This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores notions of identity and gender through a close examination of Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle's relationship as the war impacted on it. It examines the intricate gender assumptions that surround the condition of 'shell shock' through a detailed exploration of the life and work of Vera Brittain. The book discusses the gendered attitudes to the First World War located within Aldous Huxley's novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'. It also explores the questioning of war in the 1930s, a period when memories of the First World War remained fresh. The book also examines women performing very 'unfeminine' roles during the Battle of the Atlantic, and argues that femininity is imposed nonetheless for propagandist purposes. It illustrates the confusion often experienced by women in the Vietnam War.

The history of anti-theatricalism from Plato onward assumes that actors are indeed changed by their costumes. In William Shakespeare's own theater for the most part plays were costumed in Elizabethan dress; the Italy of Romeo and Juliet was a version of England. Disguises in Shakespeare are almost always absolute, with a small number of exceptions, nobody ever sees through a disguise. The famous Peacham drawing for Titus Andronicus gestures toward ancient Rome in the costume of Titus, in the center; but queen Tamora's costume is quite generalized, vaguely medieval, certainly neither Roman nor Elizabethan. By the end of the eighteenth century the vogue for historic costume in drama was well under way. The thrilling, visually stunning Franco Zeffirelli films of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew are set in fifteenth-century Verona and Padua, with historically accurate costumes and sets.

Murphy and Watt are Samuel Beckett's first two completed novels. This chapter considers the ways in which these novels and particularly their graphic devices have been critically interpreted. The climax of Murphy modifies the use of the graphic surface of the book. By comparison with the overall coherence of Murphy, Watt appears to exclude things it could and, sometimes it seems, should contain. Use of the graphic surface in Watt is slightly less varied than that found in Murphy, but incidences are more numerous. The graphic surface of Watt, like that of Murphy before it, is used to foreground instability and generate lack of faith in the text's mediators and ultimately the text itself. Through the use of the graphic surface in his early fiction Beckett has identified and drawn on a fundamental aspect of the codex form.

This chapter looks at representations of the 'vile' bodies of communism's principal political opponents, the 'fascist body' and the 'bourgeois body'. Like all bodies, the proletarian communist body was an expressive sign, a semiotic site. The body would function as an important site of British Communist Party (CPGB) efforts to implant the communist spirit and way of life in its members. During the interwar years the CPGB was keen to ensure the physical well-being and fitness of its activists. For communists, there was a vital connection between sport, physical fitness, and revolutionary labour. The 'young workers forced to perform one humdrum operation, day in and day out, become mere cogs in the machine with grave consequences to their mental and physical development', complained Young Communist League (YCL) Secretary William Rust in 1925.

This chapter introduces the main historiographic themes of the book. It makes a case for understanding the British world system not merely as a contingent series of migrations, economic exchanges, alliances, and military relationships, but also as an arena in which various cultural interchanges took place. These connections—which included literary criticism, humanitarianism, legal cultures, political thought, travel narratives, material culture, and attitudes toward capitalism—helped to cement a “cultural British world” that transcended the frontiers between formal and informal empire, and between empire, metropole, and the wider world.

When he returned from India in 1808, William Hickey discovered that Britain’s customs house officers wanted to tax as “foreign art” the collectibles he had acquired during his almost forty years in South Asia. Hickey saw their efforts as “an infamous transaction.” The art had been produced and purchased in a British settlement, it had been made by people living under British law, it was now the property of a Briton, and it had made its way from British India onboard a British East India Company ship. There was, Hickey noted, “nothing foreign from beginning to end in the whole transaction!”This chapter investigates the way late-eighteenth-century Britons in India framed their cultural life. Rather than delimiting Britishness to a domestic identity, this community braided their sense of self, nation, and empire into one singular narrative. Those, like Hickey, who left Britain with a sense of their own Britishness did not give up that sense merely because of India’s geographic distance from the metropole. Rather, they came to include India’s landscape and culture as part of their notion of what it meant to be British – even if domestic observers failed to appreciate this expanded sense of the national self.

This chapter outlines the difficulties that faced the ‘fire brigade’ states in their efforts to translate their vision of international stability based on collective security into practice. On the surface, involvement in the UN peacekeeping operation in the Congo (ONUC; 1960–64) offered an opportunity to match anti-colonial rhetoric with practical action. In that sense the experience proved successful: peacekeeping became an important outlet for expressing Irish commitment to the UN. Yet the episode was, in large part, a chastening one. With its role limited by the influence of the Cold War powers, by the relative powerlessness of the UN, and by an increasingly vocal Afro-Asian bloc, the Congo experience forced Irish officials to come of age: to recognise the limits to their actions but also to accept their standing as pro-Western, pragmatic, European states.

In many parts of the early eighteenth century Highlands the established presbyterian church of Scotland had limited impact. In the nineteenth century the religious tradition which was to have the most fundamental impact on the society and culture of Gaeldom was protestant evangelicalism. The Highlands had to be brought within the domain of the established church, because Catholicism and episcopalianism were the twin ideological sources of Jacobitism. The irreligion of the Highlander in some districts and the weakness of presbyterianism in many others had to be tackled not only for religious reasons but in order to achieve vital political ends. From the early eighteenth century, the conversion of the Highlanders became a joint mission of both church and state, a partnership designed to civilise the inhabitants of the region by destroying clanship, eradicating popery and inculcating loyalty to the Hanoverian crown.