Discussing the background of the gay rights movement in Ireland, this chapter opens on 24 July 1975, when David Norris, Chairman of the first national gay rights organisation, appeared on national television to discuss why gay people should have equality. This chapter describes how Ireland was then the last remaining member of the European Economic Community to retain criminal penalties against male homosexual activity.

This chapter explores whether stylistics, a critical approach, is really a form of critical theory at all. It presents a historical account of stylistics with emphasis on critical practice rather than critical theory. Stylistics developed in the twentieth century and its aim is to show how the technical linguistic features of a literary work, such as the grammatical structure of its sentences, contribute to its overall meanings and effects. It is the modern version of the ancient discipline known as 'rhetoric'. The chapter describes the specific differences between conventional close reading and stylistics, as well as the ambitions of stylistics. A STOP and THINK section suggests readers to make use of a few basic reference tools in understanding stylistics. The chapter includes some critical activities of stylistic critics and presents three examples of stylistics, each of which uses some technical aspect of language in critical interpretation.

The chapter discusses the place of human rights between 1945 and the early 1970s. It suggests that human rights entered American foreign policy only in the 1970s, as a consequence of transformations taking place at the transnational, international and national levels. It argues that Congress played a major role in introducing human rights into American foreign policy, as a reaction to Kissinger’s amoral foreign policy. However, far from becoming a unifying principle for American foreign policy, the surge on human rights reflected a double-headed and contradictory interest in human rights. To liberals and “new internationalists”, such as Donald Fraser, human rights should become the fundamental tenet of a new foreign policy for a more interdependent and global international system. To conservatives and “neoconservatives”, such as Henry Jackson, human rights come to be identified with an ideological weapon to fight bipolar détente and relaunch containment.

Focusing on Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI) and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (RIE), this chapter shows how voluntary hospitals were influential locations in developing and disseminating the medical advances of the Victorian era. At the same time, middle-class ideals to restore the able-bodied from temporary illness or impairment to productive industry led voluntary hospitals in Scotland to reject those who were perceived as incurable or disabled from working and therefore unable to support themselves and their families. This perspective of worthiness enacted at GRI and RIE reflected hardening societal attitudes towards the working classes that emerged during the nineteenth century among the middle classes of both England and Scotland. Ultimately, the disillusionment of early and mid-Victorian reformers with their failed efforts to restore individuals with impairments ultimately saw the reclassification of many working-class invalids as refractory, unfit for the charity of voluntary hospitals, and incapable of restoration to industry and usefulness, constructing impairment as discrediting for generations to come.

The death of Mao ended the Cultural Revolution and opened the way for Deng Xiaoping to undertake much-needed reform. Post-Mao economic reform has pulled millions out of poverty and enabled China to catch up with Western countries/economies. But this has been accomplished without political reform, which has led to a series problems that will continue to plague the CCP.

This chapter develops the idea of the importance of English constitutional history as a link between English nationalism, Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere. It argues that England’s constitutional development is the fulcrum that links English nationalism, Euroscepticism and the Anglosphere and serves as a point of commonality for all three ideologies. The process of disengaging from the European Union was bound up with debates about England’s constitutional development, ties to the Anglosphere and England’s uncertain constitutional position within a changing United Kingdom. To illustrate this argument this chapter looks at the debate surrounding the re-publication of Our Island Story in 2005 and the subsequent political support for its constitutional narrative as a means of cohering Britain and Britishness. By simultaneously suggesting an alternative (global) future for the United Kingdom, Eurosceptic Anglospherists in England articulated arguments about Britain’s place in Europe in English national frames that in turn linked Britain with the Anglosphere.

May-Fourth intellectuals/revolutionaries blamed Confucianism for China’s problems but the ancient philosophy now lives in harmony with modernity. This chapter takes a look at China’s transformation from the unique perspective of sports, the arts and the family. A century of revolution and reform has seen the modernisation of these aspects of life in China; they teach us great lessons about change and continuity.

Obscured by the neologism ‘Brexit’ was a complex interplay of elite projects and popular grievances that combined through the device of a referendum to start the process of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. The place of the Anglosphere in the referendum campaign illustrated the way that Brexit could be profitably understood as a nationalist project that sought to realign the United Kingdom’s place in the global order framed within powerful English national narratives. These narratives operated to legitimise a significant rupture in the British, European and global order and sought to provide a reassuring sense of continuity (in England). With Brexiteers insisting that Britain’s EU past was merely an interregnum in its hitherto global story, allied with popular grievances over immigration that were strongest in the least ‘global’ parts of England, what we can identify as English nationalism played a major part in reshaping British, European and global politics.

This chapter furthers the development of the analytical framework by focusing on the relationship between reliance systems and exploitation. It reworks Iris Marion Young’s five faces of oppression for use with reliance systems and the spatial contract. These five faces are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence.

This chapter begins by explaining the rise of English studies by indicating what higher education was like in England until the first quarter of the nineteenth century. A STOP and THINK section includes multiple choice questions that indicate the scope of this chapter. F. D. Maurice regarded literature as the particular property of the middle class and the expression of their values. For him the middle class represents the essence of Englishness so middle-class education should be specifically English. The chapter presents a list of the values and beliefs which formed the English subject's half-hidden curriculum. It sketches out a characteristic liberal humanist reading of Edgar Allan Poe's tale 'The Oval Portrait'. The growth of critical theory in the post-war period seems to comprise a series of 'waves', each associated with a specific decade, and all aimed against the liberal humanist consensus.

Postcolonial criticism emerged as a distinct category only in the 1990s. One significant effect of postcolonial criticism is to further undermine the universalist claims once made on behalf of literature by liberal humanist critics. The ancestry of postcolonial criticism can be traced to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, and voicing what might be called 'cultural resistance' to France's African empire. Reading literature with the perspective of 'Orientalism' in mind would make readers critically aware of how Yeats in his two 'Byzantium' poems provides an image of Istanbul, the Eastern capital of the former Roman Empire. A STOP and THINK section shows how postcolonial criticism draws attention to issues of cultural difference in literary texts. It also describes some activities of postcolonial critics and presents the essay by Edward Said on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park as an example of postcolonial criticism.