beckett’s dialogue in this transcoding of Godot to the media vocabularies of transmedia storytelling – and adapts the theatrical play for a web audience.