Several Australian films of the 1990s incorporate Gothic elements, and often exaggerate the irony, black humour and reflexive characteristics exhibited by Gothic films of the 1970s and 1980s. Death in Brunswick adopts the Gothic sensibility wholeheartedly in its blackly humorous portrait of individual inadequacy, family authority and racial tension. A superior rendition of formative experience, which combines the rite of passage with the Gothic and the period film, is found in Celia. Having been made with the assistance of the Australian Film Finance Corporation (AFFC), Death in Brunswick went on to become the second highest grossing Australian film at the home box office in 1991. Muriel's Wedding is centred in the rite of passage formal. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert extends the motifs of personal growth allied to travel seen in Muriel's Wedding by adhering closely to the road movie genre.

Best known of the five long tales of Sheridan Le Fanu which make up In a Glass Darkly is 'Carmilla'. The tale is a covert account of lesbianism, lusciously filmed with Ingrid Pitt and Kate O'Mara under the title The Vampire Lovers. Even so exotic a collection as In a Glass Darkly, with its German-writing exegete-behind-the-narrator and its continental locations, includes a sharp delineation of Georgian Dublin in The Familiar. 'German Ghosts and Ghost Seers' is likely one of Le Fanu's earliest sources for the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg. The ghostly Ferris must be treated as an influence upon the author of Uncle Silas and In a Glass Darkly. The stories of In a Glass Darkly arise, in several ways, from Dr Martin Hesselius's archive, and the variety of narrative-perspectives adopted in turn complicates the much-mediated relation between reader and character.

This chapter not only provides a general account of Afghanistan’s past but focuses on the history of the humanitarian-military relationship prior to the 2001 invasion. It uses the framework developed in Chapter 3 in analyzing the recent history of Afghanistan within the context of humanitarian-military relations. Three elements – technology, strategy and ethics – were established as historical drivers contributing to a close relationship between humanitarians and the military. This chapter traces five periods (from 1945-2001) which will be examined in light of these three elements.

The first part of this chapter compares three paintings of racing cyclist produced across Europe in quick succession during 1912–13. The works are by the expressionist Lyonel Feininger, the cubist Jean Metzinger and the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni. The second half of the chapter looks at responses to motor-racing from Germany, Italy and France. Starting with the futurist F. T. Marinetti’s notorious infatuation with the motorcar, the chapter then considers the importance of the automobile to the purist project of Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant. The chapter concludes by looking at a pair of articles that Werner Graeff wrote for the journal G. Although there are many similarities between Graeff’s attitude and those of the purists, it is Graeff who is most uncompromising in his vision of a modern artist-engineer.

The drafting and submission of the cahiers de doléances had helped to establish the principle that some form of popular participation would be crucial to the new politics in France. Those cahiers offered an opportunity to assess where the 'education question' stood at the start of the French Revolution. They also gave a reminder that the process of reading, writing, and circulating political views was central to the dynamics of revolutionary politics from their very start. This chapter is based upon a review of hundreds of letters, reports, and pieces of correspondence sent to the National Assembly, the departmental authorities in the Haute Garonne, and the municipal authorities in Toulouse. These letters revealed political and pedagogical authorities, teachers, students, and members of a broader public trying to understand, navigate, and contribute to the Revolution and articulate and foster a collective 'mentalité révolutionnaire'.

This chapter focuses on local services and their impact on strengthening civic engagement and local communities. It also focuses on central government policy. The chapter presents the analysis of new approaches by local authorities to service delivery. It analyses the extent to which potential for effective civic engagement was realised by focusing on three policy areas: crime and community safety; privatisation, marketisation and the choice agenda; and finally the emerging concept of the 'big society' and localism. The chapter reviews the role of the private sector such as banks and building societies, local post offices and community pubs, and the part it plays in providing local services. It further examines the various local service initiatives that have been developed out of the social enterprise and voluntary sectors and the local community. These include credit unions and community-run shops.

Charles Robert Maturin's second novel, The wild Irish boy, is very much aware of its ghostly inheritance. This chapter examines Maturin's novel as something more than a mere 'opportunistic imitation' of Sydney Owenson. In The wild Irish boy, Maturin produces a conglomerate novel, an intriguing mixture of society novel, national tale, Gothic novel, and early stirrings of both the Silver Fork novel and the roman a clef. This attests to and underlines the fractured nature of contemporary Irish fiction and society. Maturin's inclusion of a 'The wild Irish girl' costume further comments on Owenson's well-documented habit of appearing in public dressed as Glorvina and performing as her famous Irish princess. The heavy intertextuality of Maturin's novel, including its references to Owenson and The wild Irish girl, participate in a specific act of masculinisation undertaken by a 'purposeful borrowing from, resistance to, and remaking of, female-authored models'.

This chapter presents an analysis of the concept of sustainability, its application to local communities and what criteria have to be met if we are to achieve sustainable communities. The challenge for sustainable development lies in attaining the appropriate balance between the three components such as the environmental, the social and the economic. The chapter focuses on the key strategies at both the national and local level to regenerate local areas and communities. It also focuses on both physical and social regeneration. The chapter also presents an analysis of various local initiatives to tackle climate change, a key element of the strategy to create sustainable local communities. The issue of climate change is one that has global, national and local ramifications and encapsulates well the idea of the global to the local.

This chapter traces the genealogy of a particular strand, the 'Gothic aesthetic', where a chivalric past was idealized at the explicit expense of a classical present. It deals with a Foucauldian genealogy dealing in the descent of discourses which inform Gothic writing. The Gothic aesthetic declares its discursive nature through its claims to know proper writing, writing as it ought to be. The Letters on Chivalry and Romance may have been read as a manifesto for the Gothic romance, but the essays reveal the discursive tensions underlying the Gothic aesthetic. The pedagogic consequences of ideal presence in the Gothic aesthetic are evident in Clara Reeve's The Progress of Romance. In the Gothic pastoral, the primitivist ideal projected onto the past is always stalked by its shadow, its dark opposite.

The authors discuss the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Claude-Adrien Helvétius and debate over female education and the gendered foundations of the social order. Rousseau and Helvétius, among those most closely associated with Enlightenment ideas about the importance and influence of education, saw the prospect of meaningful educational reform as little more than a fantasy in Ancien Régime France. Émile gives us good reason to think that Rousseau saw his project as divorced from the sorts of social, institutional, and practical concerns that emerged with the Jesuits' expulsion. Combining radically sensationist views of the mind with a utilitarian approach to politics, Helvétius's works presented a world in which education was saturated with social and political significance, and social and political circumstances were inescapably educative. His points were central to his 1758 work, De l'Esprit and De l'Homme.