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In his essay, Ivan Phillips explores themes of vision and visibility as they are developed through The Vampyre. He examines Polidori’s distinctive concern with the imagery of eyes, and with acts of seeing (or not seeing) and being seen (or not being seen), in connection with the evolution of the modern vampire. Phillips understands these motifs through Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) as a fantastical challenge to the limits of the human. The vampire, in this sense, enters the fiction of modernity as a threat to stable assumptions about identity, experience, and being. As well as exploring tropes of vision in The Vampyre, this essay also considers other texts by Polidori, notably his medical dissertation on sleepwalking and his novel Ernestus Berchtold, written at the same time as his vampire story and published in the same year. Ultimately, Phillips argues that the work of this remarkable but neglected writer generates an anatomy of the modern vampire that is still influential today.

This introductory chapter sets out the scope, aim, and structure of the book. It makes the case for using Hannah Arendt’s work as a foundation for contemporary biopolitical analysis, and advances an extension of her work on the socio-political conditioning of the human. In particular, the chapter identifies and outlines three core modes of conditioning (the biopolitical, the technological, and the ethical), which serve as a framework for the analysis undertaken in the rest of the book.

This chapter introduces two important questions for the study. It looks at the possible relationships between Neolithic cave burial and other Neolithic burial practices. It then introduces the important idea that caves and other natural places had agency and were actively incorporated into funerary rites. The chapter also introduces the data set used in the book: forty-eight cave sites in Britain with Neolithic radiocarbon dates on human remains. The chapter concludes by reviewing problems in interpreting this data and introduces the theoretical themes discussed in the following chapters: temporality, object agency and funerary ritual.

Even if for the gentry and nobility the double-standard was less restrictive of male conduct than, for example, Capp has argued, there is no question that contemporary expectations constrained the behaviour of females among the elite more severely than men. Still, this chapter explores the evidence for the extent and implications of illegitimate relationships conducted by elite females, and shows that they were far from uncommon and did not in every case lead to the most severe sanctions. It considers how the participants in such illegitimate relationships were described, and the gendered concepts implicit within those descriptions. As with that relating to the male gentry, the evidence here suggests that gentlewomen tended to become involved with men who, while some may have been servants, were themselves of relatively high status. Some of the more prominent women in this situation are considered, such as Elizabeth Parr, marchioness of Northampton, or Lady Florence Clifford, husband of Henry, 10th Lord Clifford, as are lesser known gentlewomen. The chapter considers how attitudes to these relationships, whether condemnatory, regulatory or less critical, changed over time.

Chapter 4 examines how Ireland’s economy has affected election coverage and discovers some interesting patterns. A bad economic performance is reflected in a more negative tone of election news, but a good economic performance has no effect. Expectations seem to matter: the tone of election coverage is associated with consumer sentiment.

This chapter considers the nature of the marital relationships entered into by the second generation and the ways in which Herminie and Fanny were to accommodate the business interests of the Pereire brothers in fashioning the requirements for suitable spouses. It takes note of the role they played in arranging suitable liaisons, including the negotiation of religious affiliation. The chapter also notes how the marriages that took place subtly altered the family situation in its religious and social outlook and in its dynamic. The Pereire family’s relationship with Judaism was relatively fixed by the 1840s when the first of the second generation was ready to marry. They identified as Jewish, they had not abjured the religion of their birth, they still supported Jewish causes and institutions, they still mixed within Jewish circles, and, perhaps most importantly, they were seen by others outside the family as Jewish.

The Introduction sets out the cultural and political background to the book, detailing the editors’ shared interest in Rhodesia’s surprising influence within Britain and the figure of Enoch Powell. These twin research interests provided the impetus for the conference and later the book. Moving from the ‘shards’ of empire found in rural Norfolk to the ongoing Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall campaigns, the Introduction demonstrates how the legacies of empire remain an enduring and prominent feature of British culture. This section also works to distinguish what the editors and other contributors mean by ‘culture’ as well as Britishness, distinguishing England from the other constituent parts of the UK, which have their own complex relationships with the British Empire and English imperialism. The Introduction sets out the historiographical and literary works upon which the entire book is founded and engages with key scholars who have shaped the work of all the contributors, as well as given us the tools with which to begin dismantling the legacies of empire. The Introduction also pays close attention to the ongoing ‘imperial history wars’ and apparent ‘cultural wars’ currently raging within British academia and politics.

Could one at once be a Maoist and poke fun at Mao’s cult? This is the central issue explored in Jacopo Galimberti’s chapter, which investigates aspects of Italian Maoism as they were played out in four publications: the hardline newspaper Servire il Popolo, the counter-cultural magazine Re Nudo, the intellectual periodical Che Fare and the fanzine A/traverso. By 1976 some Italian militants were advocating a new form of Maoism that conflated pop culture, autonomist Marxism, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s philosophy and, last but not least, avant-garde art.

In this chapter, two key addressing campaigns are explored: that following the case of the Kentish Petitioners and the addresses which followed the trial of Henry Sacheverell. The chapter explores how addresses became vehicles for party electioneering, a fact which led to claims that the political content of addresses had essentially become meaningless. These arguments concealed the considerable ‘middle ground’ that many addresses continued to occupy as well as the survival of the pre-revolutionary consensus on the limits of popular subscriptional activity.

This chapter explores how one of the first revenge tragedies to be performed on the commercial stage employs gender strategies to problematise the theatrical performance of vengefulness. The Spanish Tragedy's problematisation of revenge tragedy's move to the commercial theatre is highlighted by a reversal of gender patterns. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy shows itself to be very much aware of the dangers of appropriating the Senecan tradition for the commercial stage. The Spanish Tragedy problematises the performance of feminine vindictive passion outside its original context of the English legal institutions of the Inns of Court. The vindictive feminine fury shaped in Inns of Court tragedies with the purpose to support the expanding legal system leaks into the commercial theatre and there 'infects' the lower classes and female members of the audience. The feminine fury of Seneca's women is indeed, as the men of law in Newton's dedication feared, greatly contagious.