Atima Srivastava is the first prominent example of a school of British Asian literature that also includes Preethi Nair, Nisha Minhas and B. K. Mahal: a British Asian romance genre intervention. Her two novels, Looking for Maya (1999) and Transmission (1992), feature young women protagonists working in creative industries. As both the first and the most sophisticated example of the rise of British Asian popular romance, Srivastava's fiction simultaneously challenges two core values of the romance genre: whiteness and heterosexuality. Moreover, the favouring of romance plots over concerns with ethnicity make her novels a further example of the post-ethnic reality to which Hanif Kureishi's work has gestured. The identity crises of earlier British Asians – whether migrants or British born – have been replaced by what Darcus Howe calls an ‘ease of presence’, challenging representations of British Asians as in any sense alienated, disaffected or caught between competing cultures. Through subtle subversion of Western romance, Srivastava's novels interrogate stereotypes of British Asian women, announcing a confident and independent contemporary identity.

Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English (1960), based on her experiences on first arriving in England from Southern Rhodesia and trying to find somewhere to live, provides an excellent point of entry into the extensive body of her work. It also allows us to begin to understand some of the contexts and intertexts that have been important in her writing. Issues of exile and migration are at the centre of this text and her work as a whole, suggesting the importance, but also the instability, of identity. Lessing is interested in ideas about class, nation, ‘race’ and gender, but, more importantly, in the links between these concepts and in the ways they overlap with and merge into one another. The generic indeterminacy of In Pursuit brings to the fore Lessing's critical relation to the constraints of genre and her qualified suspicion of categories such as realism and experimentalism, fiction and autobiography. Her constructive and complex use of autobiographical material also creatively interacts with her interest in the writer or artist as both figure in and producer of the text.

In 1945 the ideal family was thought to consist of a mother as dependant homemaker, father as breadwinner, and two, three or four children. However this model family was transformed over the following decades. Women have come to play an active role in the labour force, men are more involved in the home and lifelong marriage is no longer the common experience. By examining cultural representations of motherhood this chapter considers how these ideas of the proper conduct of mothers and fathers, inside and outside the home, were presented within society. It evaluates how women themselves related to these images and the difficulties they faced in doing so. The chapter demonstrates that motherhood at this time was a subject fraught with contradictions and ambiguities, and these tensions are reflected in women’s articulations of their attitudes and experiences.

This chapter presents a case study on the role of the European Union (EU) in the conflict resolution of Northern Ireland. It describes the incremental nature of establishing a role for European integration in the conflict resolution process through policy tools, resources and political opportunities and analyses the role of EU institutions in inducing change in the domestic political opportunity structure conducive to intercommunal reconciliation. The analysis reveals that European integration has produced significant long-term transformative effects by enhancing communication, societal interaction and interest disaggregation.

Jack Maggs begins in the best traditions of Victorian melodrama. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Jack Maggs juxtaposes the hidden and the visible to reveal a terrible social violence beneath the surface of the imperial ideal. Jack Maggs is Peter Carey's Wide Sargasso Sea, an act of postcolonial retaliation against a parent culture. Like Jean Rhys's novel, it rewrites elements of a canonical text from the heart of the English literary tradition to reveal the hidden alternative history that cultural hegemony has effaced or suppressed. Carey 'willingly admits to having once or twice stretched history to suit his own fictional ends' in his Author's Note. One of Carey's starting points for the novel was postcolonial theorist Edward Said's views on Great Expectations in Culture and Imperialism, in which Said sees the transported convict Abel Magwitch as a metaphor for the relationship between England and its colonial offspring.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about Italian language learning in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It demonstrates how the impetus for the fruitful engagement with Italian materials in English poetry and drama at the turn of the seventeenth century can be traced to the very processes by which the same authors encountered the language and its literature in the first place. It investigates how students developed a sound reading knowledge of the target language, as it was not strictly necessary to speak a language accurately in order to understand it sufficiently well to engage with its literature. This volume also traces how John Florio's influence, both personal and by means of his Italian instruction manuals, was disseminated among a number of contemporary poets and playwrights.

Symbolic representation is a relatively under-studied concept amongst feminist political scientists. Most existing research on women's symbolic representation in politics has tended to adopt a more wide-ranging approach to analyse the media's representation of women and the impact of women politicians as role models. This chapter illustrates various examples where, in common with both Labour and Conservative women MPs, Liberal Democrat women MPs have been subjected to trivialisation and objectification by the media. It also explores instances of representation where the descriptive and symbolic meet and questions whether the low number of women MPs impacts upon identification of role models. Prior to the 2010 election the Liberal Democrats had the youngest MPs in England, Scotland, and Wales, all of whom are women: this resulted in mixed press coverage. The women MPs had varying attitudes towards the media, some found it hurtful, whilst others identified it as a ‘necessary evil’. The intersection between women's symbolic and descriptive representation peaked during the infamous 2001 debate on the all-women shortlists. The most commonly identified role model was Baroness Shirley Williams.

This chapter discusses the formation of and the critical response to a canon of British television drama in terms of a conflict between aesthetic modernism and critical realism. It notes that some of the critics' responses to Beckett's work in the 1970s reflected the critical debate of the time over the politics of naturalistic versus avant-garde form. It determines that Beckett's television plays are placed within a complex dialectic of critical discourses around the aesthetics and politics of television drama, and part of this debate is about the address to the television audience. Finally, this chapter tries to link critical work on Beckett's television plays with discursive models of how television audiences were imagined by critics, television institutions and authors.

Despite the position of the UK and Ireland on the geographical periphery of the continent, Europe has never been far from the heart of domestic politics in either country. This chapter analyses and explains the divergent developmental trajectories of UK and Irish European diplomacy in the post-war period from a comparative perspective. It first reflects on the relative importance of five aggregate variables which have shaped and help to explain the nature of European Union (EU) relations prior to 1997: namely geopolitics, economics, institutions, party politics, and public opinion. It then presents a detailed assessment of EU policy under the administrations of Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern — their aims and objectives, principal accomplishments and perceived failures, and the extent to which their records represent a significant break from their predecessors.