This chapter argues for the long-standing affinity between the market and the theatre, expressed in the frequent elision of festivity with commerce in markets, fairs and carnivals. The chapter utilises Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, and Stallybrass and White’s application of it to cultural transgression. It argues that the street markets were performative places, and picks up earlier analysis of sensory affect in an investigation of the soundscape of the markets. Performance and sound lead into a final section that continues the cultural analysis of the markets and their people commenced in the previous chapter, describing how the costermongers populated the music hall stage, with a voice and look that was distilled (directly or indirectly) from street market origins. It concludes that the street markets existed on stage and in representation in a form that allowed them to be consumed nostalgically in popular culture well beyond the period of this study.

This chapter begins with a broader consideration of how lunacy law fitted into more general assessments of the role of law in the exercise of imperial power. Eighteenth-century legal experts made connections between the states of non compos mentis among Europeans and the ‘natural’ states of unreason found among many groups of people ‘discovered’ in the ‘new’ world through exploration. These experts concluded that indigenous people without any concept of property or property ownership (as defined by English legal tradition) were in need of guardianship just like white colonists who had lost their reason. More practically, this body of civil law was placed into the hands of colonial rulers by English authorities as a mechanism for dealing with propertied colonists who were considered mentally incapable of managing their property. In colonial New Jersey, the law of lunacy investigation was a very successful legal transplant, taking root in ways that could not have been anticipated by those who had shaped the law in England. In New Jersey, the law applied to a much broader socio-economic group and served as a formidable regulatory, managerial and caring mechanism for madness.

This chapter examines the emergence of jungle, the first original black musical culture in London. It discusses the relation of jungle both to rave and to the Black Atlantic traditions of reggae, hip hop and soul, and argues that jungle can be thought of as both a distinct black British musical form and as articulating a particular form of multicultural politics. It explores the emergence of jungle from the ‘ardkore circuits of East London in the way 1990s, and the approach to technology that links it with wider black Atlantic practice.

Before considering the two film adaptations of François Mauriac’s novel Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) and because it stands as a fulcrum of so many narrating voices, themselves constructed out of obsession, desire, repression, suffocation and a sense of futility, it behoves us to lift the layers away one by one, as one would uncover a palimpsest, to understand these meanings, first, before proceeding further. There have been two film adaptations of Thérèse Desqueyroux; one in 1962 by Georges Franju, in which the script was co-authored between the director and Mauriac; the second, in 2012, by Claude Miller in which the script was co-authored between director and Natalie Carter (who had already written two other adaptations with Miller). The lack of mystery and ambiguity surrounding Miller’s interpretation of Thérèse’s character is undoubtedly the weakness of his film. His simplification of the narrative (going from light to darkness as he put it) meant that he also reduced his other characters to two-dimensions. Anne in this instance is yet another clear example. Mauriac’s Anne, as Thérèse, is an unruly female; not, as Miller’s version would have us believe, one who belongs to ‘la race implacable des simples’. She will become so, because the family eventually wins the struggle and she marries Deghuilem; but she has known love, something none of the others have experienced. Until she is made to come to heel (by her parents and Bernard) she is a free spirit, quite wild (her love of shooting, her passion for Jean). The manner in which she kills the bird in front of Thérèse is particularly revealing when we compare Miller’s to Franju’s version. In the former, Anne snaps the wood-pigeon’s neck in a swift brutal gesture (much as Bernard would). In the latter, Anne gently strokes the little bird (a stonechat?), then slowly applies pressure on its throat to slowly extinguish life. In Miller’s version, Anne appears unambiguously hard. Franju’s Anne appears a complex contradiction, both sentimental and cruel. So, even as Thérèse assures us she is pure and innocent, an ambiguity arises.

Dumas’s enduringly popular novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, adapts well to cinema, having been created in a tradition of visual storytelling that developed in complexity as the cinematic medium evolved in parallel form. The picaresque adventures of the protagonist, Edmond Dantès provided narrative spectacle that was matched by advances in camerawork and editing in each decade of the cinematic century. As a time-based revelation of a latent image, the spectacle of Edmond Dantès develops in a series of identities or portraits by way of the alchemy of revenge in both text and cinema.

This chapter surveys the general history of the adaptation of French literary texts by filmmakers working within the French, British, and American national cinemas, beginning with the silent cinema. Periods covered include the early sound era, the French New Wave, classic Hollywood, and the British heritage cycle.

