The conclusion summarises the key elements that shaped attempts to build peace in Northern Ireland and highlights the value of a common approach to dialogue and negotiation as well as the need for a coherent strategy to support political aspiration and objectives.

The introduction begins by outlining trends in studies of authorial careers and authorship, which, owing to the influence of New Historicism, have mostly focused on the ways in which early modern authors created themselves during their own lifetime. It then provides an overview of milestone publishing events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (including Tottel’s Miscellany, Jonson’s Workes and the Shakespeare folios) and moves on to argue that authorial careers did not always end with their deaths, as both readers and publishers would retrospectively seek to evaluate an author’s complete works and produce definitive editions. This retrospective view on the works was often accompanied by a desire to put them in a logical-seeming sequence that mirrored the author’s life and to supplement the text with a prefatory life of the author and/or a portrait.

The films of Howard Hawks do two things best. One, they can capture moments and instances that no other means but the cinema can do as well, and in the cinema, few can do that as well as Hawks: a movement, a glance, an action, the immediacy of a gesture and their direct honesty. Two, is to tell a story well: directly, simply, coherently, legibly, to take an audience with you, making perceptions and understandings clear and secure. Montage for Hawks has two distinct but not contradictory functions. The first is to highlight and the second is to move forward. For Hawks, montage was not a time for improvisation, play, unlike shooting or working with actors and preparing the script. The best moments of the film had to be found in these pursuits before montage. Besides, mise en scène, for Hawks was already an understanding of ordering of shots.

The freedom of movement within the EU continues to be a hotly contested topic in British politics. This chapter argues that this debate is closely connected to the enlargement of the European Union – most notably the ‘Eastern enlargement’ in 2004. The author explores how the accession of ten new members was discussed by Conservative Party leaders in Parliament in the years preceding the Brexit referendum, asking if EU member states and their citizens were framed as part of a new ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson), or as culturally different outsiders. The analysis reveals that while the support for EU enlargement endured throughout the researched years, Tory party leaders, even when in opposition, exclusively emphasised the economic benefits of enlargement for Britain. This only changed in 2011 when UKIP had successfully put immigration on the agenda. Subsequently, a major shift occurred from highlighting benefits to the national interest to calls for stricter border control and active discouragement of migration.

Joseph Losey's world is often inhospitable to women, but this does not necessarily mean that his films condone this hostility. Most of his work directly explores and addresses the ideological interpellation of women by analysing the cultural assumptions that both construct and perpetuate it. This is specifically true of the three films discussed in this chapter: A Doll's House, The Romantic Englishwoman and Steaming. These works explore and celebrate women's will-to-power and also its inevitable, almost fateful circumscription by the ideological forces of patriarchal capitalism. More seriously, in the case of The Romantic Englishwoman and Steaming, these forces recruit the creative medium of art itself, foreclosing Losey's usual Nietzschean escape hatch by co-opting the imaginary into the dominant discursive formation. In A Doll's House, Losey transforms a somewhat contrived and simplistic plea for the emancipation of women into a more insightful, albeit more pessimistic, examination of bourgeois hegemony itself.

The title of Leos Carax's Pola X was an acronym of the title in French of Herman Melville's novel of 1852, Pierre, or The Ambiguities, that is, Pierre, ou les ambiguïtés. As for the X, it could be the marker to represent the family name which the character Isabel/Isabelle is denied she being the possible secret progeny of an extra-marital relationship; in this way it could stand for the family secret, therefore an element so central to the naturalist tradition in late nineteenth-century fiction. A combination of three texts of Gilles Deleuze yield a unique insight into naturalism in cinema and help to gain an understanding of Carax's concerns in Pola X. In Pola X, the quest for total fusion is complexified and the world on-screen rendered all the more catastrophic by means of its incestuous aspect.

Like its literary inspiration, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's autobiographical 1866 novella The Gambler, Karel Reisz's uncompromising character study takes us to the heart of gambling addiction, the illegal, mob-run gambling dens of 1970s Manhattan. The novel's Aleksey Ivanovich is now Axel Freed, who lectures on Dostoyevsky's nascent existentialism and will-to-power as a philosophical explanation for his own obsession with risk and chance. Dog Soldiers, Reisz's ambitious follow-up to James Toback's more intimate character study, expands The Gambler's mutual corruption between 'internal' and 'external' milieux to the broader historical and psychological trauma of the Vietnam War and its counter-cultural corollary, the CIA-controlled South-East Asian heroin trade. After his return from Saigon, Robert Stone, the novel's author, became a writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where he began work on the manuscript that would eventually become Dog Soldiers and, retitled Who'll Stop the Rain for the American market, the basis for Reisz's second Hollywood release.

This chapter explores Marcel Carné's involvement with the film industry under German occupation, and his creation of two classics, before moving on to consider his first postwar film, Les Portes de la nuit, which deals with the aftermath of war. It challenges the usual break that is assumed between Carné's wartime films and his post-Liberation work, while exploring his complex engagement with this troubled period of French history. A brief consideration of Les Visiteurs du soir's production background immediately highlights ways in which the wartime context affected Carné's filmmaking. It highlights some clear departures from Carné's work of the 1930s. The chapter shows how Carné's approach to filmmaking went through significant changes at the coming of war. It argues that a key aspect of Carné's identity as a filmmaker is that he could balance the demands of 'art' and 'entertainment'.

Contemporary societies around the globe are characterised by the difficulties and discoveries inherent in trying to co-ordinate the functions of discrete social systems, each of which is steered by a unique code. Social systems have been in existence as long as there have been human societies. They have been managed, to greater and lesser extents, by a wide variety of power structures operative within diverse forms of statehood. Politically constituted modern states had to perform and continue to perform this immense task of co-ordinating social systems. Governments and state ministries have tended to try to do so without paying sufficient attention to the details of systemic coding or historical patterns of inter-systemic communication, thereby mismanaging the processes involved in many cases. States are still desperately trying to channel systems on the basis of strategic decisions stemming from informal assemblies of ministerial elites, consultancy firms, lobbies, and what in effect amount to different kinds of private clients. These are usually vantage points with little theoretical or social proximity to the specific systems in question, thus reinforcing the patterns of governance that misdirect systems whilst simultaneously coercively integrating citizens. Individual systems cannot significantly enhance their respective capacities for self-steering without knowledge about the functioning of neighbouring systems. Critical Theory and Sociological Theory investigates the extent to which this particular knowledge process is changing, and if systems increasingly require the input of citizens capable of thinking and acting more flexibly than binary codes permit. Therein lies the epistemological and political significance of the distinction between mediated unity and mediated non-identity. Adorno’s dictum that ‘the critique of knowledge is social critique and vice versa’ can be fruitfully elaborated today with this in mind.