This chapter explores the migrant journeys of Huguenot refugees escaping French persecution in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It discusses published memoirs and escape accounts of Huguenot refugees who suffered religious persecution in France. One example is Reverend Jacques Fontaine's autobiography, A Tale of the Huguenots, which details the intense persecution in 1685 and his journey of escape following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Two: I assess the parallel history of the saintlike pelican – Christ to the cormorant’s Satan – describing the close interweaving of the symbolic histories of these two birds over time. In the process, I address the tradition of the ‘vulning’ pelican, focusing on the destructive pairing of cormorant and pelican in Richard II and then turning to The Merchant of Venice, in which the mutual loathing of Shylock and Antonio is expressed through their respective implied identities as cormorant and pelican, and I discuss the historic antisemitic association of cormorants. I then reflect on the crucified cormorant in modern writing and culture, briefly discussing also the redemption of the cormorant in contemporary British young adult fiction. I conclude with an account of a recent poem by African-American poet Tiana Clark in which, reversing centuries of racist association with the bird, she finds her own post-Christian identity in the cormorant.

In relating narrative to identity, this chapter examines how a time-related structure forms a critical element of meaning when constant change and short-term market-driven goals deny the relevance of the past and make experience episodic rather than continuous. If the flexibility, fragmentation and impermanence characteristic of the new economy are corroding our character, the search may point to situations in which other more durable and desirable human qualities can be developed and demonstrated. When mankind, at the top of the evolutionary tree, hubristically assigns primacy of being to itself, the traditions, laws and heroes must be sought within society. In seeking escape from the workplace, migrants appear to take both a physical and spiritual journey in a move to recapture and espouse actions, values, attitudes and behaviours lost in the Anglo-American cultural model.

I conclude by briefly addressing the relations of science and culture and the persistence of symbolism in contemporary scientific discourse, and I deploy the case study of the cormorant to discuss the value of longue durée cultural history for contemporary scientific analysis of the contextual aspects of human-animal conflicts.

This chapter analyses the role of the performer and the practice of 'horror acting' in 1970s British television drama. British television drama in the 1970s had a special interest in the genre of horror. Examples of horror television included works with a supernatural theme, such as the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas series, most familiarly featuring adaptations of the short stories of M. R. James. Example also includes works by Nigel Kneale for both the BBC and ITV. Of equal significance was horror drama in a somewhat different mould, namely the generally 'real life', more Grand-Guignol terrors of Brian Clemens's Thriller. The chapter shows that Thriller and some examples of 1970s horror plays create a similar mood and function to their suspenseful drama, but target a socioeconomic place rather than a domestic space.

The Lex Talionis (‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth …’ ) was introduced by Hammurabi of Babylon, as a measure to control private vengeance and concentrate punishment in the hands of legitimate authority. It also carried the message that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, a principle that was pressed by progressive thinkers in later ages, such as Montesquieu. As the law was formulated, an offence committed merited an equivalent punishment: one eye for an eye, not two. Over time the Lex became the standard-bearer of backward-looking retributivism, which carries the idea that offenders deserve to be punished simply because of the offence they have committed. As such, it was an obstacle in the way of any burgeoning abolitionist thought, in particular because it prescribed ‘a life for a life’. The abolitionist Giuseppe Pelli attacked the Lex head-on. In doing so he drew on the diverse critiques of the Lex of a succession of earlier (non-abolitionist) thinkers. The Lex Talionis has staying power. It embodies a basic human conviction that retaliation is due for injuries suffered. As such, it is outside the law; it will coexist with, and survive, any legal environment.

Public perceptions of deafness and deaf people have been heavily influenced by medical views that deaf people suffer from a disability. For a significant proportion of the deaf population, these negative perceptions are at odds with the way they see themselves. These deaf people regard themselves as members of a vibrant deaf community, based on shared language and a common culture. This chapter clarifies what is meant by the terms ‘deaf community’ and ‘deaf culture’ by unpacking various models that attempt to determine who belongs in the deaf community, and what the cultural aspects of that community involve. A closer examination of these theoretical models indicates that certain aspects do not sit easily with the reality of deaf life. These models will therefore be challenged in the light of the evidence of deaf people’s shared leisure activities which will be presented in later chapters. A case will be made for taking a much broader view of who actually constitutes the deaf community than is suggested by these models.

This chapter presents the interview between the author and the director Ultz. In this interview, the author talks to the director Ultz about the production, before going on to reflect, more generally, on his experiences of staging Jean Genet. In October and November 2007, a hip-hop version of The Blacks was performed at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in East London. The play was commercially and critically acclaimed and was one of the most exciting productions of Genet's work to have taken place in recent years. For all the difficult emotions felt by the actors in The Blacks Remixed, there was a real sense of solidarity and affection in the Theatre Royal during the run. There is a cathartic process at work in Genet. Despite all the anger and aggression, the play takes you somewhere else, somewhere more positive.

This chapter considers a specific set of northern Korean rural landscapes represented in visual arts, particularly film and stage productions, although rural landscape images of various types persist throughout an array of propaganda media. It proposes that the North Korean state selected a precise countryside image as the prototypical landscape of nationalism and that this landscape type serves as a canvas against which dramatised versions of nationalist myths unfold. Drawing from film and stage versions of several important North Korean 'revolutionary operas', the chapter explores how the North Korean regime has articulated the nationin a specific rural setting, namely the mountainous and thickly forested far-northern border area of the Korean peninsula. Several nature motifs dominate North Korean revolutionary opera, including Paektusan mountain itself, the rugged and climatically harsh topography, and the characteristic timberline coniferous forest of that high-altitude zone.