Chapter 7 explores the continuing tension between anonymity and acknowledged or even emphatic authorship of epigrams. The epigram tradition had always more fully connected these poems with their subjects than their authors. The free-floating transmission of these poems meant that they might be either disavowed by their author and left as "bastards" or taken by another and worn as "stolen feathers". A special case was "illustrious authorship", where epigrams came to be "fathered upon" notable public figures as a way of enhancing interest in them. There were, however, English authors such as Ben Jonson and Sir John Harington who more fully asserted their claim over the epigrams they circulated or published. In this they were similar to the more prestigious Neo-Latin epigrams, which tended to be closely associated with their authors.

The invisibility of Bava’s and the Ramsay’s cinema in film historiography is a symptom of the marginality, in Italy and India at the time, of the kind of capital that sustained these films, just as the visibility of Méndez’ work in the history of Mexican cinema reflects the centrality of speculative capital in 1960s Mexico. Similar connections can be traced in other countries. The end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the rise of financial capital marked also the end of Keynesian policies. New priorities began to be adopted that we now know, globally, as neoliberalism. The conclusion suggests that scholars are now rediscovering cheaply produced generic films because the marginal interests that formed these films’ conditions of possibility now confront us as a dominant force. Popular films staged the tensions brought about by its rise, and it may well be for this reason that they appear to us to be of great interest today.

This chapter revisits the global economic, social and cultural dynamics that characterised the period from mid-1950s to the late 1970s, when places as far apart as Japan and Mexico, South Korea and Italy embarked on ‘economic miracles’. While social movements forced governments into important political concessions, a popular ‘youth culture’ took shape – simultaneously a new market for commodities and a mode of renegotiating the boundary between the public and the private. In Europe and in the United States these changes took place under the aegis of Keynesian economic policies that favoured controlled approaches to industry and restrained the kind of short-term speculative capital that was responsible for, among other things, cheaply produced popular films. But neither were Keynesian economic policies adopted uniformly across the globe, nor was this situation to last into the 1980s.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. Jeanette Winterson has achieved international recognition as one of the leading present-day British writers. No longer of exclusive interest for the lesbian readership that launched her to fame in the 1980s, her novels are read, enjoyed and hotly discussed both by the general public and academia. Thus, while film and theatre versions have been made of her most popular novels, the most experimental ones often appear in the syllabuses of university courses on contemporary British fiction, and are the subject of an increasing number of dissertations and critical essays both in Britain and elsewhere.

The focus of this chapter is on al Qaeda, ISIL, and related groups and the threats they pose to various states in the Middle East and elsewhere. At the beginning of this volume we asserted some generalizations about the roles terrorism may play in twenty-first century warfare. We conclude this study by looking at patterns in the use of terrorism during these first years of the twenty-first century. Many of the insurgencies of this era are ongoing and their outcomes are not yet known. Thus far, however, we observe changes in the conduct of and participants in warfare. Terrorism is a tactic used early and increasingly in twenty-first century insurgencies. Insurgent groups’ targets are civilian and military; and, with some exceptions, their tactics are much the same regardless of their targets. Twenty-first century insurgents produce their own media and are able to rely on less dramatic and less deadly attacks to gain attention. Instead, they perpetrate more shocking types of attacks, not only suggesting but also advertising their brutality.

Generally Hollywood romantic comedies end with a kiss. One can usually know how the plot will be resolved just by looking at the opening credits. The fact of this happy ending is conventionally understood by critics to prove the conservative nature of the genre, a movement from stability through disruption to the reaffirmation of the status quo. This chapter discusses Hollywood romantic comedy films. It provides an overview of the study of this book, which explores the changing representation of the couple in classical Hollywood romantic comedy, between 1934 and 1965. There are, of course, some things that do not change in this period. The couple is always white, heterosexual and monogamous. In focusing on representations of such a couple, the chapter acknowledges the ways in which dominant ideology is reproduced. It also recognises the ruptures and contradictions in this ideology, focusing primarily on discourses around gender and sexuality.

Chapter 1 argues that in La ciénaga, her first feature film, Lucrecia Martel effects an important challenge to the aesthetic codes which have defined intellectual and resistive cinema. It shows La ciénaga to be a highly reflexive film which uses many of the distancing and defamiliarising techniques associated with political and counter cinemas. Yet the film’s aesthetics also function to challenge a disembodied intellect, or Cartesian viewing subjectivity by forming a transgressive material relationship between the viewer’s body and the sticky, swampy body of the film. Attending to the film both as a text with meaning, but also as a ‘body that performs’ (Kennedy), the chapter shows how the digetic experiments of child characters, and the filmic experiments which accompany them, work to counter the stagnation of the body and the domestication of perception associated with dominant cinematic forms. The chapter also shows how the processes of defamiliarisation in which the film engages are countered by its tactile and sensorial aesthetics, which it undertands as a form of refamiliarisation, a bringing into bodily proximity, of that which is abjected and excluded by the social order.

This chapter first appeared as the lead article in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 September 2014. It is a review of the historian Michael Cook’s Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic case in comparative perspective and Akeel Bilgrami’s Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. According to Cook, Islam has a greater tendency towards politicization than other religions, whereas Akeel Bilgrami is more disposed to find fault with Western policies than with Islam. Bilgrami underlines the need to listen to reformist voices from within Islam rather than the voices of outside critics. This leads the Chapter into a brief consideration of the prospects for large-scale institutional reform instigated by Muslims themselves, as opposed to sporadic reformist initiatives that do not crystallize into organized movements.

This chapter explores Franz Kafka, who has been universally considered as a staple of absurdism. It observes that there are a number of absurdists, proto-absurdists and supposed absurdists who seem to have been at the head of the anticipation, promotion and reinvigoration of the spirit of Kafka. The chapter then studies Kafka's relations with, and influence on, other writers, ending with a section on the concept of ‘bureaucratic fantastic’, as personified in Kafka's works. It notes that Kafka was an exponent not only of stories and novels, but also of fragments, diaries, aphorisms and letters.