This chapter examines a range of Canadian Métis writer Gregory Scofield’s poetry, exploring his revisionist treatment of the history of the Métis and other Indigenous people in Canada. As it provides a history of the Métis, the chapter also explores the impact of Scofield’s two-spirit queer identification, his codeswitching, and his community work, on his poetry. Writing in Métis and two-spirit vernaculars, Scofield’s hybrid vernacular texts become vehicles for his critique of Canadian citizenship in the case of the Métis.

This chapter outlines shifts in the American legal system related to justifiable gun violence. A crucial juridical shift, the transition wrought by American self-defense doctrine from the English requirement to ‘retreat to the wall’ to the American freedom to ‘stand one’s ground’ and repel force with force is covered here.

This chapter considers the decline of representations of the Existential drinker figure, partly a consequence of Existentialism’s fading from view as its ideas became assimilated, diluted, or discredited, and its major proponents faded away. It also notes an increasing antagonism towards the writer-drinker, once a staple of twentieth-century literature. The change in the philosophical, literary, and cultural landscape is seen in a number of texts where the protagonist is a committed drinker: Ivan Gold’s Sams in a Dry Season (1990), John O’Brien’s Better (2009, published posthumously), and Patrick de Witt’s Ablutions (2009). The acceptance of a neo-liberal world devoid not just of meaning but the search for meaning often characterises the nihilistic and hedonistic impulses of these novels.

Historical novels do not carry any authority as historical statements about the periods to which they refer. Nevertheless, creative literature is valuable for the insight it offers into a writer's intellectual and social context; the popularity of authors in the past and the longevity of their work may be because they successfully articulated 'the values and preoccupations of literary contemporaries'. In 1960, E. P. Thompson produced a detailed reading of W. H. Auden's 'Spain 1937', declaring that the excisions and alteration that Auden made in the 1950s compromised his whole achievement as a poet. Thompson's 'Chemical Works I' is a song of what happens to human souls and psyches drowned in a relentless barrage of noise. Reading poetry is hard, and takes something out of a person. Reading history is so much easier, as the worker in Bertolt Brecht's 'A Worker Reads History' knew.

The architecture of the courtroom placed boundaries on, and provided opportunities for, the production of ‘the law’. This chapter explores the physical environment of the courtroom, looking first at the Four Courts in Dublin, then at the provincial courts. It explores how architecture situated particular legal actors in place, impacting on their capacity to participate or to hold authority, as well as the symbolic meaning of the court building as a site of power in Irish society. It then explores examples of how men and women attempted to disrupt these constraints through disorderly and creative uses of courtroom space, and the important role of the gallery in setting the ‘emotional tone’ of the production of justice. It highlights the courtroom as a site where law, identity and nation were inscribed and contested.

This chapter sheds light on the shadows cast by the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan and the prospect of future nuclear devastation in various ‘theatres of catastrophe’ from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century, investigating how plays and performance pieces explore conceptions of death relating to these events and to possible futures stemming from them. Examples discussed in this chapter include Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) and Happy Days (1961), Marguerite Duras’s Yes, Maybe (1968), Edward Bond’s The Tin Can People (1984), Józef Szajna’s Replica (1971–88), and Howard Barker’s Found in the Ground (2001). These pieces approach the spectres of the Holocaust and/or death-by-nuclear-attack obliquely, only ever alluding to historical events or evoking them in fantasy.

John Donne was deeply influenced by the theatre and, as the chapter elucidates, this also shows in his religious poetry. In the Holy Sonnets (~1609), he repeatedly has a speaker reflect on or address his soul as in a soliloquy. The poems thus become stages on which the soul goes through stages in life towards death. The soul itself may become the theatron, the place of dramatic action, and the speaker is often doubled in being an actor and an audience in the scene presented. The sonnet itself structurally shows similarities to drama in which the speaker finally arrives at a climax and a happy ending, which turns these poems into divine comedies. Drama in the sense of dramatic allusion, the stage and stages, the communicative situation of the soliloquy, provides a key to processes of recognition and anagnorisis within these texts. At the same time, these dramatic elements help to explain the popularity of the soliloquy in contemporary drama.

Football fandom is an important area of research that covers a wide range of activities, people and places around the world. This chapter introduces the ultras style of fandom and situates it within the wider academic literature on football fandom. It highlights how fandom meets in the broader public sphere and engages politically within the wider politico-economic changes in football, and wider social world. Within the football stadium, there is a performance of fans’ identities which helps generate and sustain their emotions. Significantly, fandom is emotionally charged and this fuels the ultras’ engagement in the sport, but also their interactions, relationships and sense of individual and collective self.