Like other late-century writings, New Woman poetry frequently assailed the Victorian institution of marriage. Indeed, marriage represented one of the most addressed concerns of the poets, drawing attention to several factors that placed wives in untenable situations. E. (Edith) Nesbit was especially drawn to the subject, and several of her verses are presented. This chapter is divided into five parts that probe specific and diverse aspects of the flawed institution.

The first section, “Intellectual Stagnation,” examines the yearnings of wives to find more rewarding lives than traditional marriage allowed them. In only one of the poems, the final one in the section, does that desire appear headed for fruition. Nesbit's “The Woman's World” traces the thoughts of a wife who assesses opportunities for freedom and independence rather than remain in a stultifying situation. In “Under Convoy,” Nesbit's protagonist ultimately succumbs to convention instead of pursuing meaningful endeav¬ors. Amy Levy's “Xantippe” recounts the experience of the title character who marries Socrates in hopes of intellectual stimulation, only to discover that they will not be realized. The wife in Isabella J. Southern's “The Thirst for Knowledge,” set in the traditional feminine space of a garden, resists her sheltered existence and feels that her way lies elsewhere.

The two poems in the second section, “Under Tyranny,” present chilling accounts of women trapped by controlling men. Nora Harper's “A Marriage Charm” is spoken by a man who reveals his disturbing plot to dominate a wife completely and prevent her from escaping bondage. The title of Violet Fane's “The Slave Turned Tyrant” serves as a synopsis of a wife's fate, for the dutiful suitor is transformed into a despotic husband.

Misconceptions about women abounded in the Victorian era across numer¬ous fronts. This chapter features poetry confronting four of those troubling assumptions that disturbed New Women. First, women were deemed intel¬lectually inferior to men, which provided a convenient rationale for limit¬ing opportunities in higher education and occupations. Second, women were expected to be meek and submissive, qualities that New Women shunned. Third, women continued to be disparaged because of the long-standing per¬ception that they had inherited the flaws of the biblical Eve, a presumption that New Women challenged. Fourth, women were caught in the binary that disadvantageously linked them to nature as opposed to men being associated with validated culture, even in the late century.

In terms of inferiority, Mary E. Coleridge's “In Dispraise of the Moon” builds on the traditional characterization of the moon as feminine and a lesser body than the masculinized sun; the moon is considered weak, depend¬ent, and inconsequential. The speaker of Dora Sigerson's “The Awakening” regrets her lack of learning but eventually realizes that her lover's mind is actu¬ally mediocre. Three poems contained in Constance Naden's “Evolutional Erotics” feature men who scoff at women's intellect. As in Sigerson's poem, the speaker of “Love versus Learning” realizes that her beloved is mentally stagnant. In “The New Orthodoxy,” a woman regrets that her lover dismisses current scientific thought that she embraced. The title character of “Solomon Redivivus” avidly touts his superiority to a silent Sheba.

The next part focuses on cultural assumptions. Masculine expectations of female behavior include being the object, not the subject, of desire, as in Dora Sigerson Shorter's “Love in Disguise.” The child in May Kendall's “The Toy Shop” transgresses expectations of female docility in favor of self-asser¬tion. Naden's “Love's Mirror” describes a man's vision that his beloved is a Madonna figure, which she disputes until she surrenders to his belief. “Celia's Home-Coming” by A. Mary F. Robinson applauds the titular character for rejecting domestic tradition and acting independently.

Introduction

The outbreak of COVID-19 opened a new vista of moral, economic and social cultural questions that can only be adequately addressed from these different points of view and many others seemingly insignificant positions. For the first time, in a long while, philosophical considerations became the stuff of political debates and everyday conversations. The world was stymied by ethical considerations such as, what is the right thing to do? What can individuals expect from society, and what can society expect of them? Is it right to deprive people of their liberties or to dictate patterns of personal behaviour? Can the government decide where I can go or with whom to associate or to close borders in order to protect our lives from the pandemic? Some other dimensions that were often not mentioned had to do with both economic and social cultural factors. On the economic front, there was always the question of the cost and availability of vaccines to the poor nations of the world spread mainly across the African continent and some parts of Asia which, depended on the western and developed countries for their supply of vaccines. Should others make sacrifices for me, and vice versa? Is it right or just to shut down industries and firms, market places, places of worship and so on, in order to fight a deadly disease? Many of such poor nations with economies that were albeit in a state of inertia or moribund, were certainly not ready or prepared for the economic fallout of the pandemic and so were left poorer off.

