This chapter focuses on the antecedents to the absurd. It first traces the antecedents of the absurd to the older stages of Greek theatre, and reveals that the absurd can be found in Greek tragedy, which returned to the European consciousness during the Italian Renaissance. The chapter then studies absurdity as seen in medieval drama, which featured a dramatised allegory of morality, and the works of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. It describes Sterne's work as ‘nonsense prose’ and reveals that Swift's ‘gloomy world’ in prose and poetry came from medieval forebears, and even had an affinity with the danse macabre tradition. The final part of the chapter examines the adoption of the ‘Romantic grotesque’ and pre-Surrealist nonsense by several popular authors, including Charles Dickens, Lewis Caroll, Nikolai Gogol and Ugo Foscolo.

This introduction presents an overview of the history of the Normans in Europe and a background to the sources themselves. The book aims to give readers a selection of the abundant source material generated by the Normans and the people they conquered. The Normans themselves in the eleventh and twelfth centuries drew attention to their actions all over Europe. The book covers the process of assimilation and malgamation between Scandinavians and Franks and the emergence of Normandy. It illustrates the internal organisation of the principality with a variety of source material from chronicles, miracle stories and charters. The book presents material from the main chronicle sources for the history of the Norman invasion and settlement, supplemented with some poetry. It also includes the Normans' involvement in the Mediterranean, in Italy, and to a lesser extent in Byzantium, Spain and the Holy Land.

This chapter studies the concept of the Theatre of the Absurd, which is based on the precepts of Antonin Artaud, and goes on to describe Artaud as the bridge between the present Theatre of the Absurd and the pioneers of the concept. It then identifies the five major dramatists of the absurd: Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. The chapter focuses on the works of these dramatists – except for Beckett – and views the Theatre of the Absurd in (Soviet) Russia and in east Europe (during the Cold War).

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces new material in order to account for newly flourishing mixtures of documentary and drama. Docudrama has necessarily had to adjust to the cultural moment. Developments in forms and modes of access have meant that all the codes and conventions of traditional documentary have been made available for mixture with other kinds of representation. As digitalization re-forms the economy of broadcasting worldwide, the questions about the ethics and values that obtained continue to drive both popular and academic debate. Modern film and television drama has for sometime been framed and organised to capture the 'buzz' and immediacy available in other forms of 'direct cinema'. The spectrum of 'intergeneric hybridisation' in film and television can be represented graphically.

The introduction provides a critical discussion of Radclyffe Hall’s unpublished works. It traces Hall’s career as a writer of fiction and explores the relation between her published and unpublished works. It examines Hall’s engagement with a wide range of topics, including outsiderism, sexuality, gender, feminism, religion, class, race, the supernatural, and World War I, and situates her work in the context of early twentieth-century literature and culture. Overall, the introduction argues that the critical understanding of Hall’s literary writings has remained flawed due to a narrow focus on The Well of Loneliness and demonstrates how the new materials presented in this volume can serve to enrich significantly scholarly perspectives.

Policing colonial conflict reinforced the traditions of paramilitary policing. With the end of the mandate in Palestine and with troubles brewing in Suez, close attention was paid to Cyprus: strategically, the island's military base was well-placed in relation to the both the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The Aden Police faced difficulties similar to those of both the Palestine and the Cyprus Police prior to the British withdrawal in 1967. With the development of political and security intelligence in Palestine came the creation of police undercover units. Lieutenant-Colonel W. Nicol Gray, who became Inspector-General in March 1946, supported the idea of snatch squads and pseudo gangs. Emergencies required newer forms of policing that brought the traditional paramilitary style into contact with counter-insurgency tactics. The experiences of those responsible for policing Palestine shaped the practice of colonial policing.

This introduction puts the text into its early medieval context and explaining Hincmar's sometimes-dubious methods of argument. The book is a translation of the most significant source for the attempted divorce, a treatise known as De divortio Lotharii regis et Theutbergae reginae, written in 860 by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims. It sheds much light on the Frankish world of its protagonists and on early medieval Europe in general. In 860 those supporting Lothar II's divorce were still able to discomfort Hincmar by drawing parallels between the trials of Ebbo and Theutberga; the matter was only finally settled in 868. The book offers eye-opening insight not only on the political wrangling of the time, but also on early medieval attitudes towards a host of issues including magic, penance, gender, the ordeal, marriage, sodomy, the role of bishops, and kingship.

The documents in this section deal with social groups and social tensions in Italy: popolo against magnates, noble clans against each another, men against women, young men against city elders, Christians against Jews, freemen against slaves, food riots and tax revolts, acts of resistance and indecency . The chapter focuses on knighthood, towers and vendetta. Although worker unrest is evident in Italian towns from the late thirteenth century, the second half of the fourteenth century saw a rash of working-class revolts, the most famous being that of the Ciompi in Florence has become the 'archetype' of worker insurrections.

Chapter 2 focuses on Martel’s second feature, La niña santa, a film which depicts the anxious construction of hard-and-fast boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and horror, whilst revelling in the strangeness of a world in which everything – including its saintly-demonic heroine, and the moral and affective situations she negotiates, confounds these distinctions. In La niña santa, it is in particular the ideological conditions established by Catholicism – and their close relationship with constructions of femininity – which are subject to the scrutiny of Martel’s investigative gaze. The girls in this film suggest the possibility of resisting dominant narratives, a possibility with which the film is thematically and aesthetically engaged in multiple ways. The chapter explores the film’s aesthetic experiments alongside its foregrounding of the productive capacity of desire, arguing that both function to suggest ideological fissure and the glimpsing of alternative realities. Through its figuring of desire, and the female adolescent as agent of her desire, the film suggests the possibility of resistance to the subjective and identitarian roles and models into which she is socially summoned.

Re-evaluating the implications of the French Revolution for Gothic fiction, this chapter examines representations of the past in a novel that is often neglected in Gothic studies: Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. Written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, but set in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic France, it discusses the ways in which the novel bears traces of the present and examines the significance of the decaying abbey and fragmented manuscript that feature in the novel. Citing the enormity of the events taking place in France and the challenge they presented to established Enlightenment historical theories and methods, it is argued that The Romance of the Forest responds to such shifting notions of history by revealing a heightened sense of historical consciousness that is engendered by the French Revolution. Influenced by The Recess and utilising the Female Gothic’s focus on the heroine, this chapter shows how Radcliffe’s novel engages with the politics of the past and, more specifically, with the contested ‘Gothic’ views of history presented in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).