This chapter addresses the argument that How It Is mobilises Inferno VII to produce a notion of reality as the unreliable outcome of repetition. It studies the canto where Virgil translates the incomprehensible gurgling that is coming from the bubbles on the surface of the river Styx into the ‘hymn’ sung by the invisible slothful damned. This discussion shows that this illustrates how ‘credence’ for the reality of such scenes is taken from the quickly diminishing ‘incontrovertibility’ of Virgil's authority. This chapter also shows that the mud in How It Is is what allows the passing of the murmuring and what prevents it.

This concluding chapter discusses the figure of Dante that can be found in Beckett. It demonstrates the way Dante continually changes the Beckett oeuvre and presents a destabilising view of Dante and an understanding of the Dante intertexts as part of a larger economy of gain and loss. A brief summary of the texts that were studied in the previous chapters is also included.

This chapter argues for increasing recognition of the diversity of the white presence during modern Australia's foundational narrative and for the complex place narratives created by subaltern settler groups as they imbued the landscape with their own sense of self. Place was central to Irish and Scottish diasporic experience. The ethnic diversity of the nineteenth-century British and Irish migration stream to Australia added hitherto under-regarded cultural complexity to the hegemonic white presence on that continent. The Irish migration stream contained various ethnic traditions claiming descent from different periods in the country's history in a complex mix of religion, culture, language and genetics. Churches of all denominations became places where diasporic identities were continuously redefined. Colonial settlement in Victoria and New South Wales was the outcome of individual and collective understanding and aspiration informed by memory and experience.

A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989) aims to insinuate more of the ordinary and the exceptional into other people's orbit. From the opening story, told from the position of an animal stowaway, to the final summation of an average life, the book focuses on people whom history would seldom highlight but who illustrate its processes and vagaries: Lawrence Beesley, Miss Fergusson, and Kath Ferris. Barnes's fourth novel has love as its chief stowaway. Love, which intrudes into this book most conspicuously in its half-chapter, opposes history and orthodoxy because its story is individual and personal, though not necessarily happy. It purports to argue that truth lies in the need to believe in illusions such as free will, that survival resides in the need to love despite the failures of love, and that objective history rests on the need for collective silence over the certainty of fallacy.

This is a study about Tony Garnett, forty-year actor, story editor and then producer, within the context of British television, film and Hollywood cinema. This chapter attempts to describe, explicate and analyse Garnett's work. Garnett has been responsible for a considerable variety of work, including some of the most influential plays and films in British television history. Garnett is one of a small group of television producers who have helped to define what being a television producer is. He is particularly hostile to ‘auteurism’, insisting that drama production is a collective practice, artistically and socially. Auteurism in its crudest form explains the creation of ‘significant’ drama as the product of a single, authorial consciousness. Garnett has worked in a variety of production contexts across the decades, and his role as producer has altered in the process. Garnett's authorial signature is intimately connected to a realist politics and aesthetics, which is still the best way of describing the spine that runs though his work. Realism, with its various qualifiers— social, magical, hyper—and its near-synonyms (notably naturalism), is a much-debated term in cultural criticism.

This chapter characterizes youth identity in the GDR during the 1980s. It evaluates the extent to which young people in the 1980s accepted and rejected the Socialist Unity Party's (SED) patriotic programme and examines the way in which patriotic behaviour evolved during this decade in the face of intensified propaganda. The analysis reveals that identity formation amongst young people in the GDR was clearly a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon and that in many ways, it was the elements outside state control which gained most influence over young people's attitudes.

Research has highlighted that a feminist presence is often critical to bringing about gendered changes within political parties, particularly vis-à-vis campaigns for women's increased descriptive representation. This chapter explores the extent to which feminists and feminist attitudes are influential or marginalised within the Liberal Democrats, a party which has a masculine bias embedded in its culture, organisation, and ideology. It addresses four themes: the level of feminist presence within the party; attitudes towards issues surrounding women's descriptive representation; the perceived effectiveness of the strategies adopted by the party to increase women's representation; and where the party might be located within a typological framework of feminist parties. Data from the British Election Study 2005 are included, where appropriate, to offer cross-party comparison of women's attitudes towards increasing the number of women MPs. Interviews conducted with Liberal Democrat women revealed nervousness amongst some respondents regarding the conceptualisation of feminism. This chapter also looks at Lovenduski's three-tiered strategic approach, that political parties adopt to increase women's descriptive representation: equality rhetoric, equality promotion, and equality guarantees.

This chapter suggests that the Tribunals' priorities and preconceptions, influenced both by growing self-awareness of their powers and responsibilities, and by the developing needs of the military and local economy, shifted conspicuously during the course of the conscription period. In Northamptonshire, idiosyncratic distinctions between certain Tribunals are readily discernible, and these often determined the likelihood of an application being heard sympathetically. The diversity and relative strength of personalities were potentially major factors in setting policy. The two major employers in Northamptonshire—agriculture and boot and shoe—were partially protected by certified occupations lists but increasingly subjected to combing-out. The Military Service Tribunal was envisaged as a safety valve for the anticipated grievances of a society unused to, and suspicious of, coercive recruitment.

This chapter looks at how the few quotations—and occasionally, sustained allusions—challenge ideas of origin, ending and depth in Novellas and Texts for Nothing. It focuses on English and French titles and quotations, which are prioritised according to the critical focus of the argument instead of the chronology of composition. It considers the calming effects of classic works and shows how the ‘sky’, ‘earth’ and the ‘sea’ are secondary elements that ‘create the armosphere’.

This chapter summarises the approach (framework) adopted for the research work: it looks at the importance of the Press in Scotland, England and France, and identifies the sources (which newspapers) in the three ‘nations’. How are foreigners, strangers, looked at in the Press? It justifies the choice of three capitals and four clubs: the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow, Paris Saint-Germain in France and Arsenal in London. It emphasises the importance of means through which supporters identify with their team: through a player, his personality; through the style of the team; through the emblems of a team (jersey, logo, stadium). It also looks at the research methods used (interviews, limited participating observation)