Football fandom is a regular, ritualistic performance that takes place every weekend over the course of a season. These performances are recounted in conversation, social media and traditional media throughout the week. The performances help locate the individual within a broader collective, but also structure their interactions with others. Through the collective ritual of fandom, the ultras elevate themselves into a state of flow that brings the gathering of individual fans into one collective working in unison.

Chapter 5 considers how the poet of Christ and Satan portrays Satan’s attempts to disrupt Christ’s authority in both heavenly and earthly territories. I approach the poem through the liturgical traditions of the Rogationtide festival, when Anglo-Saxons participated in three days of ‘perambulations’ meant to demarcate communal boundaries. The poem’s eccentric chronology and bizarre conclusion – in which Christ forces Satan to measure the ymbhwyrft (‘circuit’) of hell with his hands – can be understood as an inversion of Rogation rituals whereby Satan parodies his own condition of lordlessness as he circuits the spaces of hell. By situating his poem within the framework of liturgical and localised practice, the poet appeals to an audience readily familiar with the primary goals of Rogationtide, namely, the purification of earthly boundaries in the interest of making oneself a suitable heir to otherworldly geographies.

By the Middle Ages the power of the Church was such that it was able to forbid Christian knights from using certain weapons as hateful to God. In fact, the feudal knights were aware of what they knew as 'the law of chivalry'. The 'law of chivalry' was a customary code of chivalrous conduct that controlled the knight's affairs, which was enforced by arbitrators specially appointed or, in England and France, by Courts of Chivalry. Contrary to the Geneva Law is the law concerning means and methods of conducting actual military operations in armed conflict. This is known as Hague Law, although it had its origin in a conference of fifteen European states called in Brussels at the invitation of Czar Alexander II of Russia. Another instrument that seems to have been applied as expressing accepted law, even though it never received a single ratification, is the Declaration of London.

This chapter provides a thorough introduction to an edited book that comprises fifteen chapters exploring the power of pragmatism in relation to social research and the production of knowledge. The chapter outlines the historical development of the pragmatist tradition and its core ideas before exploring its application to social research, past and present. We make a strong case for pragmatic social research, outline its key components and highlight its implications for research practice and outcomes. In the penultimate section, we address some of the long-standing concerns about pragmatism in order to provide critical context to the chapters in the rest of the book. The final section introduces the structure of the book and summarises the substantive chapters that follow.

In the vicinity of a number of different issues and contexts ranging across the modern academic institution, the author suggests an intractable problem of disorientation in the university that nevertheless provides the conditions for certain kinds of leverage to occur. In 'The art of memoires', the second in a series of three lectures given in memory of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida draws attention to de Man's strong reading of Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Aesthetics. For de Man allegory remains, both 'before and after Hegel', in a way that makes possible the concept and the construction of history. Thus, Derrida tells us, one cannot simply 'rely on something like history', the concept of which is in fact an effect of the allegorical, 'to account for this "allegoricity"'.

Chapter 3 investigates how the notions of justice and testimony come to bear on Russian documentary theatre practice through analysis of a series of productions that use either real or imagined trial transcripts as the basis for their performance texts. At its center is analysis of the play Chas vosemnadtsat (One Hour Eighteen Minutes), which uses verbatim and constructed texts to stage an imagined trial of the prison and medical staff involved in the final days of attorney Sergei Magnitsky. Through its analysis of One Hour Eighteen Minutes, this chapter investigates the interdependent nature of reenacting the past and the performance of justice in the Russian documentary theatre repertoire.

Through four ‘case studies’ this chapter identifies behaviours, attitudes, and representations which hint at the emergence of a new figure, and suggest significant moments in the transition from the nineteenth-century’s stereotyping of the habitual drunkard to the twentieth-century’s Existential drinker. Mary Thompson was a habitual drunkard discussed in a Parliamentary Report who rejected all attempts to make her respectable, preferring to live the life of a drunkard; George Eliot’s tale ‘Janet’s Repentance’ provides an unusually sympathetic religious/philosophical apprehension of somebody determined to drink; Zola’s novel L’Assommoir describes the drinker’s response to the modern, alienating city; van Gogh’s painting Night Café at Arles, along with a letter he wrote to his brother, introduces a self which is perched dangerously close to ruin, transformation, or oblivion. The figures encountered here, both real and fictional, are largely ‘ordinary’ people, rather than (Romantic) ‘others’ or self-avowed ‘philosopher-drinkers’, and offer glimpses of the themes and representations which in the twentieth century contribute to the figure of the Existential drinker that is discussed in the following chapters.

