Simon Soon’s chapter discusses the development of leftist art discourses in Singapore and Indonesia by examining a selection of manifestos and texts alongside artworks. Close readings unearth oblique references to Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, which enabled artists to open new ways beyond the autonomy of art in the shadow of the 1955 Bandung conference.

The fourth chapter addresses the tetralogy of films that mark Garrel’s first collaboration with scriptwriters: Les Baisers de secours (1989), J’entends plus la guitare (1991), La Naissance de l’amour (1993) and Le Cœur fantôme (1996). These works continue in the vein of the previous period, engaging with aspects of both Garrel’s present and past life, including marital difficulties and the conflict that emerges between the competing responsibilities towards one’s career and one’s family. In addition to providing close readings of the films, the chapter assesses the aesthetic implications of Garrel’s various collaborations with screenwriters, cinematographers and sound engineers during this period. Attention is equally paid to the relationship between Garrel and Eustache’s cinema, in particular to the echoes of La Maman et la putain (1974) that emerge in La Naissance de l’amour.

This essay considers the space of the museum as a dissident of location of postcolonial critique, inspired by Daljit Nagra’s poetic sequence ‘Meditations on the British Museum’ (2017). It fully acknowledges the Western institution of the museum as complicit in articulating colonial perspectives, but also challenges the views of those who regard museums as forever compromised by their indebtedness to empire. To this end, the essay combines recent thinking in museum studies concerning ‘diasporic objects’ with the critique of origins central to critical adoption studies in order to query the problematic nativism and unexplored passion for the patrial that sometimes underwrites ‘decolonial’ attitudes to object provenance and legitimate heritage. Drawing, too, upon Nicholas Thomas’s work regarding ‘curiosity’, it reframes the museum as a site of postcolonial critique where emergent relations might be struck through uncommissioned encounters between the museum’s visitors and its galleries. The new constellations of meaning created as a consequence empower us not only to admit but also redeploy our contact with colonialism’s plunder for purposefully resistant ends. A cognisance of exactly these possibilities resides at the core of Nagra’s poetic sequence, which imagines a diasporic visitor to London’s British Museum wandering at will among its myriad objects drawn from, but not confined to, a plethora of empires, ancient and modern. In his exploration of the museum as a space of generative opportunities for resistant thinking, Nagra curates in his poetry a generative encounter between the present’s enduring coloniality and the contestatory constellations yielded by unchartered diasporic curiosity.

This part explores the revival of serial television dramas set in the ancient world in the new millennium. Described by some scholars as the fourth wave of peplum, the revival of the genre in cinema, following the success of Gladiator (2000), was replicated by notable television productions that followed in its wake. At the same time, the emancipation of TV antiquity from its cinematic counterpart continued during this time. Apart from the unique way of telling stories in a serial format, technology now made it possible to claim even more of the spectacular elements of screen antiquity for television. Programmes such as Rome (2005–8) combined the recent tendency towards gritty realism in television with the visual splendour and spectacle of cinema. In addition, the use of choreographed ‘ultra-violence’ became more prominent, which was particularly evident in shows like STARZ Spartacus and indicated a new route for TV antiquity.

The introduction constitutes a comprehensive overview of the field of Shakespeare and the supernatural, covering terminology, historical ideas surrounding magic, witchcraft, ghosts and demonology, responses to the supernatural in the space of the theatre, and the ways in which Shakespeare’s work is located between discourses of enchantment and emerging scepticism. It also highlights the porous boundaries between ideas of nature, the preternatural and the supernatural. Providing relevant contexts for the issues explored in the book, it outlines the volume’s five key themes: the supernatural and embodiment; haunted spaces; supernatural utterance and haunted texts; magic, music and gender; and present-day transformations. The introduction also presents a summary of the contributions by each of the authors and explores the dialogues that open up between the various chapters.

While stage adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have grappled with representing fairies and fairy flight since the play’s early performances at the original Globe, the ‘magic’ of film offered possibilities of supernature not previously available to stage productions. Initially this capability was fully exploited in early adaptations of the Dream such as Vitagraph’s 1909 silent adaptation, and Max Reinhardt’s spectacular 1935 film for Warner Brothers. As cinema matured, and our reading of the play changed, the heavy reliance on special effects made way for other, more subtle techniques. Film directors took differing approaches in representing the fairies’ supernatural powers and their materiality, offering new and exciting ways to ‘read’ the fairies. This chapter explores how the fairies are represented in a number of film adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from 1909 through to 2016, and considers the effect that film ‘magic’ has on realising the supernatural in the play.

In his introduction to The Works of Thomas Kyd, Frederick Boas remarks that the popularity of The Spanish Tragedy was nowhere more enduring than on the continent of Europe. This chapter traces the career of the play in the Low Countries. It places the work of Thomas Kyd in the context of the various political and cultural contacts between England, the Netherlands and Flanders. The chapter looks at The Spanish Tragedy as one of a range of specifically English revenge plays that crossed the Channel during the early modern period. It argues that the lasting position of The Spanish Tragedy in the Low Countries is of interest from a politico-religious perspective. The chapter focuses on the recontextualisation of The Spanish Tragedy and the genre of revenge tragedy in the Dutch Republic.

Summarising the findings of the previous chapters, this conclusion also looks forward to the use of addresses in the modern era. It argues that addresses continued to be employed as Britain became a mass democracy because of the way in which they could articulate public feeling while at the same time respecting social, sexual and political hierarchies.

This chapter introduces the main themes pertinent to the analysis of David Milch’s writing. It locates his television work within debates about film and television authorship and signals the necessity of thinking about American literature as a way to properly understand that work.

In the 1870s, information about the growing practice of vivisection, especially in physiological research, prompted a public outcry, and led to crisis and division in the animal protection movement. Women in particular, led by Frances Power Cobbe, opposed vivisection, leading to a battle with scientific and medical opinion that took on a strongly gendered element. Cobbe as virtual leader of the Victoria Street Society, resorted to many oppositional strategies, including a notorious poster campaign, which was replicated in images published in the Illustrated Police News, and also prosecution of a scientist who infringed the terms of the 1876 Act regulating vivisection. Failing in these gambits, Cobbe went on to attack the practice at the philosophical level, raising ethical issues that were also pondered by the writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Vivisection came to symbolise the materialism, misogyny and oppressive patriarchy of the age, and in this light it was anathematised by two early women doctors – Elizabeth Blackwell and Anna Kingsford – the latter a visionary who opposed vivisection as a spiritual blight on society.