The four poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3, are untitled in the manuscript, but titled by modern editors, in manuscript order Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poems testify that he was cultivated, with an appreciation of the finer points of chivalric life, and also deeply religious - a cleric, no doubt, given the poet's biblical knowledge, his interest in Christian doctrine, and his understanding of sermon style. This chapter considers these poems, taking account of relevant literary and intellectual contexts where the poems signpost them, especially the Bible. Between them they see God, implicitly, in terms of the traditional opposition between his justice and his mercy, an opposition often expressed in literature by the motif of the debate of the four daughters of God, which has the personified Justice and Truth arguing for divine justice, Mercy and Peace for divine mercy.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, one of the pioneers of sociology in the USA, formulated in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903) a powerful argument on identity in modern society. He describes post-emancipation Afro-Americans as ‘born with a veil’ as they are only indirectly able to gain consciousness of themselves, namely through the eyes of the others who despise them; at the same time, though, the resulting ‘double consciousness’ of being both of and not of this society, can be turned into an advantage: the broken, indirect and precarious vision may see more and deeper. Du Bois talks about more than cognition and epistemology, though: both the African and the American strive to be ‘co-workers’ in the ‘kingdom of culture’. Overcoming ‘the color-line’ is indispensable to the creation of a better, modern, human and humane civilization.

This chapter describes some events that are well attested in the reign of Henry IV. The king's suppression of the Yorkshire risings and his successful reassertion of royal authority on the northern march are proved to be vital turning points that allowed a crisis-ridden regime to assume some appearance of permanence. A movement of protest at the disorder prevalent in the region, led by the archbishop, which sought to articulate the grievances of the citizens and clergy of York in politically acceptable terms. The chapter looks at the narrative sources for the risings and shows that an informed reading, which pays due attention to their rhetorical structure and polemical purpose, can support such an interpretation of events. It also examines how political defiance, one that united significant elements of the shire's nobility, gentry, clergy and townsmen into a single movement, became both possible and justified.

The chapter offers a description of the form and function of the cad in British popular culture and his post-war incarnation as the former ‘temporary gentleman’. The diverse approaches to Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips are discussed, together with their rise to stardom. With the former, Major Hitchcock of the Boulting brothers’ Private’s Progress was a one-man deconstruction of the narrative of Second World War heroism. Phillips achieved film stardom courtesy of Peter Rogers/Gerald Thomas comedies and, subsequently, the Betty Box/Ralph Thomas Doctor series. As memoires of the Second World War began to rescind, the chapter ends with a discussion of how Phillips made the conscious decision to change his screen image and how illness prevented Thomas from accepting the role of Prospero in Derek Jarman’s version of The Tempest.

Americans did not initially view the Constitution’s commitments to freedom of speech and press as individual, counter-majoritarian rights, standing over and against the structural, democratic directives of the American constitution. Instead, they held an alternative theory: to have the status of a free person (a liber homo) is to live in a free state, such that one has a set of fundamental liberties secured from relationships of dependence, which in turn requires some exercise of control over one’s government so that the institutions necessary for one’s political independence (e.g. courts, legislatures, executives) do not themselves become sources of oppression. Political liberty, they argued, is rooted in an analysis of what it means to speak of being a free person, a member of a free society living in a free state. In making this argument, Americans were reaching back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European debates regarding freedom of speech and press within free states, in contrast to monarchies, but doing so in a revolutionary context and expanding public sphere. The effect of inserting this argument into the American ratification debates was to establish for Americans the premise necessary to justify continuous, organised, oppositional political speech. Where political parties and the speech of factious men were once viewed as antithetical to responsible republican self-government, the development of the idea of legitimate contestatory, fiery speech, as part and parcel of party opposition within a constitutional democracy, marked a new turn in the history of American political thought.

This chapter explores representations of impairment and disability in the ‘Literary Realism’ writings of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and investigates a different medium of popular perceptions and representations of disability, that of popular fiction. Criticism addressing the use of disabled characters in Victorian fiction frequently acknowledges how such characters function by invoking feelings of sympathy, both within the narrative and in readers. However, Deerbrook’s Maria Young and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss reverse our expectations: rather than being the subjects of observation and sympathy, they operate as model observers of the world around them. In this, they differ from the stereotypical role assigned to disabled characters in other Victorian novels and seek to follow one of the guiding principles of Literary Realism, the accurate portrayal of daily life, rather than some romanticised notion.

By the time of his death. Sidney James was an almost instantly recognisable figure yet his image as a ‘jovial cockney’ was only one aspect of his career. Within two years of his arrival in the UK from South Africa, James was cast by the Archers in The Small Back Room, establishing his career as one of British cinema’s most versatile character players. A supporting role in Ealing’s The Lavender Hill Mob resulted in his being cast in Hancock’s Half Hour and by 1959 Tony Hancock and Sidney James were regarded by many of their audience as an unofficial double act. Finally, James’s work in the Carry On films is considered with reference to his becoming regarded as a British ‘icon’.

