This chapter analyses how Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen use texts and images of writing in Riddles to create a film that transforms pre-Oedipal pleasures into a site for feminist collaboration. Mulvey and Wollen place the title of the film over the first page of Le Mythe de la Femme. Mulvey returns to the image of Garbo's face superimposed upon the Sphinx, and focuses on the Sphinx's forgotten place in the myth of Oedipus, which is significant for the film's rewriting of maternal femininity. At the centre of Riddles is 'Louise's Story Told in 13 Shots,' the sequence in which the primary narrative of the film unfolds. The fragment leads into the first of the film's 360-degree pans, which circles Louise's kitchen. The Sphinx poses a series of questions that bring feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis together, creating an inquiry into the material conditions of motherhood in London in the 1970s.

A painting often regarded as Godfiried Schalcken's masterpiece Lady, Come into the Garden, derives from a parlour game with clear amorous and erotic implications. The painting attributed to Schalcken in Sheridan Le Fanu's story conforms to the conventional descriptions of the painter's style, his treatment of lighting, and placement of human figures. As with certain stylistic rearrangements of incident inside the story, the historical account suggest that Le Fanu has transferred items from debit to credit in a suggestive manner. By the 1830s, the great French Revolution was part of history, and the July Monarchy was in power in Paris. Le Fanu's fiction of the 1830s keeps a sharp eye on French politics, even through the medium of the gothic and the demonic.

The reform of education seemed like a necessary component of, and complement to, social and political change, a point emphasized by legislators in the Legislative Assembly and correspondents across France. These participants in the revolutionary debates over education had inherited the Enlightenment view that systems of education and of governance should mirror one another. They wed that view to the new sense of 'possibilism' unleashed by the French Revolution. Public instruction took shape as a polyvalent approach to education, a political pedagogy that sought to integrate the acquisition of skills, the cultivation of virtue, and the socialization of citizens. The interplay of anticipation, instability, and improvisation that shaped the debates over education was evident in the relative quiet of summer 1789. During the interplay of summer, deputies, administrators, professors, students, and concerned citizens took stock of the revolutionary events that would remake society and inevitably shape the reform of education.

The doppelganger or double is a frequently noted feature of Gothic fiction. The key critical text to theorise male doubles in Gothic literature is Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca sets the blueprint for the twentieth-century novel of the female double. Emma Tennant's novella The Bad Sister is a rewrite of Confessions of a Justified Sinner from the perspective of a female protagonist. In Rebecca, The Bad Sister and Single White Female, clothing provides a primary mechanism through which the exploration of the doppelganger theme is produced. Single White Female is saturated with fashion discourse. The film's title implicitly suggests the threat of the double to the construct of the 'single' woman, a historically specific category of femininity brought into being by magazines like Cosmopolitan.

This analysis of two of Jeff Wall's most important early photographic transparencies highlights the fact that his subject matter can be understood as a male artist's control of what is imagined as female-gendered physical and theoretical space. The initiation and subsequent extension of this operation in European and American critical discourse about his work is discussed in relationship to anthropological research on settler colonial societies’ territorial conflicts; specifically settlers’ need to develop cultural narratives that rationalize their control over other populations within a given geographic area. Such an approach contrasts with the prevailing commentaries by other critics, some of which are discussed at length (Donald Kuspit, Arielle Pélenc, Kaja Silverman and Michael Fried). These critics’ analyses of Wall’s work downplay or ignore the feminist subject matter in the work in favour of discussing the images' relationship to the avant-garde potential of technical reproduction or to the history of modern painting.

Sheridan Le Fanu's relations with publishers were more primitive, though tensions between privacy and publicity can be observed in the mid-Victorian period. Being not only a contributor to the The Dublin University Magazine but also its proprietor and editor, Le Fanu was placed on a major cross-roads of private and public perspectives. The particular conditions of the private/public dichotomy in mid-Victorian Ireland can only be fully appreciated within the larger context of the United Kingdom of which Ireland was so anomalous a part. The dichotomy of public and private may be long-lived but it is at every stage historically conditioned. A theory of public opinion would thus concern itself more with significant fractures in the continuity rather than with yet another seamless chronicle.

This chapter addresses the traumatic events of June 1940; the police arrests, the anti-Italian riots and enforced relocation, which served to dramatically reinforce the outsider status of Italian families in Scodand. The key to understanding the riots and how they are remembered within narratives is Portelli's work stressing how oral testimony 'offers less a grid of standard experiences than a horizon of shared possibilities, real or imagined'. Most enduring aspects of communal myth is that the riots were carried out by a faceless 'hooligan' mob. The chapter explores the impact of the government's policy of relocating Italian women from coastal regions. It highlights the isolation and problems Italian Scottish children felt in their new surroundings, including the effects of disrupted education and exposure to racial and religious hostility. Before the outbreak of war between Italy and Britain, Italian nationals, as aliens, were faced with a range of restrictions and regulations.

There was no "system" of education in Ancien Régime France. This chapter surveys the educational and institutional terrain of mid-eighteenth century France from which the Jesuits were suddenly absent. It traces an ambivalent strain in Enlightenment thought on education, a deep tension at the point of contact between seemingly limitless philosophical possibilities and the apparent limitations imposed by political and social realities. There were curricular variations across schools and over time. Each of the collège would offer one of two courses of study, either a six- or an eight-year program, and they were known as either collèges d'humanités (six-year) or collèges de plein exercice (eight). Universities and collèges occupied a prominent but liminal position in Ancien Régime society. As maps of early modern cities and images of early modern schools make clear that Ancien Régime's universities and collèges were once part of and apart from the city around them.

This chapter contains collection of texts between 1777 and 1818 connected with Gothic origins. In terms of debate about Gothic origins, Thomas Warton's other main contribution was his controversial claim that romance was ultimately of Saracen origin. Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Germania of Cornelius Tacitus are two important classical sources for the political debate on the Goths. The most striking feature of the Letters is Richard Hurd's insistence that Gothic art has its own distinct logic, derived from the social structure of feudalism, and its cultural expression, chivalry. The works of 'Ossian' appeared at the same time as the first Gothic fictions, and together they represented a new area of taste within literary culture. In the Dissertation, John Pinkerton takes issue with earlier writers on a variety of points, including the place of origin of the Goths, which he locates in Scythia, in the Middle East.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some historical contextualisation for the presentation of clothing in Gothic fiction. The nature of this exercise makes it difficult to draw any overriding conclusions about the function of clothing within the genre. Fashion discourses tend to defy any kind of totalising narrative, characteristically resisting closure in their endless preoccupation with recycling the past. The body in Gothic fictions is a profoundly unstable concept: continually evoked, nevertheless it is always disappearing beneath the mask or the veil. The process of bodily refashioning through Gothic fictions shows no sign of diminishing. The chapter illustrates the perennial power Gothic bodies possess to fashion themselves anew, replaying the preoccupation with surface and depth, using the example of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

This chapter explores the medieval interests of two twenty-first century pieces of art: Elizabeth Price’s immersive video installation, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012), and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive (2013). Both of these works turn to medieval culture in order to examine the untimeliness of the body and this chapter traces their sources and explores how their work speaks with, and to, medieval representations of the body. It contextualises Price and Landy’s work with explorations of medieval effigies and the Middle English poem St Erkenwald. The methodology of this chapter is informed by Aby Warburg’s work on gesture in early modern art and interrogates moments of contact and communication across time.