This chapter examines how BBC America (BBCA) represents contemporary Britain in its programming choices when it began service in the USA. In 1989, the BBC launched the 'Step Forward' programme to allow more Black comedy-writers to gain positions in television. In April 1999, Greg Dyke replaced Sir John Birt as the new Director General of the BBC. His primary tasks included 'the challenges of maintaining the BBC's prominence in the face of a massive expansion of digital channels and international competition'. Six years after the start of BBCA under then CEO Paul Lee, Bill Hilary was hired away from Comedy Central to replace the incumbent. The chapter describes how, despite a waning amount of black and brown faces on BBCA, transnationalism have a huge economic and intercultural effect on global audiences. It explores how BBCA can be touted as an ideological site for ethnic groups to negotiate power and agency.

This chapter deals directly with the discursive, with aesthetic discourses where the issue of gender is acutely present. In elaborating the discursive structures that encode gender within the Gothic, the chapter assumes that there is a sufficient congruence between sex and gender as to warrant the terms 'male' and 'female' Gothic. Genius, novelty, the sublime, the visual and reverie all offer points of theoretical concentration, where the hygienic self bunches into discursive thickness, forming Gothic texture. At the centre of the hygienic self lies associationism with its normative patterns of mental behaviour. But in most Gothic writing the negations of the hygienic self are not, simply, outrageously permitted; rather they occur in the context of their systematic antitheses. In Gothic writing, the patterning that promises meaning, reveals meaning of a psychological, or uncanny, kind. The Gothic aesthetic internalized the tenets of ideal presence as its pedagogic defence.

Cultural memory and Irish Romantic literary criticism from the time of Charles Robert Maturin's death to the present day have posthumously suppressed Maturin and his works. This suppression has denied the evident influence he had on a wide range of literature in his own lifetime and beyond. To speak of Maturin's 'radiance' is to argue that his presence and influence was felt continuously throughout his lifetime and after his death, as was argued in the 1892 edition of Melmoth the wanderer. Despite Honore de Balzac's desire to renounce the Gothic mode, his very dependence on Maturin's infamous wanderer highlights the ways in which the Gothic continued spectrally to possess nineteenth-century literary imagination.

The Gothic aesthetic and hygienic self gain their particular accents during the latter half of the eighteenth century; during the nineteenth, they become less distinct while others are heard. This chapter addresses the effect this had on Gothic writing during the 1820s and beyond and the genealogical consequences. Byron's Werner; or, The Inheritance: A Tragedy, a dramatic adaptation of Harriet Lee's novella, The German's Tale: Kruitzner, is an instance of rewriting at the margins of the Gothics classic period. The geographical and temporal setting, 'Germany' in 1633, towards the end of the Thirty Years War, highlights the 'Gothic cusp', a period when the feudal and modern eras were understood to overlap. Insofar as Kruitzner sets it out as typical, the house of Siegendorf, like all Gothic houses, is based on 'mystery and blood', violence shrouded by an obscurantist myth of noble origin.

The shape of Ann Radcliffe's career, culminating in The Mysteries of Udolpho, is towards the creation of a narrative structure and a narrative method. Here, a feminine subject is 'haunted' by a phantom bearing witness to the buried secrets of the father. The most compelling attempt to historicize the shift in readerly sensibility noted by David H. Richter is found in Terry Castle's brilliant essay 'The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho'. Syndy M. Conger helpfully sums up the drift of Richter's argument. 'German scholars have begun to explore ways in which Empfindsamkeit offered powerless citizens living under despotism an alternate interior realm in which to exercise power, over themselves: the experience of fulfilment in self-fulfilment'. Richter's exemplary figure is the 'unguarded door': the Gothic protagonist suddenly finds an unopposed egress from an apparently fast prison.

The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron are 'genealogical' texts concerned with the assertion of dynastic claims. Both plots revolve around murder, usurpation and restitution. In each, a young man of questionable pedigree establishes the legitimacy of his claims to his 'house', a process historically authenticated through the ostensible provenance of the text. It is over the equation between descent and authority that they mainly differ, The Old English Baron seeking to eliminate questions scandalously posed by The Castle of Otranto. From The Castle of Otranto to The Scarlet Letter, Gothic texts insist on the historical residue that authenticates their truth. These two aspects of genealogy are endemic in the Romance genre. In Romance, the usurped and dispossessed find their rights restored; the lost are found, and a true genealogy reasserts itself. It is a Romance convention to locate the story in some historically true narrative.

The commemoration of the Arandora Star victims appears to have merged over time with Prisoner of War (POW) memorials to become a symbol of what it meant to 'be Italian' in Britain during the war. The exclusion of British Army veterans from Italian memorial activity has a historical precedent. At the time of the tragedy, the wider climate of hostility towards Italians meant there was little space for public mourning for the bereaved families of the Arandora Star victims. In 1990, the prestigious civic title of Cavalieri was awarded to twenty-one Arandora Star survivors still living in Britain by the Italian government following an intensive campaign by agencies, including the community newspaper Italiani in Scozia. At the launch of the Arandora Star memorial appeal in Glasgow there were indications that the rhetoric of the apology campaigners was being contested within the community itself.

The humanitarian and military spheres have never been as different as distinct as they might appear. In fact, the relationship between civilians and the military during and after war has been closely intertwined – in some cases, humanitarians and the military have been one and the same. To help explain how this relationship evolved over time, this chapter examines three closely interlinked stimuli – technology, strategy and ethics – which both created the need for humanitarians and prompted the military to undertake “humanitarian” tasks.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to make available a body of texts connected with the cultural phenomenon known as Gothic writing. Some of the texts document the ideological and aesthetic environment which gave rise to the new form of writing; its conditions of possibility. The book includes many of the critical writings and reviews which helped to constitute Gothic as a distinct genre, by revisions of the standards of taste, by critique and by outright attack. It covers the period from 1700-1820 of the Gothic vogue to the mid nineteenth century. The book contains a number of the standard references in any history of the genre, which it would be perverse to exclude. It includes extracts from Tacitus and Montesquieu, the authorities eighteenth-century commentators most often referred to.