The role of peasants as participants in markets and as distinctive players in the medieval English economy has been emphasised by a number of historians. Marxist historians writing either side of the Second World War argued for a peasant economy that was, in its development, principally influenced by lordship and which was certainly not determined in the greater part by the market or commerce. The chapter sets out the ways in which the market has often tended to be set aside in discussion of the medieval peasant. It examines the adoption of new approaches to the study of the medieval English economy. Central features of this approach are: an awareness of the potentially significant impact of peasant economic endeavour on medieval gross domestic product and a reconsideration of the role of commerce, including rural trade and peasant economic activity, in effecting and indeed driving change in the medieval English economy.

The introduction discusses various challenges facing France’s political institutions and party system on the eve of the country’s 2017 presidential election. It presents the specifically French angle of the more general phenomenon of rising mistrust in political institutions and political parties and the capacity of political leadership to restore trust. It reviews these phenomena through the prisms of institutional adaptation, political and party competition and changing public opinion. The period of observation lay in and around the 2017 French presidential and parliamentary elections. The introduction provides an overview of the challenged institutional order of the Fifth Republic, the crisis of existing political parties and the threat posed by new movements. It concludes with Macron’s election as president and the accompanying claim that France is back.

Over the last ten years or so, a culture of war has returned to prominence in English- speaking societies, and war has broken out again as a favoured topic in the criticism of early modern English drama. This chapter recalls that the discourse of early modern (if not modern) warfare almost invariably turns on a religious axis at bottom, the rhetoric of crusade on the paradoxical premise that the exercise of power over life and death is human practice but divine prerogative. The Catholic 'tyrants' and Tamburlaine's hegemony that extends to the feminine sphere in and through Zenocrate, are discussed. The chapter proposes that perhaps the most culturally prominent instance of a combined metaphysical and military narrative, the biblical encounter between the Jewish heroine Judith and the Assyrian general Holofernes, hovers in the background of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays.

This chapter recounts the life, times, works and influence of Richard Pipes, a major historian of the Soviet experience. It shows how his life as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe, and his trauma at surviving the Holocaust, structured his later scholarship as a historian of Russia. It examines the development of his oeuvre, his life as a scholar, policy adviser and pundit, and his influence on the field of studying nation and empire under Stalin and under the Soviet regime more generally.

Chapter 3 examines the influence of Personalism on the development of the Strategic Hamlet Campaign, which served, during the First Republic, as one of the primary instruments in the struggle against the insurgency. Contrary to conventional account of the latter, the program was not simply a totalitarian technique of mass repression. Rather, it was devised as a radical program of “social revolution” (cách mạng xã hội), aimed at transforming the entire economic and political structure of South Vietnamese society. This social revolution, moreover, was not only directed against the insurgency, but also against capitalism and liberal democracy, as Western institutions that the leaders of the First Republic regarded as a legacy of colonialism. In light of the anti-capitalist character of the early South Vietnamese state, the chapter contends that the war, in this early phase, was not simply a conflict between communism and democracy, but as a contest between two different forms of anti-colonial communism.

Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature. This chapter begins by discussing Sigmund Freud's major ideas related to psychoanalysis. It then explains how Freudian interpretation works. A STOP and THINK section in the chapter helps readers understand the logic of Freudian interpretation. Freud's misreading is seen in the case study usually known simply as 'Dora'. The chapter concentrates on a dream which she related to Freud in the course of the treatment. It lists some activities of Freudian psychoanalytic critics and Lacanian critics, and provides examples of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism and Lacanian criticism. Comparing the Freudian and Lacanian examples will make it immediately apparent that there is an immense gulf between these two approaches, even though they both stem from the same original body of Freudian theory.

From the very beginning of his mandate, Macron has been more than a traditional French foreign policy president; he is representative of a global Macron brand, admired elsewhere, a model of youthful, reformist and intentional political leadership. Macron symbolises renewal on the international scene, as well as domestically, being the most prominent of a new generation of world leaders including Canada’s Justin Trudeau. The generational effect has spilled over from domestic to foreign policy, inspiring the young president to enter into a world dialogue with other young people. Finally, Macron also stands apart from his predecessors insofar as celebrity politics has spilled over into the international sphere, with Brigitte Macron a key part of the presidential toolkit. Are domestic styles and remedies transferable to the European and international scene? The first year of Macron’s presidency was rather inconclusive in this respect.

After reflecting on the screen and television image of Diana Dors towards the end of her career, this chapter goes on to contend that her dramatic abilities were visible from the outset of her film career. In addition to a discussion of the limitations of the Rank Organisation and the British film industry when confronted by such an individual talent, there is a further examination of attitudes towards female sexuality during the 1950s. Yield to the Night is evaluated as a key film in both Dors’s career and prurient societal attitudes towards those film stars who apparently revelled in their publicity. The latter section of the chapter describes how Diana Dors created some memorable performances amid some of the worst efforts of exploitation in the film industry.