Like any genre that dates back nearly to the beginning of narrative cinema, the biopic has gone through developmental stages, emerging from each of its historical cycles with certain modes that continue to be available to filmmakers working in the form. This chapter focuses on three categories of biopic performance: embodied impersonation, stylised suggestion and the star performance. Stylised performances that rely more on suggestion and less on full impersonation include Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis in American Splendor, as well as Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Johnny Depp in Ed Wood and Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry. Two rightly celebrated performances by Cate Blanchett, as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator and as the 1966-model Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, are of a different sort, and they differ from each other as well.

The introduction sets the stage by close reading two mid-century works by the poet Edward Young. Contrasting microscopy-inspired metaphors of the soul in Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-1745) against organicist descriptions of artistic genius in Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it shows how eighteenth-century biology (and, accordingly, aesthetics) might be characterised by a shift from images of permanence to narratives of development. This leads into the book's main subject, William Blake, who illustrated Young's works and presented a complicated response to this emergent evolutionist paradigm in his own writings. Situating the book against recent scholarship, the introduction establishes the book's central thesis, giving an account of the stakes of the matter, and provides an overview of how each chapter advances the book's argument.

This chapter examines the annual Havana Book Fair (the Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana, hereafter the Feria), seen here as a revealing microcosm of that literary culture, not just for 2000–11 but also of the whole post-1959 project, with its special unchallenged value placed on literature, the book and reading. After 2000, the Feria was given new purpose and impetus, to develop as an event combining the commercial, publisher-focused nature of the conventional book fair with the author-focused literary festival. It became a social phenomenon with the status of a national fiesta, similar to a festival of culture, with a range of political, cultural and social purposes.

Three: I address the cormorant’s alleged greed, reflecting on the etymological associations of the bird’s name and discussing a range of contexts, from medieval to contemporary, in which the cormorant’s greed becomes a cultural trope. I then outline scientific debates over the bird’s recovery from persecution, numerical resurgence and impact on fish stocks, noting the ways in which zoologists address the bird’s consumption of fish and assessing whether or not it is reasonable to describe the cormorant as ‘greedy’. I conclude by turning away from the consuming cormorant to the cormorant consumed, reflecting on the curious cultural associations, not least in respect of the cultural meanings of blackness, apparent in the history and politics (not to mention the weirdness) of the culinary cormorant.

Scholarship has recognized the importance of sibling ties in the late eighteenth-century. It has also targeted the inequality of men and women with regard to property and education as a key tension in brother-sister relations; additionally, scholarship has hinted that in smaller families there was not much impetus for rivalry. In reality incest, even by the broad eighteenth-century definition, was extremely rare, and siblings of both genders and all birth-order positions had to struggle with competing ideas of ideal friend and fearsome enemy. The narrowing legal definition of incest to exclude relationships of affinity was not completely abandoned in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Throughout the life course, siblings held fast to memories of parental slight or favouritism, but unlike the sisters described in published writings, real sisters resented unfair treatment from parents. The presence of step- and half-siblings complicated tense relationships.

The international law of the sea treaties imposes various obligations on contracting states, which can be managed more efficiently and cost-effectively through blockchain technology. As a disruptive tool, blockchain allows stakeholders to track transactions in a secure, cryptographically verified public database. It ensures a secure and reliable record of activities and information exchange governed by international agreements. This paper explores how the blockchain-based systems could help protect the maritime community and support sustainable ocean governance under the law of the sea. Particular attention is given to conserving marine living resources, protecting the marine environment and preserving marine biodiversity. Blockchain is already in use for some internationally regulated activities, such as electronic data interchange, though electronic permitting still waits broader international approval. Besides the clear advantages of blockchain, its legal, regulatory and other concerns must be addressed when considering its role in implementing international treaties. The author aims to explore whether harnessing blockchain`s potential requires new international agreement or if a simpler soft law instrument could provide sufficient guidance and safeguards for the international community.

Ena Hughes was a Protestant migrant born in 1907 at Augher, County Tyrone. This chapter looks firstly at the extent to which circumstances at home, rather than attractions abroad, influenced migration decisions. It then moves to explore the images of potential destinations that circulated in the homelands. For some migrants, family and household obligations were fundamental in the memories they held of the reasons for migration, and these frequently coexisted with economic uncertainty. Economic insecurity on the family farm allegedly spurred the migration of the Catholic McAleese family from Loughgiel, County Antrim, in 1925. The emigration was a powerful, individual and collective reaction to the economic insecurities and pressures pervading Ireland and Scotland. The chapter discusses the issue of Ireland's political context. As many theorists of migration acknowledge, the decision to emigrate is a combination of several reasons, including economic, social, demographic, political, and cultural factors.

The hybrid television form of docudrama, blending documentary and drama conventions and modes of address, poses interesting methodological problems for an analysis of performance. This chapter provides examples of docudramas of post-1990 period. It discusses some of the distinctions between kinds of docudrama performance, the implications of their links with related television forms and how docudrama performance exploits the capacities of television as a medium. Performance styles are different in two examples of docudrama, where in one-off television films already known public personalities are represented by actors. The mode of Thatcher: The Final Days and Diana: Her True Story has much in common with melodrama. The melodrama in television is marked by its focus on women characters, on the emotional and the psychological, and on moments of dramatic intensity. The performance style in both Diana and Thatcher derived from the melodramatic mode, as opposed to more naturalistic, understated performance modes.

This chapter discusses representations of wartime Jewish persecution in children's crime fiction of the 1990s and 2000s. It examines the reframing of war memories in these decades and the emergence of a civic memory of the Second World War structured around questions of collective responsibility and an ethics of remembrance. This mobilisation of memory is explored in crime fiction aimed at younger readers, specifically the work of Robert Boudet, Murielle Szac and Romain Slocombe. The chapter argues that such crime fiction furthers our understanding of the complex negotiations required to transmit war stories from one generation to the next.

Film genres are always already mixed; as the process of making films requires ever new combinations of generic elements. This chapter focuses on the films that Shahrukh Khan has made since he first set up Red Chillies Entertainment: Main Hoon Na, Paheli and Om Shanti Om. He is frequently compared with two other Khans working in Hindi cinema: Salman Khan and Aamir Khan, and it is the latter who is consistently described as being the 'best actor' within contemporary Bollywood cinema. The range of character types performed by Khan in his post-millennial films provides evidence of an actor who can perform these types in relation to the needs of a broad set of historical, contemporary, action and romantic film genres. Khan's dual role performances showcase his skills as an actor, and his work highlights his virtuosity.

The model of sound-image relations proposed by Soviet filmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov in The Sound Film: A Statement from the USSR was formulated as a reaction to the introduction of synchronous sound. This chapter discusses a hip-hop's model of organised sound that serves to highlight the logic of appropriation proposed by scratch video. If the call for an art of organised sound was realised sonically in the musique concrete experiments of the 1940s and 1950s, it was video than film that finally provided the medium in which the composers' ideas took an audiovisual form. Both the cultural position of scratch in the 1980s and the intervention made by the scratchers may be usefully articulated through reference to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain.