Philip Caputo's memoir, A Rumor of War, debates issues such as heroism, masculinity, violence and sexuality. These issues were identified and linked by Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century, but more confidently verbalised in the aftermath of Vietnam than after any previous war. This chapter seeks to explore this verbalisation, through an examination of a range of textual representations of Vietnam: novels and memoirs by both men and women from both the West and the East. Joanna Bourke has suggested that in the past many men have been reticent about telling their war stories as much because of the pleasure of war as of the horror. The effects of the Vietnam War were double-edged for Le Ly Hayslip. Her narrative, Heaven and Earth, attempts to explain the war from multiple perspectives.

Improvement, as an ideology, fitted perfectly with Francis Hutchinson's Latitudinarian-Whig views, which envisaged a stable, commercial, ordered society, guided by a sociable and reasonable national religion. During the 1720s, Hutchinson published a number of economic tracts that suggested ways in which Ireland could escape its economic backwardness by developing its indigenous resource. In the period 1721-1723, Hutchinson's involvement with improvement went beyond the publication of the bank and poor tracts. Hutchinson moved beyond pamphleteering, to embark on a more practical improvement programme, by disseminating a culture of improvement on his newly purchased private estate near Portglenone and by playing a prominent and active role in the newly founded Dublin Society. The Society was regarded by contemporaries as a perfect practical complement to the efforts of Parliament and the Irish gentry to develop Ireland.

B. S. Johnson produced seven novels, two volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, as well as several plays, screenplays and television scripts, and miscellaneous joint projects. He received awards for Travelling People, Trawl and the short film You're Human like the Rest of Them. Authorial powers, not substantively different from those of an omniscient author in a more conventional novel, are explicitly flaunted in Travelling People in a number of ways that to demonstrate what the convention involves. The major graphic elements of Travelling People appear within the chapters composed of interior monologues. Initially the use of the graphic surface in Albert Angelo does seem to be designed to attract the attention of the reader to the conventions of mimetic representation. One example is the 'specially-designed type-characters' that frame physical descriptions of Albert's pupils.

This chapter examines the contributions of Freethinking feminists to the women's rights movement and how they negotiated its predominantly Christian culture. The Freethinking emphasis on the sanctity of individual private judgement and moral autonomy shaped attitudes towards the social purity campaigns that came out of repeal work, deterring some Secularists from endorsing the more repressive aspects of this movement. Remaining true to a longstanding, ultra-democratic tradition, Freethinking feminists tended to cohere around the radical fringes of the new suffrage organisations emerging in the early 1900s. The legacy of their commitment to female enfranchisement was evident across the twentieth-century suffrage movement.

This chapter examines the world of the Victorian diplomat through the life and work of Austen Henry Layard and his circle in Constantinople. Best known for his excavations of Assyrian artifacts at Mosul (now in the British Museum), Layard parlayed his fame as an adventurer-archeologist into a position as Disraeli’s Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. At Constantinople, Layard found himself at the center of a humanitarian and diplomatic crisis. The slaughter of Bulgarian civilians by Ottoman forces on the eve of the 1878 Russo-Turkish War sparked outrage at home over the “Bulgarian Atrocities.” His life as a diplomat at the Sublime Porte placed him at the center of a network of philanthropists, consuls, and other diplomats who attempted to reconcile Britain’s humanitarian commitments with geopolitical realities.

Clearly, Beatrice Annie Pace had press and politics on her side, and, in the wake of the acquittal, some newspapers asked a variety of prominent people for their views. There are 232 letters to Beatrice in the collection. It is impossible to systematically group them according to the writer's class or income level, but other distinctions are possible. As noted, the predominance of women in the crowds gathered at the inquest and trial was often commented upon. Fewer men than women wrote to Beatrice, but some took an equally strong interest in her case. Male correspondents related differently to Beatrice, as identification based on certain common experiences, obviously, was impossible. Despite the fact that Beatrice herself rarely expressed religious sentiments, nearly a quarter of the 220 letters classified as congratulatory had religious themes that went beyond colloquial expressions such as 'God bless' or passing references to having 'prayed for' her.

By associating cunnilingus with a Tootsie commercial aimed at children, Lil' Kim's 'How Many Licks' mischievously risks broaching one of the biggest taboos in the American culture. Childhood, as a sacred place of uncorrupted innocence, is largely an invention of romanticism, popularly resonant in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in William Blake's 'Songs of Innocence' for example. In the generic mom and pop rage that characterises many lyrics in nu metal, Korn's in particular, the father tends to vacillate between the imaginary and the real registers. The chapter looks at another symptom of adolescent rage that seems to be more radical than the therapised mom and pop rage. Apparently indifferent to mom, pop and their surrogates at school, the target of this destructive rage is American adolescence itself, as a symbol of the American way of life.