Newcastle Permanent is a community-based financial institution (building society in Australia) with its head office on the corner of Union and King streets in downtown Newcastle, Australia. The building itself is a brutalist masterpiece, with tiered floors finished in pebble-crete and narrow windows spanning each floor. An updated refurbishment has added a folding facade of steel and tinted glass to one part of the building, and in front is a land¬scaped garden with palm trees and other coastal plants housed in raised gar¬den beds. The edges of the garden beds are topped with a layer of granite. The granite hangs out over the vertical edge of the garden beds, creating ledges for insurgent play. At the corner of the lot, the garden bed walls start low to the ground and rise upwards, a metre or so off the street level, almost making a pointed corner, a little bit like a ship's bow. The horizontal granite surfaces are covered in rows of small steel blade-like strips spaced about 30 centimetres apart from one another and rising to about 3 centimetres from the granite surface – skatestoppers.

This is a busy junction, and the traffic lights are slow. Pedestrians and driv¬ers have a long time to look at this garden, the trees and the hundreds of steel objects covering the surfaces. In the middle of the day, office workers come and sit in the garden to eat lunch. I have watched as they arrange themselves between the steel blades to find a comfortable position. It is hard to know whether they notice these blades or know what they are for, but on surfaces in cities around the world, bodies encounter these counterinsurgent objects with seeming oblivion.

For skateboarders, the space is tantalising. Granite is a desired surface for insurgent play. It slides and grinds well and doesn't need as much modification and care work as raw concrete.

New Woman poets explored multiple aspects of their craft in verses attuned to such topics as artistic inspiration, daunting challenges, and responsible writing. Among the most prolific authors attuned to metapoetry was A. Mary F. Robinson, whose work is especially intriguing with its compelling observations about multiple facets of the poetic process. Several other poets examined the subject in intriguing ways, as the verses in this chapter reveal. Opinions run the gamut from exhilaration to lamentation.

The first section, “Innovation and Aspiration,” begins with three pieces by Robinson. “The Sonnet” credits women as the originators of the sonnet form through their singing in ancient times. The speaker of “A Search for Apollo” seeks guidance from the god of the arts to produce admirable work. “Sonnet” urges women to eschew masculine poetic paths and forge their own poetic identity. Dollie Radford speaks to the difficult process of reach¬ing creative potential in “Because I built my nest so high.” Another Radford speaker asks, “If you will sing the songs I play.” The soul takes on the artistic role in two poems by Mathilde Blind, as the title of the first one, “Soul-Drift,” suggests. Like an independent being, the soul is credited as the force driving poetic endeavor. Blind's “Prelude” to the lengthy Ascent of Man seeks the soul's power to ascend to artistic heights. The speaker of Olive Custance's “The Song Spinner” realizes that the beauty of her surroundings provides a stimu¬lus for creative work. Similarly, Custance's “The Snow” alleviates a poet's dark outlook as beauty overshadows negativity. In “The Poet” by Violet Fane, the speaker asserts that nature and art, not a duty to provide moral lessons, should be the guiding principle for an author. “Aspiration I” by Emily Pfeiffer relates that poetic power emanates from within oneself to produce innovative work and urges the pursuit of creative goals. L. S. Bevington ponders the effect of misery on creativity in “The Poet's Tear.”

In April 2024, it was announced that the writer John Logan was to adapt Cormac Mcarthy's Blood Meridian for Director John Hillcoat (Variety, 2024). There have been many aborted attempts to transform McCarthy's 1985 South Western Gothic novel to the screen over the decades. In 1995, a screenplay was developed by Tommy Lee Jones with his intention to both direct and star in the film. This version was abandoned because of its extreme and violent content. Ridley Scott later attempted to bring the book to the screen with a script developed in 2004, but again, the unpalatable content at the heart of the narrative proved to be an insurmountable problem. Scott stated that ‘[i]f you’re going to do Blood Meridian you’ve got to go the whole nine yards into the blood bath, and there's no answer to the blood bath, that's part of the story, just the way it is and the way it was’ (Empire, 2008) and that ultimately, ‘you can't apologise for the violence’ (Film, 2024). Others have attempted to bring the novel to the screen including Todd Field and James Franco, but it is clear that the fundamental issue of the savage, nihilistic and relentless nature of the book's content has thus far been an unsolvable issue.

Blood Meridian tells the story of an unnamed narrator (The Kid), who, lost in an apocalyptic world of chaos of Texas in 1833, joins The Glanton Gang (a real life and notorious group of scalp hunters and fighters in the American/ Mexican war lead by John Joel Glanton) not out of any ideological or financial drive, but simply to survive in the whirlwind of gore and depravity he finds himself in. Blood Meridian spans decades and includes many references to true atrocities mixed with quasi-supernatural occurrences that boil down to a gnostic battle between various forces and individuals for the narrator's spirit. What holds the novel together, is its absolute commitment to depicting human savagery in its most intense and unfettered incarnations. It is perhaps not just the violent nature of Blood Meridian that has proven to be so problematic regarding the attempts to adapt it to the screen.

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.