This chapter outlines a biographical sketch of Jim Crace and considers its relationship to his fictional world, focusing upon the pastoral impulse that shaped his Arcadian visions and their origin in the area in which he lived until he left school at eighteen. It analyses Craceland's dynamics and characteristics, considering it as a world apart from our own, often but not always found in an additional sixth (inhabited) continent. The chapter also considers the development of Crace's writing, from his early attempts, his career as a journalist and finally the emergence of the rhythmic prose that has come to typify Crace, with its preciseness of observed detail. Also considered are the traditional mythopoeic, storytelling and pastoral traditions that Crace incorporates so as to reinvigorate the novel, and as Eleazar M. Meletinsky explains in The Poetics of Myth (2000), ‘Twentieth-century mythification is unthinkable without humor and irony, which inevitably result when the modern is wedded to the archaic’. This combination creates the energy of Crace's comedy and yet sustains his serious themes.

This part of the book contains texts on the topic of religion, metaphysics, and ethics, translated from the original Hungarian by Adam Fabry: Culture – pseudo-culture (Kultura – álkultura), Preface to Ernst Mach’s The Analysis of Sensations, Credo and credulity (Hit és hiszékenység), On the destructive turn (A destruktiv irányról), Speech on the meaning of conviction (Beszéd a meggyözödésröl), A lesson learned (Tanulság), The calling of our generation (A mai nemzedék hivatása), Oration to the youth of the Galilei Circle (Szózat a Galilei Kör ifjúságához), and The resurrection of Jesus (Jézus feltámadása).

This chapter focuses on the novel Written on the Body. The publication of Written on the Body marked a change from the structural complexity of Sexing the Cherry, with its duplications and intertwining of narrative voices and historical periods, by turning back to the simplicity of the single narrative voice of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. However, as in Winterson's first novel, this simplicity is more apparent than real; in the case of Written on the Body because the gender and physical aspect of the autodiegetic narrator are never made explicit, thus suggesting that s/he enjoys the type of bisexuality Jordan achieved in Sexing the Cherry at the end of his quest for individuation.

This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the nineteenth-century ideology of 'martial races': the belief that some groups of men are biologically or culturally predisposed to the arts of war. It explores how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs and Nepalese Gurkhas became linked in both military and popular discourse as the British Empire's fiercest, most manly soldiers. The book argues that the connections contemporaries seen between these three groups demonstrate the historical instability of conceptions of 'race' as well as the political uses and contradictory purposes to which such conceptions could be put. It also argues that the savage representations of masculinity that lay at the heart of martial race ideology were a crucial imaginative site upon which Anglo-Indian military elites responded to, and attempted to manipulate, historically specific global-imperial politics after 1850.

Bringing reform to the Colonial Police Service during the post-war era, prompted by the onset of colonial conflict, was simply a matter of too little, too late. On a much broader level, 1948 marked the start of the Colonial Office's attempts at bringing standardisation to the Colonial Police Service, through reform, with the appointment of its first official Colonial Police Advisor (CPA), William Johnson. A measure introduced shortly after Johnson's report was the Conference for the Colonial Commissioners of Police. In terms of the colonial police, the Gold Coast riots prompted a government enquiry, which untimely led to the despatch of Arthur Young of the City of London Police to enact reforms. Unifying the police forces of the British Empire was the first real attempt at implementing any degree of standardisation. A fundamental difference between colonial and British policing lay in the structure of accountability.

Drawing from some broad interpretations of psychology and psychoanalysis, criminal law constructed the concept of Sex-as-law as a reality of psychological nature. Those who violate the standards of the world of Sex are not like other criminals and offenders. They are supposed to be, above all, sick, and most importantly, incurable patients. The criminal justice system began to think of the illegal sexual being as a boundless body, thus allowing the State to grant itself an arbitrary and constantly expanding power. The phenomenon that the author calls "denormativization" of sexuality is connected, at least in principle, to the new position occupied by consent in the framework of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. The misdemeanor of sexual exhibitionism finds its rationale in the new techniques for controlling debauchery. Visible sexual relations are tolerated in specific circumstances, while their excesses are punished by the new Article 222-32 of the Penal Code.

This part of the book contains texts on the topic of Hungarian politics, translated from the original Hungarian by Adam Fabry: Radical bourgeois politics (Radikális polgári politika), Magyar hegemony and the nationalities (A magyar hegemonia és a nemzetiségek), Bourgeois radicals, socialists and the established opposition (Polgári radikálisok, szocialisták és törtenelmi ellenzék), The programme and goals of radicalism: an address to the general assembly of the Radical Party (A Radikalizmus Programmja és Célja, held in Szeged, 1 December 1918), Radical Party and the bourgeois party (Radikális párt és Polgári párt), Manual and intellectual labour (Fizikai és szellemi munka), The Galilei Circle: a balance sheet (A Galilei Kör mérlege), Concealed foreign rule and socialist economics (Leplezett küluralom és szocialista közgazdaság).

Comedy was in reality the most serious genre in Hollywood—in the sense that it reflected, through the comic mode, the deepest moral and social beliefs of American life. The Hollywood romantic comedy's articulation of the ideology of heterosexual love, marriage and desire is far from consistent, and certainly reflects many of the deep-seated anxieties of the cultures which produced it. Hollywood comedy's seriousness lies in its accurate reflection of ordinary American beliefs, the instabilities and excesses of the films. Hollywood romantic comedy not only reflects American ideology but also interrogates and negotiates its contradictions. The couples in the films are extraordinary because they somehow manage to find happiness despite the deepest moral and social beliefs of the American life. Considering this, the chapter explains the ideological implications of the extraordinary status of Hollywood romantic comedy films from three different perspectives: the ideology of romantic love; the structures of romance; and the limitations of the ideal.

In 2012, the author made a feature docudrama called The First Fagin. Films are born out of moments of madness, and that was one of those moments. The main story, and the film's backbone, was the life and adventure of Ikey Solomon, a likeable man who was once seen as 'the most famous criminal of his time.' In the course of general exploration, the author had also gone along to see Adrian Wootton, the head of Film London, which provided location advice for people who wanted to film in the metropolitan area. Early on in the script, the author put Ikey in the context of the aftermath of the French revolution and the end of the Napoleonic wars. Most of filming had been of Tasmanian interiors.

This concluding chapter summarises the discussion on the four ‘special author’ representatives of absurdism that were presented in previous chapters. It emphasises that the term ‘absurd’ can be applied to literature in three ways, namely: as a prominent period style, as a category with philosophical implications and as a modern reworking of much older works. The chapter also describes how one can study the absurd in literature.