A frequent topic in New Woman poetry concerns the dissolution of love and the disparate reactions that the loss generates. These fin de siècle poets appear more cognizant of the perils of romantic relationships than some earlier woman writers, likely in part because of the tumultuous times in which they lived. The poetry thus departs from the sentimentality of romantic relation¬ships found in earlier works. The chapter presents varied situations in which love does not thrive. There is no indication in the verses that the couples are married before a realization of a shared future is doomed. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first section presents the transformation of caring relationships to their cessation, whether physical or emotional. The second section recounts the many ways that connections are severed.

Several poems detailing the end of love rely on nature imagery to illustrate the downward progression of the relationship. One of the bleakest accounts is Mathilde Blind's “The Forest Pool,” which is filled with natural elements that no longer live. In E. Nesbit's “Song,” vibrant nature reflects the early days of contentment, and dead vegetation signals the bitter conclusion. “A May Song” by Violet Fane follows the decline of love over a lengthy span of time. Augusta Webster's “Farewell” features a couple who remain together but wholly estranged. Her “In After Years” questions whether the love that was once believed to exist was merely an illusion.

Broken connections dominate the second part of this chapter. Fane's “Divided” traces the divergent paths that the lovers take as their interests no longer mesh and cannot be reconciled. In Webster's “Once,” a woman realizes that she will never experience love again. The speaker's beloved in “Waiting,” also by Webster, has deserted her.

This chapter explores the notion of ‘living ghosts’; often vengeful revenants who track, stalk, haunt and terrorise the Western. The notion of the lone gunslinger as has already been discussed is a potent generic trope in the Western, and this chapter will explore the predatory counterpoint to this figure. Consider for instance, the mysterious spectre of Anton Chigurh ( Javier Bardem) in No Country for Old Men, a terrifying hitman, an unrelentingly chilling pursuant who, vampire-like, tracks down and kills his prey as they cling to the notion of survival. Such figures draw attention to the severity of the environment in the Western and they illuminate the fallacy of escape and security in the face of a grim, sinister fate. The chapter will consider the ways in which these ‘dead men walking’ haunt the neo-Western, drawing attention to the desolation of late-stage capitalism and its bleak environs. A good deal of these films are border narratives, and interstitial spaces are a fitting place for figures who haunt the Western. Jordan Savage draws attention to the strife that the imposition that borders create, in that they are a doomed attempt to bring order to a chaotic world, and intrinsic to imbalances of power. He states:

We will chart the cultural significance of these revenant, border inhabitants in the genre and select key case studies to highlight this significance. Historic and contemporary case studies will be compared in the context of the development of the Western as will the ways in which they circulate key themes in the genre such as morality, revenge and retribution.

The desire for freedom was articulated eloquently and abundantly in New Woman poetry as an aspect of social protest. With their own desire for personal freedom, New Women understood the importance of not being oppressed on a wider scale. Specific locales were not commonly included in the verse but instead the ideal of liberty in general received strong approba¬tion. Several topics were covered among the poems, emphasizing the impera¬tive to contest tyranny, the extensive spans of time needed for success, the difficulties of the quest for freedom, the honorable actions of past heroes, and the gift of liberty itself.

The first section of this chapter stresses that the acquisition of freedom proceeds along a laborious path. In “On the Road,” Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson) cautions that the struggle for liberty may extend far beyond the lives of its champions, who themselves will never enjoy its realization. L. S. Bevington's “In Memoriam” praises anarchists battling against enemies of freedom. Three verses by Eva Gore-Booth present various aspects of the ongoing struggle. Her “Defeated” cautions that a failure to suc¬ceed must be set aside and the fight must continue. “To Certain Reformers” praises the strength of women and urges them to join the cause in the contest for a better life. “Clouds” turns specifically to a saddened Ireland, anticipat¬ing that it will rise again as a free land. Also focusing on Ireland is Nora Hopper's “Silk of the Kine,” which maintains that the country will some¬day overcome England's domination. Isabella J. Southern argues in “The Progress of Liberty” that the painful quest for freedom will eventually bring victory.

This chapter explores the presentation of desire, both overtly and indirectly. To conservative Victorians, a woman's expression of desire was transgressive, even in the late century. New Women explored sexuality in their work and were widely attacked for so doing. The opening verses, by Michael Field, deploy landscape imagery to convey sensuality in both mythic and realis¬tic characterizations. Thereafter, the emphasis shifts to another deployment of nature imagery in depicting the intensity of the sea to represent human desire. The chapter concludes with poems in which the biological sex of the speaker, the addressee, or neither cannot be readily ascertained.

