This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates discursive structures intermittently recurring through Gothic writing. It explains that the intertextual readings form the methodological lynchpin for interpreting Gothic writing as self-aware debate on the character of the subject. The book argues that before one can theorize the Gothic as a response to a 'gap in the social subject' one needs to recoup the Gothic's contemporaneous meanings, itself a theoretical task. The book adopts Michel Foucault's 'genealogy' as the theoretically sensitive model of literary history. The book discusses the common usage of 'ideology' as referring to configurations of national or class values individuals might find themselves associated with, as for instance, 'liberalism' or the 'Freeborn Briton'.

Christianity has affinity with liberal universalism to the extent that it warrants faith that all humans are capable of improvement, regardless of their 'race'. Certain colonised intellectuals developed forms of liberal universalism that enabled critical commentary on prolonged tutelage. To illustrate the anti-colonial resourcefulness of the liberalisms of the colonised, this chapter quotes from the writings of five indigenous intellectuals: Peter Jones, Charles Eastman, Zitkala-Ša, Apirana Ngata and William Cooper. For Cooper, the Empire was a realm of universality, not in the sense that it embraced all of humanity but in the sense that it was not racially exclusive: every native people would have its chance, if British ideals were realized. Karuna Mantena has argued persuasively that John Stuart Mill's liberalism was unstable in a way characteristic of 'the structure of imperial ideology'.

This chapter revisits the question of whether the mediation of referendum campaigns is distinctive enough to deserve dedicated analysis. It queries the extent to which the referendum analysed in this book bears similarities with the UK’s subsequent 2016 EU referendum and how that event was framed in the mainstream media. The chapter argues that the frame-building model proposed in chapter 7 appears to also provide an account for the mediation of that campaign. The chapter concludes with a wider consideration of the contribution of old and new media to our understanding of politics. It considers the changing nature of public debate following Brexit and the 2016 US Presidential election and questions the extent to which mainstream media remain key determinants of public discourse. It proposes that future avenues for frame building research would need to explore frame building processes on social media, where the gatekeepers and organizational routines that are so central in the frame building model proposed in this book are absent. It argues that in order to deliver the complete picture frame analysis needs to engage with the totality of news provision and sharing as this moves towards the internet and news aggregation, propaganda sites and social media.

The Introduction looks at the rise of sport as an organised activity across Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It sets this in the context of the development of urban modernity, with elite sport becoming a focus for the emergent mass media and a concomitant rise in spectatorship. Sport can claim to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century. As such it is surprising that the influence it had on modern art and artists has been largely overlooked.

Gladstonian liberalism quickly replaced an exhausted whiggery, and Gladstone's programme placed the Irish landlord system, education, and the established church at the head of its list of demons. The unnamed but recognisable upas tree, by which Gladstone introduced the notion of poisonous growth, unfamiliar now, had a long history as a romantic metaphor. In turn, Gladstone's upas tree becomes the totem pole of the Anglo-Irish. The metamorphosis of Gladstone's denunciation into a programme for self-enhanced dignity and cultural re-orientation follows a certain pattern in the naming of social groups. Gladstone re-baptised the Protestant Ascendancy by reading an order of anathema over its head. Ascendancy is another serial factor in the culture emergent in the last days of Sheridan Le Fanu.

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This chapter presents the early memories of Anne Clifford during the year of 1676. On the 14th day of April 1676, Anne's dead body was carried in a hearse drawn with six horses to Appleby church, and was buried about midday in the vault there which her ladyship had caused to be made in her lifetime for that purpose. Her funeral sermon was preached by the Lord Bishop of Carlisle. Sir Philip Musgrave and Mr John Dalston and some of their sons, and others of the gentry of this county being there present at her funeral. Her autobiographies reveal her joys and griefs within a vivid description of seventeenth-century life. They reveal a personality that was vulnerable and determined; charitable and canny.

The Old English poem known as The Ruin meditates on the material remains of a long-passed civilisation and has often been read as typical of the nostalgic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, but its reception history reveals how cultural memories of the Anglo-Saxons have been rewritten in the modern world and the importance of the idea of ruination to modern conceptions of the Middle Ages. This chapter constitutes the first extended study of the disciplinary and translation histories of The Ruin, traces the history of the poem from 1826 to the twenty-first century and explores the meanings of ruins in the Middle Ages and modernity.

This chapter discusses how stylistically, Shoot the Messenger's (STM) non-realist techniques, non-linear form and overt constructedness depart from the traditional modes of social realism that have prevailed in the Black British television drama. It begins with a broader contextualisation of the drama genre in its treatment of 'race' and reference as an earlier BBC single play Fable written by the White playwright, John Hopkins. The chapter proposes that the major responses to STM have neglected its more complicated nuances and the ways in which these can help us understand the processes of racialisation in post-colonial settings. It suggests that the STM's devices of unstable narration, irony and stylistic abstraction add to the difficulty of reading the text as a 'reflection' of reality. The chapter also suggests that STM can in fact be interpreted as a radical critique of social inequality and the destructive effects of living with ethnicised social categories.