After the mid-1960s, Karel Reisz made a parallel withdrawal into examining the nature of the committed artist, particularly an art that comes into inevitable conflict with its necessary psychological corollaries, love and death. The biographies of Isadora Duncan and Patsy Cline are haunted by their tragically premature deaths and both women successfully fought to revolutionize extremely traditionalist artistic fields and both struggled in vain to find an equitable balance between career, family and healthy sexual desire. Reisz's biopics Isadora and Sweet Dreams were based on these two women. In Isadora Reisz transcends the materiality of death and moves into an image of immanence through his symbolic focus on the dancer's identification with water. However, in Sweet Dreams he regresses the narrative back from the distanced professionalism of the Kansas City concert and Patsy's very public death to a direct and sensual link with her husband.

This chapter explores two traditions of realist film theory and cinema, namely, ‘intuitionist realist tradition’ and the ‘nineteenth-century Lukácsian tradition’.It examines the rejection of the supposed distinction between a phenomenological and a realist Kracauer, arguing that phenomenology and realism can be discerned within both Kracauer's early and late writings, as part of a sustained critique of mainstream cinema as a force for both the reinforcement of abstraction and dominant ideology, and the liberation of the subject. Realist film theory and cinema attempt to reconnect some gaps, in particular, those that have emerged between categories such as ‘realism’, ‘anti-realism’ and ‘modernism’. The chapter focuses on the substantive assessment of the shared ideas that link the three main theorists within the classical intuitionist realist tradition and of the relationship between realist film theory and relevant aspects of contemporary film theory.

The Franco-Swedish coproduction Au hasard Balthazar, released in 1966, is the most complex and baffling, but also for a great many critics the most thoroughly 'Bressonian', of its maker's works. Jean-Luc Godard, in a characteristically pre-postmodern Cahiers article ('Testament') juxtaposing confected Bressonian remarks with citations from Merleau-Ponty, has his composite Bressonian persona say: 'il y a comme une essence de la mort qui est toujours à l'horizon de mes pensées'. Of no Bresson film is this truer than of Mouchette, his second Bernanos adaptation, shot in late 1966 and released the following year. Marvin Zeman's claim that Robert Bresson was heading towards suicide finds more support in Mouchette that in any other of the director's works. Like Journal, Mouchette (produced by Anatole Dauman) is set in a spiritually and materially impoverished village community.

Chapter 2 examines the professionalisation of the publishing industry and the first generation of ‘professional’ poets. It focuses on a peculiar phenomenon of the 1590s, Robert Greene’s death in 1592 and his textual afterlife as a semi-fictionalised professional poet character and cause of the Harvey–Nashe quarrel. Due to his reputation as a ‘hack’ writer, much Greene criticism has focused on literary quality (as well as the apparent insult to Shakespeare in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte), although recently there have been more varied approaches to Greene. This chapter, however, is primarily interested in Greene’s afterlife as a biographical phenomenon. It argues that Greene’s notoriety as a prodigal scholar and a professional – if negatively perceived – poet figure is for the most part a posthumous construct through his appearances as a ghostly character figuring in other people’s works. This involved a gradual fashioning of Greene’s body of works into a suitable life narrative by other figures involved in the professionalisation of the English publishing industry during the 1590s. Vitally, however, this fashioned identity established the possibility of newly close relation between the nature of literary output and personal life.

Part six describes the secular government of the city of Genoa. In three chapters, this part recounts the various regimes by which the city of Genoa has been ruled, presents basic principles of good governance, and explains their benefits.

This chapter argues that the institution of monarchy (and individual sovereigns) occupied a key but hitherto undervalued position in the process of decolonisation in Asia after the Second World War. Anti-colonial nationalists challenged many of the principles of hereditary rule, and the status of sovereigns, their families, advisers and courts. The future place of the kings, maharajas and sultans in the British, French and Dutch ‘protected states’ posed a central question in the period leading up to and following decolonisation, and questions were raised, as well, about monarchies in already independent Japan and Thailand. Some dynasties have survived, even with altered rights and powers, though others were overturned, often by post-independence revolutions or constitutional changes. The old colonial monarchies of Britain, the Netherlands and Japan meanwhile also had to refashion themselves in light of the loss of empire, in the case of the British crown attempting to find a new role for itself in the context of the Commonwealth.

Part nine offers moral advice on domestic matters. Chapters one to four addresses relations between husbands and wives; the fifth discusses relations between parents and children; and the sixth deals with relations between masters and servants or slaves.

This chapter discusses the early films of Lindsay Anderson for Richard Sutcliffe Ltd. These films include Meet the Pioneers, Idlers that Work, Three Installations and Trunk Conveyor. In addition to episodes of Robin Hood for television, Anderson also wrote and directed a twenty-minute film Foot and Mouth made for the Ministry of Agriculture during the 1955 epidemic. Anderson also directed films influenced by Humphrey Jennings. These films include Wakefield Express (1952), Thursday's Children (1953), O Dreamland (1953) and Every Day Except Christmas (1957).

After La lune dans le caniveau, Jean-Jacques Beineix worked on a script for a vampire film, based on the novel La Vierge de glace by Marc Behm. This project, for which Beineix bought the rights, and has continued to pay them annually, was shelved because American producers felt that the budget of $20 million was too high. Beineix worked on the adaptation, this time alone, over a period of two months in Saint Cyprien, near Gruissan, on the Languedoc coast. Gruissan is the site of the 1930s beach houses on stilts which are one of the more startling images of the film. Disenchanted with his experience of the producers of his two previous films, he had created his own company, Cargo Films, in November 1984, and tried to associate with some Swiss producers for 37°22 le matin.

The Petrarchan love sonnet and the figure of the sonneteer kept appearing in seventeenth-century plays (generally comedies) long after the fourteen-line poem is usually said to have waned. The plays discuss the sonnet both as a poetic form and as a tool for social advancement; the staging of sonneteering as a mercantile activity practised by incompetent sonneteers (most usually amateur poets from the country gentry) appears as a means to reflect on poetic language. Sonnets are deemed to be superior to ballads according to a hierarchy of poetic genres which reflects the social hierarchy. The evidence gathered in the wide array of seventeenth-century plays studied suggests that after the ‘sonnet craze’, when received poets in the canon had moved on to anti-Petrarchan poetics, or poetics which had little to do with the Petrarchan model, more ordinary rhymers kept on imitating the Canzoniere, and still claimed they composed sonnets. The continuous stream of attacks against the sonnet therefore also testifies to the deep mark it left upon early modern English poetry.

Literal readings of terms such as centralisation and de-centralisation can lead to misinterpretations of the issues involved when assessing the fibre and composition of legitimacy and statehood. When applied to modern states, for example, centralisation and the division of powers are mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory or antithetical. Similarly, social systems are dispersed and nonetheless in steady communication with one another through a wide range of mediations. One of the crucial points for this chapter and for the book as a whole is that social systems are not joined according to a model of mediated unity. Their relations can be compared instead to a constellation of constituent elements that transmit and receive coded communication. At this historical juncture it can be said that inter-systemic social communication proceeds according to the dialectics of mediated non-identity. The dialectics of mediated non-identity imply a qualitatively different model of statehood than the dialectics of mediated unity. However inchoately, it is a model of social statehood in tune with the potentially constitutional dimensions of social systems.