This chapter begins by outlining the events leading up to the Peterloo Massacre on 16th August 1819 and its immediate aftermath with a particular focus on the response in the radical and loyalist press. By combining eye-witness accounts with contemporaneous reporting, the significance of Peterloo at the time can clearly be recognised. This chapter then focuses on the radical press, both in the 1790s, including Thomas Spence’s Pigs’ Meat and the 1810s, including the Manchester Observer, Medusa, Wooler’s Black Dwarf, Hunt’s Examiner and Carlile’s Republican, The Cap of Liberty, The Theological and Political Comet and The Briton, in which many of the ballads and songs were printed. Finally, this introduction discusses the place of the broadside ballad in vernacular culture from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century and the appropriation of it by antiquarians in the eighteenth century.

The introduction outlines the rationale for selecting these five women: Edna O’Brien, Sinéad O’Connor, Bernadette McAliskey, Nuala O’Faolain and Anne Enright. It discusses the ways in which women in Ireland have been understood as both symbols of the nation and key agents of modernisation. It explores the question of whether Ireland has been exceptionally oppressive to women. It considers current conditions for women in Ireland and argues for the significance of the contribution made to Irish feminism by innovative individuals such as the subjects of this book.

In the disastrous 1974 remake of Brief Encounter, almost every aspectgoes wrong. The casting of glamorous international stars reduces thesense of ordinary people facing emotional conflict, and thestructural change also undermines this. The short gay take on theoriginal, Flames of Passion, offered a wordless version, which foundsome festival favour but not general release.

Recent scholarship has shown that an Old English riddle’s description may at times relate not only to its solution but also to an unspoken metaphor, lending the riddle an underlying coherence beyond the literal answer. While it has long been agreed that the solution to the first Exeter Book riddle(s) is a meteorological event, a natural phenomenon, here the ‘wind’ is described in terms akin to the workings and movements of the human mind (OE mod or hyge) within and without the body. Therefore, OE mod provides the unspoken metaphor for the opening riddle(s). This chapter contends that the human mind is not detached or divided off from nature in these riddles, but participates in the violent moods of the storm. Like one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, the storm is so massively distributed across time and space that it cannot be grasped, and the power of the wind destabilises dualisms such as human–nonhuman, self–other, internal–external, forcing us to question whether the mod is inside or outside, apart from or a part of, the storm.

This chapter discusses the author's experience in dealing with W. H. Auden's works. She was introduced to Auden's poetry in her O-level English literature class, South London, in the 1962-1963 school years. The author found Derek Attridge's theory of poetry more legible than Auden's because of her own education, which, despite its being Latin-less, was closer in time to Attridge. Auden was in the primary school classrooms the author inhabited between 1974 and 1982 because of the long extracts she taped from Geoffrey Summerfield's Junior Voices 1-4. From 1991 onwards, she used lines from 'Homage to Clio' as an epigraph many, many times. She did not want to know what Auden really meant; she wanted to know what the poem told her about the thing she did: history; about history's quiddity, its beingness in the world, its social and cultural function; what it is.

Like Southall, Bradford was faced in 1960–62 with a sudden influx of Asian immigrants, the great majority of whom hailed from Pakistan. This wave of immigration did cause some early panic, with the outbreak of smallpox in 1962. This chapter studies the introduction of bussing locally, which took place without a real white mobilisation in favour of it. Dispersal in Bradford was a fairly smooth affair compared with Southall. It was hailed by members of the Wilson government as a model type of dispersal, particularly because the city proved efficient at gathering statistics about immigrant children, but archives reveal that, as elsewhere, there were many shortcomings to the operation of dispersal locally, which had a detrimental effect on immigrant children.