The two Field poems launching the first section both turn to Venus, situ¬ating her in sensualized landscapes to convey a woman's desire. The verses appeared in the 1892 Sight and Sound, which features poems about paintings. With her many connections to passion, fertility, and seduction, Venus pro¬vides an exceptional figure in associating sexuality with the terrain in which she is located. “The Sleeping Venus,” derived from a painting by Giorgione, makes the connection apparent in the portrayal of her naked form as if it were landscape itself. The Botticelli painting upon which “Venus and Mars” is based describes the mythological characters when their attraction leads to sexual satisfaction in their eroticized landscape. Subsequent Field poems turn to contemporaneous figures that are associated with natural imagery allied with sensuality. “Unbosoming” employs a fecund iris to illustrate the force of desire. “Ah me, if I grew sweet to man” adopts a frequent image throughout literary history to convey sexual interest. “Our myrtle is in flower” features the plant as an erotic site.

Introduction

On April 21, 2020, the chief of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “the world is on fight against a devil.” The UK Prime Minister said, we are waging the third world war. President Trump termed it as “our great enemy in an ‘allout war.’ “ War, Enemy, Devil, etc., are the metaphors extensively coined by the media in the fight against COVID-19. Well, this is helpful as a powerful pedagogy in alerting the public. It does help orient them to a collective sense of fear as well as a communal sense of required compromise with the otherwise difficult demands of conservative adjustments.

The philosophical problematic underneath this approach is that it altogether presents a radical binary by aligning the tiny semi-organism, virus, on the one side and the entire humanity with all its arsenal on the other. This sort of binary representation of the pandemic misses the true points as it does not do justice to an ontological vision of a holistic, interconnected vision of reality. A philosophical appropriation of the pandemic is still missing amidst the pandemonium caused by the pandemic. Well, after all philosophizing is not done in a do or die context. Now that the humanity has more or less reconciled itself with the prevalent pandemic and learned to cope with it, it is time to enhance this new found coping mechanism with a philosophical and theological framework that would also find some positivity in the pandemic.

My attempt here is to offer a scientifically informed theological framework, rooted on the metaphor of the Cosmic Christ, that may offer some sort of a positive appropriation of the pandemic. Rather than viewing the pandemic in binary epistemic categories as God's curse or as nature's revenge, what we need is a theological discourse reinstating the genesis testimony that everything that God created is good and beautiful.

Introduction

Following the presidential election in November 2019, Sri Lanka was gearing up for the parliamentary election in early 2020. Nonetheless, the country's 9th Parliament was elected on August 5, 2020. The election was delayed due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The election results demonstrated the rise of two new political configurations sidelining the two most dominant political parties in Sri Lanka, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which was only recently formed, won the election convincingly. Another newly formed outfit, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), became the main opposition party in Parliament. This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 parliamentary election. The SLPP won the election convincingly partly due to the pandemic. Nevertheless, it could not offer a stable government as the administration collapsed in 2022. The pandemic also had a role in the 2022 crisis and the eventual undoing of the government. Therefore, the pandemic had a significant immediate and long-term impact on Sri Lanka's politics and governance. The research was guided by the question, how did COVID-19 impact Sri Lanka's politics during and in the aftermath of the pandemic? The paper relied on secondary data for analysis.

Politics of Pandemics

Since the COVID-19 virus outbreak, publications on the nexus between the pandemic and politics have proliferated. They cover a range of issues, from the likely impact of the pandemic on the international order to the influence on domestic politics and decision-making. For example, in terms of pandemics and domestic sociopolitical issues, Rahman (2020) examined how social distancing exacerbates social inequalities in India.

COVID-19 pandemic struck China and later the world in December 2019. It has been one of the deadliest pandemics in last hundred years second only to the fatal Spanish influenza of 1918. It has taken so many lives and exposed us to trauma, death, and unsustainability of our existing modes of thinking, living, and social organization.

