Memory has been recognized since ancient times as a basic element of artistic creativity. The chapter argues that forgetting, or the suppression or subversion of memory, is an equally essential creative principle. Forgetting is crucial within the play's action, too: it is a radical act of forgetting that precipitates William Shakespeare's catastrophe. The chapter explores the case of King Lear, and begins with a famous emendation, which is particularly germane, because it depends on a case of memorial reconstruction. Shakespeare sets up a powerful tragic momentum reminiscent of Lear in the opening three acts, only to disarm it at the conclusion with fantasy and magic. In every version of the Lear story, both in the chronicles of early British history and in the The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, Cordelia's forces are victorious, and Lear's throne is restored to him.

As a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse, Vera Brittain was well aware of the symptoms of shell shock. This chapter argues that Brittain's failure to identify her own breakdown as such is indicative of her belief that shell shock was an exclusively masculine condition that served to hinder the feminist cause. Brittain struggled with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder until 1925, and only began work on Testament of Youth in 1926. In Testament of Youth, Brittain notes that although she put on civilian clothes and looked to her parents very much like the attractive young woman known throughout Somerville for her fashionable attire, she felt alienated. Brittain's Testament of Youth clearly shows her also to have been disillusioned, angry and very bitter on her return to Oxford after the war.

This establishes the central and related structural factors that shaped the character of the 1984-5 strike in Scotland: pit closures in the 1950s and 1960s; social changes in mining communities; shifts in trade union politics, with the re-emergence of militancy in the 1960s, and embodied in the leadership of Michael McGahey, Scottish Area President of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1967 onwards; and the character and meaning of the moral economy of the Scottish coalfields. The complex, highly contingent and fluid nature of coalfield communities is emphasised, and related to the process of industrial restructuring. The Thatcherite political economy of coal, and its transgression of the moral economy, is analysed.

Emigration has been a central feature of Highland history over the last three centuries and, for much of that period, the scale of outward movement was significantly greater than that from other areas of Scotland. Clearances, commercialisation, demographic pressures, famine, economic collapse and landlordism all had an impact on the emigration process, though there is much debate among scholars about the precise and relative significance of these various influences. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the economic and demographic pressures on the population perceptibly increased. The landlord role was often crucial in translating the social crisis into high levels of emigration and also in fashioning the composition and structure of the emigrant parties and this was not only because proprietors covered transport costs. Landlord pursuit of profit and the ensuing commercialisation of estates were the main reasons for the development of mass emigration in the first place.

This chapter examines the rise of two new, and related, forms of international relations that simultaneously bolstered and bypassed traditional channels of diplomacy: aid and humanitarianism. It describes the powerful impact the Biafran humanitarian crisis had on inter-state relations, shifting aid and emergency relief to centre stage in the ‘fire brigade’ states’ relationship with the developing world. Diplomatic support for the decolonisation process was translated into economic and humanitarian support for ailing independent states. But, as this chapter shows, this shift was significant primarily because it was accompanied by the emergence of a new global discourse on aid and humanitarianism, and a new group of transnational actors whose work bypassed traditional political structures to emphasise the power of ‘people-to-people’ action: NGOs.

The Chiapas rebellion in 1994 signalled a rupture with both the political and visual marginalisation of the indigenous peoples in Mexico. Antonio Turok's black-and-white photographs of the beginning of the uprising were among the photographs that were reproduced endlessly on various websites, including that of the Zapatistas. The photographs constitute the core of a photobook entitled Chiapas: The End of Silence, a collection of photographs taken in Chiapas, Mexico from 1973 to 1994. This chapter examines the way the book informs us about the everyday life of the ethnic communities in Mexico and, most importantly, considers the ways in which the book enhances our understanding of the Zapatista struggle. It compares the photobook with stereotypical photographic representations of Mexican twentieth-century photography and seeks to evaluate the contribution of Turok's book to the understanding of the indigenous people's struggle.

The English poet Richard Aldington and his wife, the American poet Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), became modernist writers who in different ways explored the boundaries of both identity and textual representation. The issue of textual representation is a central concern for both writers. But while feminist scholars over the last twenty years have stressed H. D.'s attention to gender in her work, Aldington's attitudes towards both textuality and sexuality are misrepresented as conventional and fixed. From its very first page, H. D.'s own war novel, Bid Me to Live, addresses the issue of form, the problem of genre, and the difficulties of identity and textual expression that are, in fact, the novel's central subject. The conflict on which H. D. focuses is at once the Great War and the war between the sexes, while the problem of female utterance stems from the war which defines her through marginalisation and loss.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book illustrates how one of the main sceptical witchcraft texts was constructed and what its relationship to the wider intellectual and literary context of the time was. Francis Hutchinson attacked witchcraft for the very same reason: he regarded it as a dangerous, unsociable and enthusiastic belief system, a disposition hardened by first-hand experience of witchcraft trials and the effects they had on small communities. Although the methodology he employed in the Historical essay was similar to that used by other English sceptics, the structure of the book was shaped by his attempt to influence two sectors of English society. They are the literate lower orders and the judiciary. Hutchinson was concerned with maintaining the welfare of the Church of Ireland as he was with serving the Whig and Hanoverian regime.