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Jillian Wingfield turns to the events at the Villa Diodati in 1816. She shows how, alongside Byron’s conjuration and Polidori’s later development of the charismatic and aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven, Mary Shelley shaped the pseudo-science behind her patchwork creature in Frankenstein. Since then, the link between these Gothic stalwarts has evolved to a point where, two centuries after Polidori’s glamorous parasite was summoned into being, the genre of vampire fiction has soundly assimilated science. This essay discusses the effects of evolutionary manipulation in Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) as twenty-first-century exemplars of this ‘vampensteinian’ conjunction of the supernatural and cod science. Through this, Cronin and Butler invite a questioning of genetic modification, otherness, and racial prejudice, upending the aristocratic singularity started by Polidori. Consequently, Wingfield argues that this conjunction suggests the need for a twenty-first-century revision of Gothic taxonomy, amalgamating what has been a Polidorian paradigm into the novel nomenclature of the vampensteinian.

This chapter explores how anxieties regarding women’s ability to feign virtue contribute to the idea of female shamefastness as an enemy to be besieged and conquered by desiring men. This adversarial dynamic emerges clearly in personification allegories of varying scale and complexity, which present Shame as a stubborn adversary who must be defeated by Love by any means necessary, including by force. The chapter begins by considering the origins of the enmity between desire and shamefastness in the nature of personification allegory, focusing in particular on Prudentius’s treatment of lust (Sodomita Libido) and modesty (Pudicitia) in his Psychomachia. It then examines how personification allegories such as the medieval French Roman de la rose and its Middle English translation draw on anti-feminist tradition in order to explicitly establish female shamefastness as an obstacle or opponent to be overcome by male desire. The chapter’s final section turns to Lydgate’s discussion of female shamefastness in the Troy Book, and demonstrates how his depiction of Medea’s ‘staged’ shamefastness and his allegorization of her subsequent emotional turmoil articulate the anti-feminist logic that puts female honour at risk.

This chapter shows how The Spanish Tragedy simultaneously favours a view of corrupt Mediterranean monarchies and contemplates future imperial dreams for England. While questioning Spanish imperial power in the light of Portugal's diminished might, Thomas Kyd's tragedy suggests that the Habsburgs' policy of marital alliances and colonial expansion can be thwarted by the threat of dynastic crisis. In most of Kyd's revenge tragedy, though, the geographical reality of space takes over the Spanish as individuals and Spain becomes a territorial entity, a space defined in opposition to others that can be expanded through colonisation or diminished through invasion. When The Spanish Tragedy is read as a chronicle play about past events rather than as a tragedy reflecting on contemporary Spanish affairs, a series of connections between Spanish history and Kyd's play emerge.

This chapter offers a detailed biographical account of David Milch’s family background and his early life at university and elsewhere before he began work as a television writer in the 1980s. In particular it examines the profound influence of the poet Robert Penn Warren on Milch during the latter’s time at Yale University in the 1960s and 1970s. It also calibrates the significance of Milch’s time studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and offers an analysis of his MFA dissertation, ‘The Groundlings’, and one of his early poems.

This chapter explores Milch’s work after the cancellation of Deadwood, with particular attention to John From Cincinnati and Luck. It seeks to understand how Milch’s authorial voice developed and evolved alongside changes in US drama production.

This chapter presents a case study of Japan’s ICT regulation after the 1980s. It first reviews the development of Japan’s ICT sector, starting from telecommunications liberalisation in 1985. This review is followed by an exploration of power relations between key actors including those within the core executive. Paying attention to how power relations have changed among core executive actors, the third section explores how the core executive in the ICT sector has transformed its internal power relations by exploring key actors – Cabinet ministers, party politicians outside the Cabinet and civil servants – and structures within the core executive. Two core issues emerge in the analysis: first, the relationship between Cabinet ministers and party politicians outside the Cabinet including those in the ruling party; and secondly, the partisan confrontation between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

The woodblock illustration below the title to the 1615 quarto of The Spanish Tragedy captures a sequence of actions that happen across two of the play's scenes but freezes them into a single nightmare image of horror. A hundred years later, however, the flower-dealing woman in white is once again the object of horror, the tropes originating with Isabella and inherited by Ophelia now reconfigured by the gothic imagination. This chapter gives her Doing Kyd's last word, an epilogue that also serves as a prologue for the continuing cultural work that Isabella, and The Spanish Tragedy, perform sometimes incognito, sometimes in her and its own right, in subsequent theatre. When he's casting Soliman and Perseda, Hieronimo asks rhetorically: 'what's a play without a woman in it?'.

The Unconsoled differs greatly in some respects from Ishiguro's three novels, and in it the theme of memory is managed very differently. This chapter examines the dream-like distortions of events, space and time in the novel, with particular reference to Freud's concept of displacement. Then it considers how the book displaces Ryder's anxieties on to the musicians he meets in the town and his significant others. Lastly, the chapter looks at the text as fantasy and as a postmodernist work, to elucidate how it apes the elisions and projections of dreams for its unique mixing of memory and desire. The Unconsoled is full of such excursions that collapse back in on themselves. To sum up, The Unconsoled is an experimental work, successfully utilising several dream techniques to skew its narrative, and incorporating aspects of postmodernism, fantasy and realism.

This chapter looks at the pioneers of lobbying laws: those political systems that enacted them throughout the 1900s, thereby representing jurisdictions that have the longest history of formal lobbying legislation. This includes the US, Canada, the EU and Germany. In this second edition we have substantially updated developments and data presented for the US, Canada and Germany. Of key difference to readers of the first edition will be a full update on developments in the EU, highlighting its Joint Transparency Register, which is held between the Commission and the Parliament. Analysis of the four political systems is divided into three sections. The first offers a brief examination of the history of the country and its nature of governance. The second considers the nature of lobbying in each jurisdiction. The third examines the actual lobbying legislation, focusing on the names of the acts, when they came into existence, the details of the regulations in place, and any changes over time.

One of the most enduring faces of the monstrous-feminine is that of the femme animale. The monstrous femme animale continues to haunt the modern horror film although in different guises from her ancient counterparts. The female werewolf offers a perfect example of the symbol of the femme animale and her ability to explore new ways of being and knowing. Films which feature the female werewolf, such as Ginger Snaps, also call gender and sexual boundaries into question, particular where the female grows a furry phallus of her own. Ginger Snaps explores Giorgio Agamben's caesura and its gendered structure through its narrative about a young girl who metamorphoses into a werewolf asserting that she derives greater pleasure from being animal than female. Ginger as female werewolf tears at the fragile suburban surfaces, exposing its abject depths, bringing that which should have remained hidden into the light.