This chapter explores a few of the female Gothic dramas in an attempt to define the particular ways in which narratives of domestic fear and entrapment appear on television. It outlines the ways in which the heroine negotiates her position within the domestic space of the Gothic narrative. The chapter focuses on a topographical analysis of the mise-en-scene of female Gothic fiction on television, and identifies the connection between text and domestic viewer. The television adaptation of Northanger Abbey plays upon the representation of Cathy as a diegetic stand-in for the female Gothic reader-viewer by fully visualising extracts from her reading matter through imagined point-of-view sequences at key moments in the narrative. The Wyvern Mystery alters the generic approach to the heritage location to express the distinct uneasiness attached to domestic spaces within the female Gothic narrative.

This chapter explores the importance of the concept of the iconic ghetto, examining its discursive importance in reproducing racism. It explains a critical discourse analysis of Top Boy to understand how the iconic ghetto is reproduced throughout the show. As one of the handful of black majority cast shows, Top Boy has an important role in framing how black communities are portrayed on British television. The relentless image of crime and poverty on the estate discursively binds the black community to the ghetto. The basis of the iconic ghetto portrayed throughout the show becomes apparent and is captured in the number of themes. They include the proliferation of poverty; crime and violence agency, a lack of female agency; and ultimately, blame cast on black communities for the problems the show exaggerates.

Charles Robert Maturin's sixth and final novel, The Albigenses, a romance, is a kind of textual house of mirrors. Maturin had already dabbled with the historical novel form as later popularised by Sir Walter Scott in The Milesian chief and, arguably, Fatal revenge. By current critical descriptions of the historical novel, however, these texts, now narrowly defined as national tale and Gothic novel, respectively, do not conform to Scott's model. To judge The Albigenses by markers of chronological or strictly factual accuracy, as Dale Kramer does, is to hold the novel to entirely different standards than those of Scott's historical novel. Fearful of social revolution in Ireland, The Albigenses focuses on revolution of a different kind: the recurrence of the past.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents transnational interpretations of how Black people have been represented on British television. It explores a range of contexts and practices that address the ongoing phenomenon of 'race' and its specific relationship with public service television. The book outlines how current studies of transnationalism highlight the importance of contemporary information societies and the global consortiums of transnational corporations. It examines how the 2005 reboot of the classic series utilises deracialised and decontextualised slavery allegories to absolve white guilt over the transatlantic slave trade. The book also examines the uses of race, immigration and multiculturalism as comic themes in British television sitcoms from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also explores the politics of 'tick-boxing' especially in regard to public service remits.

Upon first looking at Codex Artaud, it is likely viewers' eyes are drawn to the small figures dispersed throughout the vast empty spaces of the artwork. Nancy Spero painted these figures in gouaches of copper, brown, grey, and gold. This chapter analyses a letter Spero wrote to Lippard that attests to the galvanising power of this recognition and then returns to Codex Artaud, Codex Artaud VIII and IX specifically, which re-present Artaud's aggressive and desperate correspondence with his editor. The tongue is a primary visual refrain in Codex Artaud. Codex Artaud I explores the themes encapsulated by the tongue. Spero's thematisation of protest is clear in Codex Artaud III. An image in Codex Artaud III dramaticises the poles of strength and victimisation that Artaud lived out in his writing. Spero's sculpture Mummified is a portrait of a woman without the language to identify repressive feminine ideals.

The Afterword is framed by a reading of Caroline Bergvall’s text and performance Drift (2013) and explores ideas of migration across time and space. Using Thomas Nail’s recent work on the figure of the migrant and Paul Zumthor’s celebrated work on ‘mouvance’ the Afterword asks, following Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, what cultural possibilities emerge if we celebrate the diversity, multiplicity and untimeliness of ideas of the Middle Ages, rather than attempt to limit or define it. It suggest that medievalist acts of cultural memory often rely on an idea of the Middles Ages as singular, closed-off and stable, but nevertheless demonstrate its multiplicity, openness and indeterminacy.

The international and local feminist avant-garde of the 1970s is discussed in Chapter 6. Vancouver women’s rejection of canonical art history, their development of alternative distribution and exhibition systems for promoting artwork, and their psychoanalytic critique of the male gaze all implicitly challenged the legitimacy of the theoretical and historical project of Vancouver photo-conceptualism. These threats would thus be selectively integrated into the new male-authored photography. Historical and contemporary critical responses to Marian Penner Bancroft and Liz Magor’s work are also analysed, which through contrary-example further establishes the male-gendered character of avant-garde discourse formation in Vancouver.

This chapter considers how the 2005 reboot of Doctor Who utilises the deracialised and decontextualised slavery allegories to absolve white guilt over the transatlantic slave trade. It examines the imperial fictions and post-racial slavery parables of Doctor Who. The liberal humanist whiteness of Doctor Who is most clearly laid bare in episodes that thematise the sins of European imperialism: slavery, genocide and dispossession. In the tenth version of Doctor Who, the most sustained engagement with slavery occurs in the three episodes, 'The Impossible Planet', 'Satan Pit' and 'Planet of the Ood', which feature the Ood: an alien species described as born to serve. The chapter illuminates the programme's 'structural opacities', how its colourblind universalism sustains and nourishes the boundaries of contemporary whiteness and colonial consciousness, and the fraught place of race in multicultural and, ostensibly, post-colonial Britain.