This chapter addresses the reality – and ‘unreality’ – of death in the years surrounding the ‘Great War’ of 1914–18. The devastation wrought by the war, the scale of the conflict and the types of death it caused challenged conceptions of ‘the real’, inflecting it with perceptions of the ‘unreal’. This chapter analyses plays written during and immediately after the First World War that represent death in a ‘fantastical’ manner and on a grand scale, abstracting it. Three plays are discussed at length: Vernon Lee’s allegorical satire Satan the Waster (1920), Ernst Toller’s expressionist drama The Transfiguration (1919) and a section of Karl Kraus’s monumental documentary drama The Last Days of Mankind (1922). The chapter shows how these dramatists strove to capture something of the ‘shock’ of the war – its disruption of the status quo and conventional understanding of mortality – through their depictions of death.

Since at least the middle of the twentieth century, the extent of the global ecological crisis, latterly labelled as ecocide, has become starkly clear, but political, cultural and ethical responses have been minimal. What responses there have been remain ineffectively stuck within the reductive logics of modern approaches to knowledge production and application. This chapter seeks to set out why pragmatist, non-representational and anti-representational approaches offer some hope for creative and effective responses, not only to the ecological crisis but also to the wider crisis of modern knowledge. I argue that these alternative forms of knowledge-practice are ecological in their embracing of process and interconnectivity, and that they offer forms of locally articulated, creative, radical incrementalism within the mesh-works of collective life. The chapter highlights the strength of pragmatic ways of thinking that unify thinking and doing, and the importance of making creative interventions in and beyond the academy.

Traditionally, international law was divided into the law of war and the law of peace, with no intermediate stage between. When hostilities began, usually following a declaration of war, and non-parties to the conflict were held by the belligerents to be subject to the duties of, and they claimed the rights pertaining to, neutrals, war was recognised and the law of war came into operation. As with the situation under customary law, it is irrelevant whether the conflict is in accordance with the obligations of Hague Convention III, the Pact of Paris or the Charter of the United Nations. Even if the conflict does not amount to war in the legal sense of that term, there is nothing in international law, other than human rights conventions, preventing a country imposing restrictions upon the freedom of residents possessing adverse-party nationality.

In Dublin there were strikes at the Jeyes factory in Finglas, a Ringsend construction site and Royal Irish Ltd in Glasnevin. On Sunday 30 January 1972, there were few in the Republic who disagreed with Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) MP John Hume, that the Parachute Regiment had carried out 'cold-blooded mass murder; another Sharpeville; another Bloody Sunday'. There were reports of attacks on British citizens living in the Republic and allegations that 'mafia-like methods' were used to force people to close their businesses. Some news outlets reported Derry's James Connolly Republican Club's call for an 'immediate general strike (to) bring the country to a standstill'. Bloody Sunday, the president of the GAA Pat Fanning asserted, had 'drawn the Irish people together. The point of no return has been reached and passed.'

This chapter engages with interdisciplinary scholarship on legal systems and revenge in order to argue that the Western, like other genres which seek to provide justifications for violence, has informed and been influenced by paradigmatic shifts in the American legal system. A fuller investigation into the style of the gunslinger’s vengeance, this chapter argues, suggests a rather different relationship between cultural products and legal apparatuses than that suggested by critics who portray the Western revenger as a reactionary figure. The Western gunslinger is presented here instead as a progressive figure by reading the cultural work of the Western genre as a rhetorical thinking through of a set of interconnected conflicts and inconsistencies in American legal paradigms related to justifiable homicide and gun possession.

The rape affects the soul of Tarquin and the body of Lucrece, and their antagonistic relationship that has been established throughout comes to its climax. Shakespeare expresses this relationship linguistically through parallelism and chiasmus which lends the epyllion iconic and performative qualities through the dynamics based on these formal structures. The opposition between the characters forms a unity. The action taking place between Tarquin and Lucrece becomes a reversed (and even perverted) love tragedy: lust encounters chastity and destroys it. At the same time, Tarquin’s evil action leads to political change and the institution of the Roman Republic. The underlying allegory connects poetry and drama with narrative as well as inner debates and the soliloquy in this drama of the soul.

