This chapter argues that all Terry Gilliam's films are exercises in hybrid textuality, but the dystopian form taken up in Brazil makes this his most overtly political work. Brazil initially is replete with utopian dreams, but as its protagonist Sam Lowry gains a better understanding of the dystopian reality, his dreams increasingly take on the dystopian tenor of that environment. Lowry's fantasies are critically analysed in terms of their narcissism and escapism, but even if we judge these negatively, he at least inhabits a more stimulating world than those around him. In Munchausen, by constructing the framework of the theatre around the tales themselves, Gilliam and Charles McKeown create a form of transitional space between the worlds of fantasy and reality. The Theatre Royal provides a space where fantasy can be presented, while serving as a refuge from the murderous reality of the besieged town that surrounds the audience.

This chapter considers the evidence by looking at the following eight themes. The first four themes are the state of formal politics, public attitudes to politics, broader forms of civic engagement, and involvement in political campaigning and pressure groups. Next four themes are volunteering and the role of charities, community identity and a sense of place, civic engagement and young people, and finally the emerging world of the internet/world wide web. The chapter focuses on the analysis of some of the major policies, debates and initiatives that have helped to shape the local political space over the last fifteen years. The Power Inquiry, which published its findings in 2006, was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Trust (JRT). Its task was to look at the state of British democracy and the extent of political participation and civic engagement.

This chapter examines John Stuart Mill's neglect of the Bengali reformer, Rammohun Roy. Buckingham also used the famous Rammohun Roy as evidence of the intellectual progress made possible by a free press in India, warning of the threat to that progress by the new press regulations. The German intellectual influences to which Thomas Carlyle exposed Mill included a version of Einfühlung. The United States and elsewhere, satyagraha is testament to the flow and counterflow of ideas engendered by modern imperialism. J. S. Mill was situated like few other major Western intellectuals to participate in cultural and intellectual exchange with the non-Western world. Bernard Cohn saw the British colonising Indian forms of knowledge and inventing ones of their own useful for the imperial project. Exploring what transpired with the potential for intellectual influence across cultural borders during the course of Mill's intellectual career is an unfinished project.

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.