By the late 1930s Clemence Dane and Virginia Woolf were both well-established women writers, and well known as feminists. While Woolf's logic works with the connections between clothes and ideology, Dane links clothes to performance and theatre clothes and uniform, the stock-in-trade of performance, are central to the theatre of fascism. Dane's insight into the dressing rooms of 1930s' fascism is confirmed by subsequent historians. It was no accident that the birthplace of twentieth-century fascism was in the land of opera. Fascist black made its first appearance on the glamorous backs of the Arditi, a volunteer force of elite shock troops in the Italian Army during the Great War. The starring role in the theatre of fascism is played by the dictator himself. Dane's prescient appreciation of the theatre of fascism may have been assisted by the interpénétration of theatre and reality in her own life.

This chapter examines the ‘counter-conversions’ of women from religion to Freethought. It uses their personal narratives to ask wider questions about the relationship between Christianity and the Secularist movement, and about how people might understand the religious and irreligious beliefs of women in the past from a feminist perspective. Many renounced religion for a variety of reasons: inaccuracies found in the Bible that prevented them from accepting it as the Word of God; because supernatural dogmas could not be reconciled with modern scientific knowledge; and because they were repulsed by a God who could allow so much suffering to continue among His people. Counter-conversion also generated an entirely new way of looking at and relating to the world.

This examines the longer effects of the strike, including deindustrialisation, the economic and social loss of employment in the coalfields, and the limited but perceptible reconstruction of gender relations. The book's core conclusions are then detailed.

Between 1846 and the early 1850s, the Highlands escaped a calamity on the Irish scale, but at the expense of a huge increase in emigration and a profound weakening of the crofting economy. Crofting townships which had grown up to service the labour needs of the kelp manufacture were especially vulnerable to clearance and consolidation. The clearances and emigrations of the famine speeded up the invasion of the last bastions of the crofting population by the Cheviot and the Blackface. Indeed in an economic sense, many west Highland and Hebridean estates probably emerged from the famine in a leaner and fitter economic condition than they had been before 1846. The period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the potato famine had been one of contracting income and falling employment opportunities.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores notions of identity and gender through a close examination of Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle's relationship as the war impacted on it. It examines the intricate gender assumptions that surround the condition of 'shell shock' through a detailed exploration of the life and work of Vera Brittain. The book discusses the gendered attitudes to the First World War located within Aldous Huxley's novella 'Farcical History of Richard Greenow'. It also explores the questioning of war in the 1930s, a period when memories of the First World War remained fresh. The book also examines women performing very 'unfeminine' roles during the Battle of the Atlantic, and argues that femininity is imposed nonetheless for propagandist purposes. It illustrates the confusion often experienced by women in the Vietnam War.

The history of anti-theatricalism from Plato onward assumes that actors are indeed changed by their costumes. In William Shakespeare's own theater for the most part plays were costumed in Elizabethan dress; the Italy of Romeo and Juliet was a version of England. Disguises in Shakespeare are almost always absolute, with a small number of exceptions, nobody ever sees through a disguise. The famous Peacham drawing for Titus Andronicus gestures toward ancient Rome in the costume of Titus, in the center; but queen Tamora's costume is quite generalized, vaguely medieval, certainly neither Roman nor Elizabethan. By the end of the eighteenth century the vogue for historic costume in drama was well under way. The thrilling, visually stunning Franco Zeffirelli films of Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew are set in fifteenth-century Verona and Padua, with historically accurate costumes and sets.

Murphy and Watt are Samuel Beckett's first two completed novels. This chapter considers the ways in which these novels and particularly their graphic devices have been critically interpreted. The climax of Murphy modifies the use of the graphic surface of the book. By comparison with the overall coherence of Murphy, Watt appears to exclude things it could and, sometimes it seems, should contain. Use of the graphic surface in Watt is slightly less varied than that found in Murphy, but incidences are more numerous. The graphic surface of Watt, like that of Murphy before it, is used to foreground instability and generate lack of faith in the text's mediators and ultimately the text itself. Through the use of the graphic surface in his early fiction Beckett has identified and drawn on a fundamental aspect of the codex form.

This chapter looks at representations of the 'vile' bodies of communism's principal political opponents, the 'fascist body' and the 'bourgeois body'. Like all bodies, the proletarian communist body was an expressive sign, a semiotic site. The body would function as an important site of British Communist Party (CPGB) efforts to implant the communist spirit and way of life in its members. During the interwar years the CPGB was keen to ensure the physical well-being and fitness of its activists. For communists, there was a vital connection between sport, physical fitness, and revolutionary labour. The 'young workers forced to perform one humdrum operation, day in and day out, become mere cogs in the machine with grave consequences to their mental and physical development', complained Young Communist League (YCL) Secretary William Rust in 1925.

This chapter introduces the main historiographic themes of the book. It makes a case for understanding the British world system not merely as a contingent series of migrations, economic exchanges, alliances, and military relationships, but also as an arena in which various cultural interchanges took place. These connections—which included literary criticism, humanitarianism, legal cultures, political thought, travel narratives, material culture, and attitudes toward capitalism—helped to cement a “cultural British world” that transcended the frontiers between formal and informal empire, and between empire, metropole, and the wider world.