Charles Robert Maturin's fiction, with its explicit use of Gothic themes and motifs, provides a perfect window into the continued influence of the Gothic novel in Irish Romantic fiction. A revenant-like figure, Maturin continues to exert something akin to the 'horrible fascination' attributed to the 'unearthly glare' of his living-dead creation. A kind of ghost lurking in the corridors of Irish literature and literary history, Maturin is very much a Derridean spectre haunting literary production in Romantic Ireland and beyond. The violence of the past, even when acknowledged, will always form the bulk of the Irish individual's social inheritance. Similarly, previous literary forms will continue to influence, however subtly, later literary texts long after they have ostensibly died away. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts of this book.

Incomprehension suffered by Ireland and its people at the close of Women; or pour et contre has been a frequent response to Charles Robert Maturin's fifth and most famous novel, Melmoth the wanderer. As Maturin wrote Melmoth, Ireland became, in essence, 'symbolically spread' throughout the novel by way of the paratext. Despite the geographical and temporal differences between tales, as well as the huge cast of characters, the composite stories repeat, reflect, and mirror each other. Such repetition and reflection constructs Melmoth's various tales as, in effect, a house of mirrors, a convoluted maze of mirrors around which the fairgoer-cum-reader must navigate to find the exit/conclusion. Recalling earlier Gothic novels by way of its interpolated tales, Melmoth contains repeated direct references to both the Gothic novel as a form and specific examples of the Gothic novel.

Matthew Lewis's The Monk begins with an apparent non sequitur. The Monk's subversion of sensibility may have panicked Ann Radcliffe into a riposte, one imposing closure on Lewis's worrying gaps, but it also prompted a reassessment of her earlier work. Radcliffe's reassertion of the denotative function of language pulls The Italian back towards naturalism, as is evident from her stress on the veridical genealogy of her text. Radcliffe's development of the female Gothic sublime and interiority may be seen as examples of self-fulfilling exercises of power within a 'despotic' context; The Italian differs in trying to analyse that context. Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: Or, The Moor, is in two respects a female version of Lewis's The Monk. A woman, Victoria di Loredani, occupies Ambrosio's role, while the sexual politics of the Gothic are viewed from a feminist perspective.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the feminist stakes of women artists in the United States and Britain. It analyses how three artists, Adrian Piper, Nancy Spero, and Mary Kelly, worked with the visual dimensions of language to transform how women are perceived. The book focuses on aggression and traces how its repression plays out across Spero's Codex Artaud and Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. It also traces how Solanas deploys language as a weapon capable of 'cutting up' patriarchal authority. The book shows how her history as a feminist lesbian of the 1960s helps evoke a historical milieu that brings the stakes of Codex Artaud into sharp relief. It argues that in Post-Partum Document, texts and pieces of writing become fetish objects that Kelly arranges into visual and linguistic 'poems' that forestall a confrontation with loss.

This chapter provides historical background to the case study analysed in subsequent chapters by looking at the historical events that led to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. It offers a summary of how the Scottish constitutional issue developed particularly in the second half or the 20th century, the movement for devolution in the 1990s, the establishment and the first decade of the devolved Scottish parliament, up until the 2011 Scottish election, which instigated the independence referendum. It also discusses definitions of Scottish identity and their role in claims for Scottish independence. It then maps out the media landscape in Scotland and the media’s ideological positions in relation to autonomy.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book examines Terence Fisher as a director dependent on and at ease with the industrial and collaborative nature of film-making. Praised by David Pirie in the early 1970s as a Gothic auteur, he has since come to be seen as the reactionary face of British horror against which more radical and innovative approaches can be defined. The book presents Fisher as a more complex figure than this, as not entirely the auteur identified by Pirie but neither the wholly reactionary film-maker imagined by others. Isabel Cristina Pinedo has suggested that Hammer horror forms a transitional stage between 'classical horror' and more modern forms of horror. Fisher's horror films perhaps represent more clearly than other Hammer horrors some of the tensions and uncertainties involved in this transition.

The opening pages of The House by the Church-yard are a dies irae, day of wrath, or even Day of Judgement for the Irish eighteenth century. In strict literary terms, The House by the Churchyard owes less to Scott than to the costume novels of Harrison Ainsworth, and also to the (anti-)puritan fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The innumerable elements and sub-elements into which The House by the Church-yard might be analysed are arranged in a centrifugal pattern precisely so as to screen from scrutiny the actual centre from which they issue. The House by the Church-yard combines two never wholly reconcilable aspects. It excavates the past, laying bare the evidence of deceit and homocide. It assimilates the past, transforming the ruddy-handed Eliabethan lord of creation into a dreamy paterfamilias or love-struck soldier.

Vancouver artists’ concerns with discourses of theatricality and female gendered spaces are argued as important links between the defeatured landscapes of the 1968-1971 period and the development of large narrative photographs after 1975. The importance of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to this historical thread are covered in detail, including the documented impact of his work Étant donnés: 1. La chute d/eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946-66) on Jeff Wall’s transition towards the tableau format. Using Étant donnés as a fruitful formal and conceptual segue, the feminist content in several of Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace’s works from the mid-to-late 1970s are analysed. This demonstrates how both artists actively integrated feminist theory and ideas into their visual work, even as they directed critical attention away from it by instead stressing their works relationship the history of European avant-garde critique within modernism.

Elizabeth Bowen's novel had a background of sexual irregularity but its eventual concentration on character largely excludes issues of 'gender-identity', opting instead for more thoroughly ontological questions. One has no desire to repatriate Bowen, but rather to explore her distinctive insight into the processes of dissolution, reformation and further dissolution which contribute to the seemingly solid notion of character. Yet one may feel that something more thoroughly radical is at work in Bowen's fiction, and nowhere is a radical attitude towards character more evident than in The Heat of the Day. Published in February 1949, but written during the war, this novel constitutes not only an interrogation of fictional character as a realistic device but also an expose of Irish or English identity as a fiction. In the distinctly more threatening situation of 1941, Bowen's fiction quite naturally admits more of the invasionary danger facing England.