This chapter examines narratives about uncanny objects which disrupt private domestic space, focusing in detail on two novels: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953). Both authors were interested in a domestic gothic in which lost, dazed and traumatized characters must negotiate with the things they chose – or chose not – to surround themselves. Bowen’s novel – and the short stories she wrote concurrently and published as The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945) – depict the domestic spaces of wartime as stripped of personality and affect, while the people who haunt them are made spectral by the abolition of the present tense in a city under aerial bombardment, which leaves only ‘a grinding-together of past and future’. The abolition of temporal order inspired narratives about superannuated objects which push insistently through the membrane of linear time in order to trouble the present. Eerie antiques become reservoirs of authenticity and value, and Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-Longue is read as a critique of post-war gentrification, and the disruption of value and history that it entailed. The gentrified and haunted chaise longue weaponises its own narratological power, and the gothic intimacy it achieves attests to the change that took place in the relationship between women and things in the mid-century.

There have been some eighty film adaptations of the Carmen story since 1895 (excluding over thirty TV films), based either on Prosper Mérimée’s novella (1845) or on Georges Bizet’s opera (1875), or on a combination of both. It is one of the most adapted stories in cinema history, and the most adapted classical literature in French cinema. Those adaptations range across national cinemas: the USA is the most prominent (27), followed by France (10), Spain (9), UK (8), Italy (6), Germany (4), Brazil (2), Russia (2), and there are Argentinian, Austrian, Czech, Dutch, Mexican, Senegalese, Slovenian, South African, Swedish, and Venezuelan versions. The Carmen story has unsurprisingly then been the focus of considerable academic attention. In this chapter I will focus on the climax of the story, the ritualistic murder of the threatening femme fatale represented by Carmen in her irreducible difference. In most cases, Carmen’s death takes place either in the wild countryside of Mérimée’s novella, or in the urbanized bullring of Bizet’s opera. A majority of film versions construct the death scene as a ritual performance where the location is an enclosed and generally non-realist stage, especially when the rest of the film has been relatively realist in its use of locations. Using Foucault’s theory of heterotopia as ‘other’ contested place, I argue that the reason for this staging is to provide a segregated ritual space which retrospectively legitimizes the narrative as a performance of excessive sexualities, at the same time as, paradoxically, it contains that excess by staging it as a performance.

One of the most prolific and successful francophone writers of the twentieth century, Georges Simenon is also one of the most frequently adapted to the screen. His legendary output includes 436 novels published between 1931 and 1972, as well as many essays and autobiographical pieces of writing. Seventy-five of them are devoted to the author’s most popular hero, Chief Inspector Maigret, a senior policeman in Paris. The first Maigret novel, Pietr-le-letton, was published in 1931. Others followed at a phenomenal rate until 1934, when Simenon attempted to put a stop to them in order to concentrate on what he considered his more serious romans durs. However, public demand and financial reward were hard to resist; the Maigret series resumed and continued until 1972. Barely a year elapsed between the publication of the first Maigret novel and the first film version, La Nuit du carrefour, directed by Jean Renoir in 1932. Many others followed, with altogether more than 300 films and television series. At least thirty actors have incarnated the character. ‘Maigret’ describes his relationship with the author who created him, while the latter explains that he deliberately drew the policeman as a simplified, instantly recognizable silhouette ‘that gradually became fleshed out with details’.

This chapter places the music scenes the book has discussed in the context of the politics of space and music in contemporary London. It considers the rise of the ‘plutocratic’ city’ in the early 21st century, and considers the emergences of subsequent music genres of grime, drill and new London jazz in terms of what they tell us about the contemporary state of London multiculture.

This chapter shows how dining out has become more familiar to more people over the twenty years since 1995. It examines who visits which types of restaurant and how frequently, showing how often people eat out and who eats out most, on the basis of survey evidence. It reports on how personal orientations affect the frequency of eating in restaurants. It examines exposure of survey respondents to the variety of different types of restaurant in 2015 and compares that with 1995. It concludes that eating out is both necessary and discretionary. There has been a modest increase in the rate of eating out as the tempo has stepped up. Familiarisation with the practice makes dining out less special, so while it is still highly pleasurable, satisfaction with commercially provided meals has declined.