Reverberating uneasily during the nineteenth century, the Woman Question intensified in the fin de siècle with the emergence of the iconoclastic and con¬troversial New Woman.1 The Woman Question brought to the fore dissenting perceptions of a Victorian female's proper role and her fitting place in the social structure. Even though the Woman Question had prevailed for genera¬tions, an anonymous 1888 Westminster Review contributor stated that “far from being talked out, the question is to-day as burning as ever, and, on a continu-ally widening basis, remains the topic of the times” (“Female Poaching on Male Preserves” 290). Sarah Grand remarked the next decade that “[w]e are now at the swing of the pendulum in the Woman Question” and “[i]deas are all at extremes” (“The Man of the Moment” 627). The urgent debate swirled around such issues as a woman's nature, educational prospects, mari¬tal relationships, domestic entrenchment, liberatory independence, profes¬sional opportunities, legal standing, and sexual behavior. The middle-class New Woman arose during an especially turbulent time raising anxieties not only about gender roles but also about rapid change, economic uncertain¬ties, cultural perspectives, scientific advancements, economic uncertainties, empire unrest, and other unsettling issues. Her supporters viewed the New Woman as an emancipatory force for positive change, while detractors saw her as an egregious threat to social stability.2 The New Woman had become a highly conspicuous figure, as Olive Schreiner observed

Street skateboarding, skateboarding in the open public spaces of cities glob¬ally and outside designated skateparks, is a compelling example of insurgent play. Street skateboarders make play space out of the surfaces and objects of the city. Figure 2.1 is a typical example. The photograph shows insurgent play in action. Here the skateboarder, ‘JM’ (pseudonym), has rolled down the asphalt street, onto the concrete driveway, onto the sandstone wall (a trick called a ‘wallie’ or ‘wallride’ depending on how it is executed). That is the moment captured in this photograph. In the next moment, ‘JM’ will pop off the wall onto the pavement and then roll at high speed down the steep street to the bottom of the hill.

Behind the walls are an electricity substation and associated office build¬ings. The compound is nestled in a residential area. There are houses fur¬ther up the hill out of the frame, apartment buildings and a synagogue on the opposite side of the street. It is an ‘ordinary street’, yet the surfaces and angles make it desired as play space and subject to claims by the skaters. The changing surface of the wall makes it particularly desirable. A close look at the lower portion of the sandstone wall, just below where ‘JM’ is positioned in the photo, shows textured sandstone blocks, which are too rough to ride on, and skaters must land on the wall above these blocks and leave the wall before rolling down onto them. The (somewhat) levelled driveway breaks the trajectory of the steep pavement, allowing skateboarders a flat roll-up to the wall. The steep hill is part of the draw too.

Westerns are often regarded as one of North America's most distinctive contributions to film. As Jenny Barrett has stated, in an imaginative commentary on the genre with specific reference to the American Civil War; ‘the western has gone through numerous permutations whilst retaining certain narrative and stylistic conventions in its films that make them immediately recognisable to the viewers as westerns’ (58). Furthermore, Westerns have some of the most identifiably historic settings, themes and characters in cinema. Similarly, Westerns have always commented upon the contemporary culture which created them and engaged with America's definition of itself. As Andrew Patrick Nelson states, Westerns continue to explore ‘the present day and distant future’ (xx). However, this has presented a dilemma in such a recognisable genre. As Steve Neale has suggested, there is a problem with the ‘central role of iconography in the Western’ (27). It is as if, according to Neil Campbell, ‘by the very nature of its mythic representations’, there exists ‘a type of hyperreality, a simulation reproducing images conforming to some already defined, but possibly non-existent, sense of West-ness’ (2001, 130). This has allowed a collective hauntology to have taken place in the conceptualising of the West and the Western itself, and this is what this present volume will seek to explore.

Bone Tomahawk is a brutal and barbarous film. Relying in part on familiar conventions of the Western as a shorthand to cut through the need for exposition and arguably a sense of innovation, it invokes well-worn narrative structures and conventions (at least in the establishing act of the narrative). However, it surprises, shocks and disgusts in its willingness to cross boundaries in terms of its unwavering depiction of severe physical torture and gore. This correlates with the narrative itself, which begins with the crossing of boundaries, as two thieves enter territory clearly demarcated as sacred and perilous, and in doing so awake an unholy tribe of cave dwelling ‘Troglodytes’, which they and others assume to be a faction of a Native American tribe. What follows is an increasingly terrifying quest, fuelled by the noble requirement of rescuing an innocent kidnapped woman and a young sheriff (along with the thief who sets the whole treacherous set of events in motion), which climaxes in one of the most startlingly violent and grisly sequences ever seen in the Western film genre.

Bone Tomahawk then reveals itself to be unique in several ways, not least in its ambiguous coalition of genres which it draws into the Western trope (folk horror, survival horror, torture-porn, etc.) It is also though, almost comically subservient to the conventions of the ‘traditional’ Western. The core elements of the genre are so clearly established in the first half of the film that it could be seen (at a glance) to be a derivative Western adventure. The setting of the town where the protagonists live, Bright Hope, the saloon, the jail, the freshly built home are persistent in setting the scene for the Western period piece.

