African medical culture adjusted and adapted to needs created by increasing mobility, particularly by migrant workers and carriers. Malawian migrants could take protective, curative and luck medicines, and resort to both African and Western practitioners, as well as Christian and Islamic prayers. The changing medical culture was gendered: while early migrant and Christian networks were largely dominated by men. Membership of Christian networks was, particularly for Protestant men, a precondition of Western medical education and for mobility far beyond colonial Malawi. Attention to networks and nexuses, which could both enable and restrict access to medicines, helps us to better understand how medicine and colonialism were entangled. The inequality of colonial mobility at the turn of the century was starkly evident in the use of the machila. Africans carried Europeans for the health, comfort and speedy travel of the latter, while the carriers were subjected to physical strain, jiggers and injuries.

The Malawian-British Protestant medical mission networks were at their most significant between the 1890s and the 1940s, a period that witnessed considerable growth in the agency of Protestant African intermediaries, particularly trained medical middles. The role of African mediators and middle figures in Malawian-British networks increased with the expansion of medical education. Mission networks offered, albeit on a limited scale, avenues through which some Africans could acquire medical knowledge, competence and recognition, new identities as medical middles and practitioners, and novel forms of mobility in the colonial world. Within these networks there were important interplays and tensions between spiritual and secular medicine. As Western medicine became more professionalised, specialised and hospital-based, the part-time medical practice available at most mission stations proved disappointing to many doctors. A spiritual dimension was also integral to the practice of 'herbalist' medicine: knowledge about medicines might come through dreams, from ancestors or through spirit possession.

This chapter explores some of the history that led to the belated breakthrough of Black and Asian British comedy, looking at the production of jokes about race and colour, and questioning what these jokes tell us about British multiculturalism. It questions the ways in which jokes about Black and Asian minorities functioned in a period of overwhelming white control. The chapter looks at one early attempt to give voice to Black British comedy, the production of London Weekend Television's (LWT) family comedy, The Fosters, in 1976-1977. By focusing on employment rather than the racial conflict, The Fosters attempted to speak to the primary challenges of the Black community as seen from within. The series also focuses on cross-generational conflict and, in particular, disagreements between first and second generation Black Britons, a theme which went on to dominate much Black and Asian-written television and theatre in Britain.

The conventional ghost-story attention to footsteps on the staircase is inverted and intensified; the legacy of Sheridan Le Fanu is adapted to the spiritual conditions of systematic bereavement and impersonalised killing. The horror of the blitz was the absence of weapons: people fell down dead, killed either by explosions of air or by the components of their dwellings. This chapter discusses the notion that, under the blitz, Londoners came together in an amalgamating way, people wishing to be a people in some tribal and bond-reinforcing way. The indefinite article attempts to inscribe this wish, but visibly relies on italic emphasis. Other images for the condition either reflect the earlier Wordsworthian allusion to earth's dense maintenance of the dead or repeat a feature of Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway's earlier union.

This chapter focuses on two personae in the Victorian period as having particular relevance for Gothic fiction: the dandy and the cross-dressed or 'manly' woman. It explores the twentieth-century understanding of the relationship between dandies and freaks. Dandyism was an important influence on Gothic even when not directly represented within it, as its emphasis on the surface embodied in the charismatic, amoral male crystallises many of the genre's pre-existing characteristics. James I. Walpole's camp nostalgia, which led him to affect elaborate archaisms in his dress as well as collect kitsch antiquities, can be thought of as an antecedent of Aestheticism if not necessarily of dandyism proper. Dandyism and female cross-dressing, connected through their parallel negotiations with existing gender roles, constitute the specific fashion technologies through which the Gothic surface is articulated. Nevertheless, not only gender but also class and colonialism are implicated in the attendant narratives.

Le Fanu published two short stories in The Dublin University Magazine; set in County Limerick and seventeenth-century Milan respectively, 'Ultor de Lacy' and 'Borrhomeo the Astrologer' indicate a breadth of reference which also impresses. These two unacknowledged stories of 1861-2 should be read as part of an anxious Victorian reconsideration of major theological and political themes. With its glimpse of Elizabethan massacre 'Ultor de Lacy' remains an isolated item in Le Fanu's writing. The purported incident upon which it is based is of the kind chronicled in Thomas Stafford's Pacata Hibernica. Ultor De Lacy was neither the butcher of 1601 nor the victim of Ultor O'Donnell's supernatural revenge. He lived between these savage events, implicated in the 1745 Jacobite rising it is true, but a middling fellow, a central character in that apparently immunising sense.