The Australian Fulbright Program was implemented after the election of the Menzies’ Liberal Party government. As Australia’s Cold War deepened the Menzies government signed other treaties with the United States, establishing the ANZUS Alliance. Administration of the program of educational exchange had to be established amid attempts at political influence and resistance from university staff who still looked to England for prestige and career advancement. The terms of the Australian Fulbright Agreement ensured a sound foundation, more autonomy meant the appointment of Australian staff to administer the program and who understood how to reach the Australian university researchers to participate.

This chapter first historicises securitisation theory and situates the theory in the wider field of international security. It shows that securitisation theory was innovative in the sense of challenging the state-centricity and over-militarised nature of international security during the Cold War. The chapter then proceeds with a brief discourse analysis of speeches made by George W. Bush and Barack Obama in relation to Islam and the role of Muslims in the war on terror. It argues that Bush and Obama articulated Islam as a ‘peaceful religion’ and that terrorists ‘hijacked its peaceful teachings’. Even Donald Trump sought to reassure the American public that his executive order banning citizens from Muslim-majority countries was ‘not a Muslim ban’. As a result, the chapter demonstrates that this presents a challenge to securitisation theory. The last section engages with the burgeoning post-Copenhagen School literature, which has raised important concerns about securitisation theory, and concludes by addressing the implications for the puzzle of the book.

This chapter explores the role death played in the cultural imaginary of the fin de siècle, when spiritualism and other death-related pursuits were in vogue, particularly in bohemian Paris. Spiritualists claimed to be able to contact the dead, thus proving that death did not mean the end of life but simply marked a transformation from a corporeal to a non-corporeal state of being. This chapter connects spiritualism to representations of death in symbolist drama and theatre, outlining how symbolist dramaturgy and mise-en-scène made it possible to ‘admit’ death as paradoxical presence in theatre – as something that could be sensed but not readily defined or contained. Short plays discussed include Rachilde’s Madame La Mort (1891), Charles van Lerberghe’s The Night-Comers (1889), Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Intruder (1890) and Leonid Andreyev’s Requiem (1916). The chapter ends with an analysis of W.B. Yeats’s symbolist-inspired play Purgatory (1938).

Achilles Tatius takes his characters through a range of adventures as they move around the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike the otherworldly pastoral of Daphnis and Chloe, Achilles Tatius's Leukippe and Kleitophon is a sexually explicit and ostensibly very human study of the harsh effects of misfortune and interruption on the course of true love. In representing the rhetorical features of his romance as a painting, Achilles Tatius offers a unique perspective on the properties of ecphrasis as a narrative device. The earliest European publication of Achilles Tatius was Ludovico Annibale della Croce's Latin translation of Books 5-8, Narrationis Amatoriae Fragmentum. The distinctive representations of Leukippe and Kleitophon by della Croce, François de Belleforest, William Burton and Anthony Hodges demonstrate that each has his preferred method for dealing with morality, rhetorical display and textual fidelity.

The Amherst embassy to China has long been viewed as a major diplomatic failure in Britain’s early relations with China. This chapter concentrates on the greatly overlooked aspect of the Amherst mission – the delegation’s discoveries in China after the official proceedings were concluded. Since the embassy was given unprecedented freedom of movement during its four-month return journey from Beijing to Canton, British observers were able to explore the interior of China and to communicate more fully with the Chinese government and people than ever before. As a consequence, the Amherst embassy not only provided valuable first-hand observations which increased and improved Britain’s knowledge of China, but developed the view that the Qing government was the chief obstacle to the progress of Chinese civilisation and to the general welfare of the Chinese people. These important perceptions laid the foundation for future changes in Sino-British relations and led, indirectly, to the outbreak of the Opium War.

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar.These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

Education was another contentious policy area during the 1970s. The Conservative Party essentially moved from a position in which standards and choice were at the centre of its approach to education – but it had gone with the grain by expanding the number of comprehensive schools in Britain – to one in which it felt even more strongly about standards and choice, and was more sceptical about the need to impose comprehensives on unwilling parents and pupils, but still did not, or could not, commit to seriously undoing many of the most important changes. The party therefore looked for alternative ways in which standards and choice could be improved, once the types of school from which parents would have to choose was less of a factor. This chapter examines those alternative policies, including an assisted places scheme, educational vouchers and a Parents’ Charter. It shows again that short-term political factors often had the greatest immediate impact on Conservative policy.