Introduction

This chapter essentially presents a critical analysis of the political use of the scientific concept of ‘herd immunity’ in the context of the COVID-19 public health emergency. It considers the consequences and implications of such use from the perspective of critical theory. This political-scientific phenomenon is approached as a manifestation of a typically modern ‘mediation problem’ (Habermas) involving the fraught relation between an expert culture and everyday culture. The analysis grafts below the surface with the aim of unearthing the largely unconscious selective composition process involved in both the direct and indirect instances of political appropriation and application of the scientific concept. On the one hand, the analysis supports the critique of the damage done to the significance of language by the questionable application in public communication of the notion of ‘herd’ to the human population. Here, the fateful misunderstanding as well as the deliberate misrepresentation of the scientific concept multiplies the negative impact. On the other hand, the analysis stresses the virtually imperceptible consequence of this normatively hollowed-out political usage. Telling in this respect is the largely, but by no means only, tacit assumption of some medical scientists, politicians, officials and a by no means negligible part of the public that the cost of the pandemic can be shifted onto the vulnerable, disadvantaged, marginal and even certain politically inconvenient sections of the population. The argument closes with an indication of a new cognitively inspired mode of analysing unconsciously operating processes in social life assumed in this chapter.

Opening the argument, a preliminary description is offered of the COVID-19 pandemic context. This is followed by an outline of the central concept of modern cultural mediation problems which provides the theoretical framework for the proposed analysis.

The landscape of the American West summoned up for those European pioneering labourers caught in its punishing midst an eerie solitude that many contemporary as well as subsequent writers and filmmakers have often evoked in their work. Yet this isolation, on the part of the settlers, was often accompanied by a haunted cultural baggage, often dredged up memories from a harrowing past, which meant that they were in truth never alone. This seeded what Benedict Anderson described as an ‘imagined’ community, constructed from remnants of memories of a past life, and torn up ‘cultural roots’, as well as an enfeebled anticipation of what was to come in the desolate canvas of a new life in an unforgiving landscape (10). This experience epitomised the stark reality behind the fatal pretence of the American melting pot, that lusty, potent myth, of an idyllic virgin arcadia waiting to be imprinted, explored and colonised by virtuous and industrious yeoman farmers about to test the myth ‘out West’, contrasting with a terrain bathed in the blood of the collision between supposed civilisation and ‘frontier savagery’, and out of which emerges ‘this America’. Instead, the immigrant hordes brought with them from their homelands not just their belongings, which they also carried on their ravaged, diseased bodies, but their psychologically damaged baggage; all their individual prejudices and psychoses, class conflicts, racial and ethnic hatreds and tribal loyalties, border tensions and neighbourly rivalries and religious bigotries, and all of which washed up on America's supposed undefiled shores. Europe, with its despotism, poverty and tyranny was a floundering sea vessel, gushing forth all its fateful debris.

The scene reveals a cabin, in the middle of nowhere. The sun is slowly dying to herald a blood red dusk. A group of people are isolated and alone in the homestead. The inhabitants become increasingly aware that someone or something is outside. They can hear coyotes calling to one another. They then realise that there are many of them and they are surrounding the homestead. The group is outnumbered now as well as cut off. A member of the group, a young girl, screams hysterically. Her mother strikes her. The inhabitants, we later discover, are attacked by men, not animals; the male inhabitants are violently killed, the females are either brutally raped and murdered or kidnapped. With slight amendments this could be the start of any number of home invasion horror films, such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), or other genres such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which was influenced by Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959). But it also typifies plot devices in Westerns, such as No Country for Old Men, or Outlaws and Angels (2016). As a number of commentators have already argued, home invasion films allude to the dissipation of the clear distinction between home (the private world) and the external (public) world, and the fear of intrusion and trespass. As with horror, according to Carroll, ‘the over-arching macro-question becomes, early on, whether or not the small company of the living who are sequestered in the house, can survive,’ (140). He goes on, ‘their chances are not good, and they only get worse. They are vastly outnumbered; they are cut off and surrounded in the manner of an entrapped platoon’ (140). The scene above actually belongs to John Ford's The Searchers (1956), which Carroll could be describing; he is actually discussing Night of the Living Dead. This is Hell in the West, filmed in a Poe-esque hue which would predict the cycle of Roger Corman films based on Poe's work.