This chapter illustrates the interconnection between representations of war and Gothic imaginary. It presents a reading of WWI poetry in conjunction with George Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007), Ambrose Bierce's Gothic description of his Civil War experience and the American military involvement in the Caribbean. Romero's distinctively self-referential style is read as a reflection of the monstrosity of the cinematic medium itself, conjoining on the thematic level the return of soldiers as zombies and on the extradiegetic level a visual language returning both as spectral bodies on screen. The war zone is depicted as a realm between life and death, as though the Gothic mode were the only way the truth can be told in a situation of catastrophe. The zombie, poised in this space, functions as a trope used to confront us with the ethical crisis raised by a ubiquity of digital images at the beginning of the 21st century.

This introductory chapter responds to the proliferation and diversification of adaptations of Beckett’s work across different genres and media since the author’s death in 1989. It summarises recent debates in the field of adaptation studies which has likewise expanded, reflecting critically on earlier debates and taking account of new media, while clarifying terminology that will return in the chapters that follow. These approaches resist the traditional value-laden hierarchy between ‘original’ and ‘adaptation’, offering instead different frameworks for analysing the cultural, aesthetic, political and media-specific, intermedial or transmedial contexts of each new version and its relationship to its source text/s or inspiration. Issues relating specifically to the status of Beckett as a canonical author in relation to cultural authority and ‘authorisation’ are included. These theoretical discussions lay the foundation for an introduction to this collection of essays on Beckett’s ‘afterlives’, which is the first book-length study to be devoted to Beckett and adaptation, although existing scholarly work in this area is noted as well. The rest of the Introduction summarises each chapter and the rationale for how they have been grouped in order to encourage resonances and dialogues between them.

Chapter 3 explores the issue of class relations in the Renaissance. Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (published in 1583) has an elaborate taxonomy of social ranks from those born to govern down to those who cannot rule ‘and yet they be not altogether neglected’. The classification of social strata was applied to literary texts by George Puttenham, indicating that class and literature were connected by contemporary literary theorists and that writers in Renaissance England certainly had the intellectual tools at their disposal to think about class. The chapter explores the economic prospects and social assumptions of a number of writers, most of whom came from the ‘middling sort’, many of whom felt themselves over-educated given their prospects – one reason why they gravitated towards writing. A number of plays are analysed, including Arden of Faversham, which explores the social changes inaugurated by the Reformation and the availability of cheap land; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which examines fantasies about work and holiday; and Massinger’s A New Way To Pay Old Debts, which laments the destruction of stable social values and the rise of the unscrupulously wealthy under James I. Edmund Spenser demonstrates an acute sense of class status in the Amoretti; Richard Barnfield represents Lady Pecunia, an allegorical representation of wealth. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the career of John Taylor the water poet, a writer whose work expresses the anxieties of uncertain class status and who fashions himself as someone outside social systems, able to speak truth to power.

Hand-held cameras and night vision technology have become increasingly common in the contemporary horror film. Taking Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s phenomenally successful REC films (2007, 2009, 2012) as exemplary of this and other recent trends (e.g. intertextual cannibalism and girl monsters), this chapter will examine how these innovations relate to the certain generic constants of the horror film (such as obstructed visibility and mounting dramatic structure). The driving motor of both REC and REC2 is their use of video recording technology. While the threat seems to shift from zombie-like contagion in the first film to demonic possession in the second, the technological gambit of the two films remains the same: both films are entirely mediated by recording equipment. A single professional TV camera occupies center stage in the first case while in the second, there is a proliferation of devices and locations (including cameras embedded into firefighters’ helmets). Both films give the night vision function a key role in the final (climactic) segment during which the dialectic between visibility and invisibility itself becomes the main drama and the camera the central protagonist.

Gare Saint Lazare Ireland’s adaptation of How It Is (Part I) flips the theatre in every sense: the audience remains on stage for the duration of the performance along with the technical crew, while the performers lay claim to the auditorium, the stage and the light box. From the opening soundscape of near-white noise to the weaving of recorded or live voices and the shadowy doublings of the cast, the premiere production eschews all the traps of a ‘direct’ adaptation, instead attempting to make mud in the mind. From this densely rich, disconcerting, at times disturbing sump of voices and visions, the occasional flash of sublimity emerges. This chapter will examine the Gare Saint Lazare Ireland productions of How It Is Part I and Part II (premiering September 2019) as groundbreaking examples of both inter- and multimedial adaptations of Beckett’s work. Detailed analysis of the production, directorial and technical choices will be used to question the specific challenges of adapting Beckett’s prose for the stage, the status of the original text and the concept of adaptability; a willingness to seek out alternative techniques, technology and music to dig into the complex layering of the text. It will also consider the theatrical uses of uncertainty, hesitancy and apparent improvisation in the stage adaptation to reinforce the notion that, as in the original text of How It Is, there is no ‘last state’, no ‘finished version’, no ‘resting place’ that can or should be achieved.

This chapter discusses the novel, Shame. The novel traces a fictionalised and heavily fantasised path through the rise to political power of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who appears as Iskander Harappa); Bhutto's appointment of Zia ul-Haq (Raza Hyder) as his army chief of staff in 1976; Zia's deposition of Bhutto after the army was called in to quell street rioting in July 1977; the execution of Bhutto on the charge of ordering a political assassination; and the ‘Islamisation’ programme that Zia introduced once he had taken power in Pakistan. Shame was written at the height of this ‘Islamisation’ programme, and much of the bitter, brooding anger of the novel can be explained by this fact. The satire, however, is not directed at Zia alone, for his serious erosion of the civil rights of women and for his politicised misuse of Islam, but is directed also at Bhutto, who is held responsible for compromising the democratic process sufficiently to allow the military to regain power. Shame is thus a double satire on a pair of ‘conjoined opposites’ – the playboy and the puritan, the socialist democrat and the autocratic dictator – who are seen as two sides of the same coin: a Jekyll and Hyde of authoritarian politics.

In Lynne Pearce's essay, movement between two places (the north of England and rural Scotland) is the focus of a piece combining the personal with the more conceptual. Phenomenology inspires the study of diary extracts of driving the same route regularly over a period of more than ten years. Her account of these road trips in her own ‘driving diaries’ becomes the ‘date’ in this perceptual exploration of what we are thinking when we are driving.

The fact that English education in India may be seen as a tool for the cultural domination of Indians, designed to cement and extend the dominion already effected through military and economic means, makes explicit a central problem confronting an anti-colonial and post-colonial writer such as Rushdie, whose literary language of choice is English. Briefly stated: by using English, Rushdie lays himself open to the charge that he is not only accepting the legacy of British imperial rule but legitimising the culturally imperialistic act which brought English into being as a sub-continental language. Some of Rushdie's more aggressive critics have made this argument against him with force.