This chapter examines the materiality of reproductive labour in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft. It shows the changing dynamics in motherhood, which ceased to be solely defined by the physiological processes of child-bearing and became an emotional and social responsibility. The chapter then introduces the model of ‘commodity production versus nature’, and also focuses on writing and reproduction, as well as the ways discourses of writing and reproduction are phrased in terms of nutrition.

In 1979, Doris Lessing published Shikasta, the first novel in her Canopus in Argos: Archives quintet (1979–1983) and her first novel written entirely in the speculative mode. Science fiction (SF) has always involved extrapolation, so in what ways is writing about new worlds a way of writing about our own? Does SF require a different voice or narration? If it does, how might that make a writer such as Lessing rethink her authorial and narrative voice when she returns to realism? How might it impact on her attempt to write about a subject like terrorism? In the Canopus in Argos: Archives series, and in The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984) and The Good Terrorist (1985), questions of voice are central. Lessing suggests here that style and voice cannot be separated from content, and that there is no such thing as a characteristic authorial style or voice. Her work in the early to mid-1980s, despite its apparently vast differences in mode, genre and subject, can be viewed as a self-conscious experimentation with the authority of voice.

This chapter focuses on Garnett's journey from an actor to a producer. The study briefly highlights the interests and works of Garnett. His chief interest was always acting, and he spent much of his time as a teenager at Stratford, the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company. After leaving school, he acted in local repertory theatres before taking up a place at the University of London where he studied psychology. He spent little time at the university, and developed a parallel career as an actor whilst studying. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was a relatively successful actor, rarely out of work, and with a profile of creditable performances on television and, occasionally, film. Eventually, he stepped into the driving seat as a producer. Garnett was one of the first generation of producers who were also directors and operated in different ways to other producers employed in the Drama Group.

Appraising the work of a living writer is unlikely to cover the entire oeuvre because fresh works may appear. In the case of Julian Barnes, it is also true that he prefers not to be written about by critics, partly because it makes him feel entombed rather than a living voice. As pertinently, Barnes would prefer not to be mediated by the entire book industry. The belief in the importance of ‘the words’ alone is a viewpoint that Barnes shares with the nineteenth-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert. Barnes's fiction reflects a wide array of approaches but settles on a combination of social satire, Swiftian irony and experimentation. For the most part, Barnes is a comic novelist. Ironic comedy and false memory are two of the poles around which Julian Barnes's work revolves.

Building on Muriel Fabre-Magnan's thought-provoking Chapter 6 of this volume, I endeavour here to offer another view of Rouen Cathedral. I mainly juxtapose her egalitarian views with more liberal ones; at the same time, I do not conceal my own preference for certain positions in relation to the content of freedom of contract and its reasonable limits. In this context, I use some illustrative examples that help capture the strained relationship between freedom of contract and paternalistic interventions mainly in favour of weaker transacting parties.

The structure of this chapter is as follows. In section 1, I elaborate on an account of the jurisprudential background that underpins freedom of contract, personal autonomy, and their limits. In section 2, my main focus is on practical cases in which some sort of paternalistic interference may come into play. In section 3, I first briefly present the limits of freedom of contract according to civil law and then deal with a typical case of intervention for the protection of the weaker party, namely spousal and parent suretyships, which are usually characterised by a structural bargaining imbalance between the contracting parties. In section 4, I try to shed light on the possible power imbalances in arbitration agreements, within the framework of the general trend towards privatisation of the state's adjudicating (and enforcing) mechanisms.

This chapter discusses the importance of the technologies that were used in making the five dramas Beckett wrote for British television. It studies television adaptations of Beckett's theatre plays, which were recorded in a television studio. It examines the work done on the aesthetics of television and also notes how changes on production technologies affected Beckett's work and other productions. This chapter also discusses the aesthetic significance of studio production and the plays' uses of film recording technology in the television studio.

Most Western women only feel acceptable to themselves and to society if their bodies are largely hair-free. The cinema is particularly responsible for the confirmation and perpetuation of this convention of femininity. This chapter explores how film makes use of the two extremes of female body hair: the idealised hairless female and the vilified hairy female. First, it outlines the normalisation of female depilation by looking at the cultural and symbolic meanings that are attached to body hair, and then the artistic heritage from which the ‘hairless ideal’ has sprung and which film perpetuates. Next, the chapter considers how female body hair is employed as a negative signifier in two screen texts based on the novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil, written by the feminist author Fay Weldon. Finally, it discusses the viability of presenting female body hair on the screen in a positive way by looking at facial hair as signifier of the ‘freak’ and of sado-masochism, body hair as signifier of the ‘beast within’ and unreal hair or wigs as signifiers of sexual deviance.

This chapter sheds light on the post-war British film industry and the turn Asquith's career took during these times. He was well established as one of the British cinema's leading directors on the basis of a diverse output: the middlebrow drama adaptations of Shaw and Rattigan, lowbrow genre films including a comedy thriller and a costume melodrama, patriotic war pictures and documentary dramas. Asquith resumed his directing career with While the Sun Shines (1947), and his next film, The Winslow Boy (1948), was a Rattigan adaptation in which he corraborated with Korda's revived London Films and British Lion. The Importance of Being Earnest, a version of Oscar Wilde's famous play from the 1890s, was his first film in colour. Asquith's genre exercises from the early 1950s, though containing much of interest – innovatory narrative structures, imaginative mise-enscène, lyricism, and poetry, the radical ideological questioning of war – remain little-known films on the periphery of the mainstream British cinema of the time.