In his 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare uses ekphrasis to explore a shift in the early modern understanding of history. Of the many changes he made to the Lucrece story, he added a 200-line ekphrasis of a picture depicting the fall of Troy. While appearing at first glance to celebrate the idea of an illusionistic experience that makes the past seem fully alive, Shakespeare’s ekphrasis draws our attention to the fragmented things that supposedly evoke this fantasy – the ‘thousand lamentable objects’. In so doing, Shakespeare explores a new notion of history that is built from material fragments. These fragments are silent, but in a manner that is paradoxically expressive. In Shakespeare’s ekphrasis, Lucrece relates to the image of Hecuba not despite its brokenness and objectness, but rather because of them. The poem in this way constructs an early modern encounter where broken subject meets broken object.

Films invariably come to completion only after considerable creative struggle and because this chapter concerns the processes of change that take place once a film goes into production, the nature of those changes and the extent to which they are commonly resolved during the editing process. Many films begin shooting using a version of the script which is not necessarily considered to be final. During the shoot, there will be rewrites of the script that are intended to improve, clarify, embellish or shorten the dialogue, and rewrites that omit scenes considered inessential and therefore removed to accommodate an overstretched shooting schedule. To give an example of the way that a section of script can be changed and developed before it becomes a scene in the finished film, the chapter uses a fragment from a two-part television drama, Comics, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence from a script by Lynda La Plante.

Chapter 6 demonstrates that Syria is not simply a case of misinterpretation, but one in which the taboo has intensified the conflict. The conflict is worse and more violent as a direct consequence of using the taboo as the basis of US foreign policy. It looks at the physically and politically destructive ways in which the taboo has fed the tensions underpinning the crisis, specifically where these are identified as effects that would not have occurred had the taboo not been prioritised above all other concerns. The chapter then concludes with a more comprehensive analysis of how the taboo is detrimental to international politics and whether it should even be kept as part of IR discourse.

The introduction defines and distinguishes different types of recycled artefacts. It begins with a reading of the Old English lyric The Ruin that demonstrates interest of Anglo-Saxons in incomplete objects from the past that inspire literary imaginings. It then turns to the role of relics in the Middle Ages in order to interpret the dream vision, The Dream of the Rood. Finally, it provides evidence for preponderance of spolia, both architectural and textual, in medieval England and on the Continent. The introduction argues that ruins, relics, and spolia shape Old English poetry in similar ways because they complicate the boundaries between temporal layers (present/past/future), the global and the local, the textual and the visual, and the animate and the inanimate.

In this chapter, I make the case for pragmatic readings of social and political life as opposed to those associated with agonism (as developed by Chantal Mouffe and others). Drawing on evidence that demonstrates how the experience of working across difference to re-open a school building in New Orleans both grounded participants’ political commitments and altered them, I argue that agonistic theory is limited by its inattention to the lived experience of negotiating difference and by its assumptions regarding the futility of doing so in non-adversarial ways. In contrast, Deweyan pragmatism offers a useful counterpoint by centralising experience and emphasising the value of learning from engagements across difference. A Deweyan lens trains scholarly attention on the knowledge people create as they work across difference to understand and shape their own circumstances. In so doing, it encourages scholars to grapple with the limitations of their own expertise and points to potentially transformative practices that might otherwise be ignored.

This chapter considers the proems of land charters that evoke the angelic rebellion. After providing an overview of the legal outlook surrounding treachery and rebellion from the age of Alfred – whose legal reforms sought to establish that landed entitlements were privileges descending from kings – onwards, I consider this social context alongside Genesis A, a vernacular poem that includes a striking episode detailing earthly creation alongside the doctrine of replacement using distinctly legal terminology. The connection between the charters and the biblical story thus allow us to see how notions of replacement may have had physical, earthly repercussions, and how new modes of sovereignty emerged through a growing reliance on biblical authority.

Lance Comfort has been shamefully neglected in the standard histories of British cinema, which have tended to be dominated by the work of major figures to an extent which obscures beguiling work done in less obviously prestigious areas of the field. His work exhibits strengths in categories that have been habitually undervalued in the discourse on British cinema: melodrama, genre film-making and the 'B' film have only very recently been given overdue attention. Actually, the word 'reappraisal' is a misnomer since Comfort has never had serious appraisal, even when he was the 'busiest film director' in Britain in the early 1940s. The rehabilitation of his critical reputation may depend on further work in melodrama and on an openness to the possibility of finding rewards in the too-often dismissed category of the 'B' film.

Political liberalization allowed people in Aceh and Papua to express long-suppressed grievances and aspirations. Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, the 'outlying' provinces of Aceh and Papua have caused great concern to Indonesia's national security planners. This chapter aims to provide an assessment of the Indonesian state's approach to security in these territories. In the midst of the intensely conflict-ridden and securitized political climates found in these territories, there is space for the imagination of alternative conceptions of human security by local communities, as well as room for their application in practice. The internal separatist threat is invariably linked in the security discourse to external threats to Indonesia's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The authority of the regime depended upon the cultivation of a constant state of anxiety and insecurity that 'penetrated profoundly into the everyday activities of ordinary Indonesians'.

The comedy of Charlie Chaplin uses both dramatic and structural irony as the basis of its humour. The period of filmmaking that spans the ending of the First World War and the coming of sound was one of the most innovative in terms of developing style and form. This chapter first explores some of the fundamental aspects of the silent film in order to provide a context for an examination of the films that were made during this most important and innovative period of filmmaking. The films examined are D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan, Hans Janowitz's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and F. W. Murnau's Faust. Increased social stability in Germany encouraged a move away from morbid, psychological expressionist themes of the early 1920s towards a more realist presentational style.

Chapter 5 focuses primarily on the problems faced by Prime Minister Wilson in his struggle to keep his party united. Following Macmillan’s failed attempt at EEC entry, Wilson also found himself facing not only US pressure to apply for membership, but also from the pro-European right-wingers in his party. Having been seen to have strongly supported Gaitskell’s passionate speech opposing EEC membership, Wilson needed to be able to make an application without on the one hand appearing to shift his position on Europe, and on the other hand attempting to maintain party unity for electoral advantage. During this period, WiIson also faced the difficulty of combating leadership challenges from Roy Jenkins and James Callaghan. For both Macmillan’s and Wilson’s respective applications, the conditions of entry were inextricably linked with party management, with both leaders lacking total commitment to Europe. Wilson also used pressure from the CBI for Britain to join the EEC to his own advantage. As a consequence of his application, Wilson gained the support of British business.