The aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Steiner calls the two main streams of Marxist criticism, of the 1960s and of the 1970s, the Engelsian Marxist criticism, which stresses the necessary freedom of art from direct political determinism. The Leninist Marxist criticism insists on the need for art to be explicitly committed to the political cause of the Left. This chapter outlines the key terms and concepts of the Marxist thinking on literature introduced by Louis Althusser. A STOP and THINK section helps readers ponder over how the nature of literature is influenced by the social and political circumstances in which it is produced. The chapter describes some critical activities of Marxists and presents an example of Marxist criticism, which mainly shows the Marxist critical activities.

The final profile makes the argument that at his finest, Peter Sellers had few equals in his portrayals of the vulnerable, the lonely and those desperate to maintain a social facade. His star character roles for British cinema in the eight years following The Ladykillers are remarkable for their diversity and their insight. A move to ‘international productions’ by the mid-1960s, combined with the actor’s health issues, resulted in a coarsening of his work, not least the self-indulgence of Casino Royale. His penultimate film Being There was yet another demonstration of the fallibility of the Academy Awards and the chapter ends with the contention that Sellers’s finest work was in Heaven’s Above!

Since the mid-twentieth century, much of the discussion of the medieval English peasantry has been determined by consideration of the overarching theme of population and the availability of resources relative to the peasant's capacity to cope in his or her world. It was the work of M.M. Postan which effected a crucial shift in the study of the medieval peasant by introducing a broad thesis of economic change based upon the relationship between population and resources. This chapter begins with a discussion of Postan's thesis of population movement before exploring it both in relation to his own views on the medieval English peasantry and, further, the application of that thesis by a generation of historians writing subsequent to Postan. This overview of Postan's work and its response summarises what can, with some justification, be described as the predominant explanatory model for the historiography of the medieval English peasantry.

François Hollande was elected as France’s second Socialist president in May 2012. By his mid-term in office, his presidency had broken all records in terms of unpopularity, and there was a widely diffused public perception of the individual being a poor fit for the accepted institutional role. The chapter interprets Hollande’s descent in terms of the ambiguities surrounding his election as a ‘normal’ president in 2012; the result of a particular style and discourse; the unintended consequences of the political responses to the terrorist attacks of 2015; the longer-term impact of economic crisis; and the failure to bring down unemployment. All of these factors recalled the weak political, partisan and sociological bases of Hollande’s support from the outset. The chapter considers in detail the events of 2016, which culminated in the decision not to stand as a candidate in the 2017 presidential election.

It was during the nineteenth century that specialist hospitals emerged, but medical specialisation was often ridiculed by general clinicians who took pride in having training and expertise that they felt equipped them to direct their skills at any kind of medical challenge. This chapter outlines the arguments put forward by those opposed to specialisation, tracing the evolution of the Royal Ear Hospital in London. It is a journey during which the scientific knowledge of the ear, and how to restore or improve its utility, made significant strides, but the hospital’s early battles evolved around establishing the medical credibility of its aural specialists. The chapter shows how specialist hospitals came to define the parameters of deafness as a disability or defect requiring a cure, how this perception has influenced wider societal views on the necessity of medical interventions ever since and how this is in stark contrast to counter views of deafness as a distinct cultural or linguistic identity.

John Howard, the prison reformer, was the first person to be consistently described as a ‘philanthropist’. He visited prisons throughout Britain and Europe, counting the steps down to ‘dungeons’, lambasting the sins of gaolers. In doing so he put his own life constantly at risk as gaol fever was endemic. The chapter centres on a proposal in 1786 to collect funds for a statue to Howard, even though the proposers knew that Howard would disapprove. From this point on philanthropy became a public, not simply a private, virtue. The aristocracy, William Pitt the prime minister, William Wilberforce and many other famous names contributed to the appeal for funds. Those raising money congratulated themselves on their own philanthropy: it was an expression of their own good feelings and above that of the nation. Howard put a stop to the proposal, but on his death in 1790 it was revived and in 1796 his statue, the first in the body of St Paul’s Cathedral, was unveiled. Howard was described as ‘the philanthropist’, his ‘god-like’ life celebrated. For a century future philanthropists were measured against Howard and found wanting. He himself counted the miles he travelled, not the considerable amount of money he gave.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is dedicated to Susan Reynolds and celebrates the work of a scholar whose views have been central to recent reappraisals of the position of the laity in the Middle Ages. It is arranged chronologically but is bound together by a series of themes and concerns. Those themes and concerns are hers: a medieval world in which the activity and attitudes of the laity are not obscured by ideas expressed more systematically in theoretical treatises by ecclesiastics; a world in which lay collective action and thought take centre stage. Susan Reynolds has written her own Middle Ages, especially in her innovative book Kingdoms and Communities. It is a world of overlapping communities or, as she would prefer it of 'collectivities' and 'solidarities'.