This chapter investigates people’s preparations for their own deaths and their sense of responsibility toward those who had already died. Although they sometimes feared death, people did not despair, for they also believed that death was not the end of a person: while the body was part of this world and therefore material and apt to decay, the soul was eternal. With sections on the fear of death, the idea of a ‘good death’, and the importance of remembrance, this chapter shows that Scottish townspeople made arrangements for their own souls to pass as painlessly as possible into a blessed eternity, and that they attended to the souls of those already deceased, especially to the souls of their blood kin and their civic brethren.

This chapter traces the major people, dates, and places of Charles Robert Maturin's life. Critical suspicion of Maturin is evident in early studies of the Irish novel in which Maturin is very often dismissed as a mere imitator of Owenson, with questionable literary skill at best. More recently, work on Irish literature gestures towards an acknowledgement of Maturin's literary importance. This more often than not confirms his peripheral position in the annals of Irish literary history by reproducing him as a marginal figure. In this respect, Irish literary history has largely erased Maturin's existence from the central narrative of early nineteenth-century Irish literature, thereby effectively 'un-Maturin(ing)' Irish Romantic literature and its historiography. In so doing, twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism has produced and supported a general cultural ignorance when it comes to Maturin and the details of his life.

This chapter looks at various theoretical discussions about the meaning of democracy, political participation and civic engagement, social capital, community, civil society and public value. Social and political changes do not simply happen, but need an agency to drive them. For D. Beetham, the agency that best fits the bill is the political party. The social capital has the potential to shape and enhance formal political participation and broader forms of civic engagement. In the UK context, at one end of the scale the social capital might include some women's groups and groups made up of specific ethnic identities. At the other end of the scale we might include the Freemasons and golf clubs with high membership fees. Linked to the concepts of social capital and community is the idea of civil society. The discussion of public value relates directly to notions of civic engagement and community.

Graeme Turner's judgement of the place and significance of the period films produced during the revival re-emphasises several key issues already acknowledged in relation to the Ocker comedies and the Australian Gothic. The film credited with inspiring the cycle of period films, and with endowing the new Australian cinema with an aesthetic maturity belying its age, was Picnic at Hanging Rock. Picnic's basis in the Gothic and its extension of its director's interest in alienating subjective experience underline the film's adoption of a period setting in order to offer a critique of authority within a fantasy-horror format. Fred Schepisi's films which use the period setting focus on male experience of intolerance and oppression, and refuse to temper their criticism of prevailing attitudes through simplification of issues or prettification of mise-en-scene. Sirens achieves a belated revival of the period film cycle, while developing the themes of its writer-director.

In The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam is attracted to the darker sense of the fairy tale, understanding it as a suitable genre for mature children and open-minded adults. Bob McCabe had already produced Dark Knights and Holy Fools, a critical survey of Gilliam's films up to Fear and Loathing, and would put together The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons. The book that came from Gilliam's request, Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood, offers a sobering account of the tribulations Gilliam underwent in making The Brothers Grimm. Tideland takes Gilliam into new territory, the world of Gothic horror, and he claimed that in Tideland, Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho. There are elements of the Gothic in The Brothers Grimm, but that film's comic undertones relieve the tension, which builds menacingly in Tideland.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents acts of hybrid theorization from across the world, from figures within societies colonized by the British, French, and Spanish empires who sought an end to their colonial status or important modifications to it. It includes a diverse array of case studies as a step towards conceptualizing the character of the exchanges, including instances in which the colonized sought to reverse the direction in which ideas flowed. The book covers the well- known case of the Haitian Revolution. It begins in London, with a figure familiar to political theorists for his involvement in colonial projects: John Stuart Mill. The book treats an Indian writer who ultimately, seemingly paradoxically, endorsed British colonialism, which he saw could be an instrument for overcoming Brahmin domination at home.

Historicizing Gothic writing implies a narrative of descent, of change over time. Michel Foucault's theory of discourse will enable the readers to gain an historical purchase on Gothic writing. There are two related ways in which circularity arises to balk the theorist. First, he or she may find that their theory is predicated on the very 'gap' they seek to historicize. Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytical readings are particularly vulnerable here in that they read the repression on which their theories are based back into Gothic texts, thus closing the hermeneutic circle. Foucault instructs us to see the atavistic as circumscribed within the discursive practices of the new. In both Madness and Civilization and The History of Sexuality the specificity of the Gothic moment arises from the clash of incommensurate 'archives'.