The ‘Excursus on The Stranger’ is one of the most influential sections of Georg Simmel’s Sociology (1908) and is examined in this chapter. Simmel describes with ‘the stranger’ a person who has come from elsewhere but stays, and is thereby close and remote at the same time, detached and attached: the stranger belongs and has a function but could probably leave any moment if s/he chose to.

Scholarship on the Christian defence of Jim Crow-era racial segregation has tended to downplay its similarities with antebellum support for slavery. The prevailing view is that religious apologies for segregation had little if anything in common with the robust pro-slavery arguments from Scripture developed in the nineteenth century. However, slavery apologists had compensated for the absence of biblical racism by interpreting one text (Genesis 9:20–7) in ways that would prove a boon to segregationists. Although the so-called curse of Ham would lose its appeal with the demise of slavery, proslavery interpreters’ habit of racialising Noah’s descendants made this section of Scripture of continued interest to racist Bible readers in the century after the Civil War. Understood as a narrative disclosure of God’s will for distinct ethnic groups in the postdiluvian dispensation, Genesis 9–11 became basis for a biblical defence of Jim Crow. Surveying examples from both elite and non-elite contexts makes it possible to identify the dominant forms and persistent themes of a ‘distinction and dispersal’ tradition of biblical interpretation that reveals surprising connections between the religious defences of slavery and segregation.

In this period philanthropy stood highest in esteem. The Times moderated its stance. Newspapers praised Britain as a philanthropic nation. People wrote of their government as philanthropic in its foreign policy. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert devoted time and resources to much-praised philanthropy. But there were worries. The Social Science Association, with which philanthropy was at first closely aligned, distanced itself from it and became the voice for social reform. The Charity Organisation Society promoted scientific charity; its secretary, C. S. Loch, did not disguise his mistrust of philanthropy. Criticism was still unrelenting: ‘practical philanthropy’ was admired, but too much of it, according to the critics, was ‘spurious’ or ‘pseudo’. In 5 per cent philanthropy there was an attempt to help resolve housing problems but it came to be seen as a failure. Philanthropy was associated with the multiplicity of voluntary organisations to help the needy but they had spawned a body of ‘professional philanthropists’, who ran these organisations and were subjected to ridicule and dislike. Effeminacy became even more linked to philanthropy. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, three books by the era’s most eminent novelists had philanthropy directly in their sights: Middlemarch, The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

This chapter focuses on the first legal case to pursue recognition of a same-sex marriage. The case was launched by Irish citizens Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan, who were married in British Columbia after the legislation was implemented there. This section details how this case moved from a request to the Revenue Commissioners to be assessed as a married couple to a High Court case.

This chapter questions a standard narrative about the development of the scholarship on Stalinism: the narrative of a succession of generations, beginning with the totalitarian ‘fathers’ (and mothers) moving on to the revisionist sons and daughters, to find an historical endpoint in the post-revisionist ‘grandchildren.’ Instead, the chapter shows how different authors of these different approaches to the study of Stalinism both learned from each other and forgot or misrecognized this process of learning by declaring themselves new and superior to the previous generation of scholars.

This chapter shows how experiments can test a variety of strategies for mobilizing the vote in a Get Out the Vote campaign. There is a vast literature on getting citizens to engage politically, but could nudge offer some additional insights? This chapter reports on an experimental intervention about getting citizens to vote and reflects on its implications for stimulating citizen behaviour more generally.

This introduction establishes the French inflection of Italian modes and models in Shakespearean comedy as a compositional paradigm and the basis for an intertextual critical approach. After discussion of the broad theoretical principles of such an approach, The Taming of the Shrew is set off against its anonymous analogue, The Taming of a Shrew, so as to throw into relief the latter’s incorporation, in the key passage presenting the heroine’s acceptance of her ‘taming’, of a translation from Guillaume Du Bartas’s La création du monde. The intertextual dynamic thereby set in motion is then applied to Shakespeare’s text, with attention to the different interpretative possibilities thereby made available, given the uncertain relation between the two plays with regard to chronology and authorship.