Jane Eyre has been remodelled for audiences with varying cultural backgrounds, thus proving the status of the novel as a Western classic. Literary mash-ups, graphic novels and web series have been added to the repertoire of texts that strengthen Jane's transmedia presence. The Autobiography of Jane Eyre follows in the footsteps of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which won an Emmy in 2013 for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media. The novel's theatrical presence was soon accompanied by wide-screen adaptations: from silent movies, through classic adaptations, to more recent experimental filmic versions. The web series as multimedia form offers unparalleled opportunities for the adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's novel. This new type of seriality has, from the start, been associated with confessionality in contemporary culture and with questions of authenticity, authorship and access within a shared and sharing digital economy.

This chapter examines the ritual for church consecration and the paradigm that it sets up for the construction and interpretation of sacred space. The performance of the liturgical ritual unites building, community, and scripture, purifying and consecrating the space as an ideal location for the communal worship of God. The chapter establishes key practices for the creation and maintenance of sacred space, including procession, purification, and the consecration of liturgical objects, and examines the continued relevance of the consecration ceremony for the identity of the parish community, in evidence from dedication sermons.

This chapter explores the importance of Ginsberg’s sexuality in the context of his life and work. Aware of his nonnormative sexual desires from an early age, Ginsberg’s lifelong quest for self-understanding was necessarily shaped and informed by poetic explorations into his sexuality, his relationship with which was sometimes fraught. His work bears the imprint of his enduring preoccupation with the variable experiences of queer minds and bodies (often his own) in both straight and queer spaces. The chapter examines selected canonical poems including “A Supermarket in California,” “My Sad Self,” “Howl,” “City Midnight Junk Strains,” and “The Green Automobile,” in order to highlight their generative provocations in the context of a period of prevailing queer invisibility and to emphasize Ginsberg’s legacy as a queer poet in the twenty-first century. The chapter also examines the relationship between Ginsberg’s status as a queer pioneer and some of the more troubling aspects of his in some areas limited and limiting visions and modes of sexuality.

This section presents an annotated critical edition of La diligencia , one of the ‘artículos de costumbres’, a type of satirical sketch that was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, by the Romantic journalist Mariano José de Larra (1809–37).

At the heart of the modern world order, one that has for the most part been shaped and maintained by the United States, lies a paradox between empire and anti-imperialism. At the heart of that paradox sits the enigmatic figure of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt's attitude towards empire was similar to his view of concentrated wealth and industrial power. Whether his views on political economy informed or even shaped his views of imperialism is uncertain, but the similarity between them is striking. In both cases, Roosevelt criticized the exercise of power and control as a form of subjugation of the weak and powerless by a small cabal of elites. Rhetorically, the image of big business as imperial helped Roosevelt construct ideological and political support for the New Deal.

Clive Barker's works frequently invoke fundamental elements in the gothic tradition. To reveal Barker's invocation of fundamentally gothic conventions, this chapter uncovers the gothic excesses in his early and seminal novel(la)s. They are The Damnation Game , The Hellbound Heart, The Thief of Always, and more recent novels Coldheart Canyon and The Scarlet Gospels, each of which are indebted to the Faustian pact. The Faustian pact is a key strategy for Barker to explore the corrupting nature of desire and the twisted path towards the sublime. Barker frequently entwines the invocation of the infernal with the desire for immortality, a pact with the damned that confers humanity's deepest wishes, all the while revelling in its nightmarish and often visceral consequences. Barker's novels, The Scarlet Gospels, continues in the vein of voyeurism and witnessing miracles beyond the call of human understanding.

Paradoxically, as much as Africa’s current problems are often rooted in the past, the continent today finds itself squarely at the forefront of new security thinking. Although the international community historically has played a critical role in shaping the African security agenda, true security—and solutions—begins at home. The often misappropriated mantra of ‘African solutions for African problems’ has taken on real and significant meaning in recent years with the development and implementation of new national, sub-regional, and regional approaches to advancing peace and security. This chapter examines these approaches, past shortcomings of the modern African state and its limitations, and looks at ways the African Union, regional NGOs, and civil society are seeking to fashion a cooperative security culture for 21st century needs. Without doubt many obstacles and challenges still remain, but these efforts are already proving useful in recasting the continent’s security priorities and, moreover, in establishing a direction for future engagement by Africans and non-Africans alike.

This chapter looks at the ways in which popular British comedy reflected the reorientation of an entire generation, away from the former conception of Britain's world-wide imperial destiny and towards the awareness of Britain's place in the world. The ever-widening gap between the global reach of British national aspirations and the encroaching external realities of the post-war world provided new avenues for comic exploration of the imperial ethos and the myth of Britain's 'world role'. It was the idea of character and breeding as the key to political legitimacy that was most brazenly sent up in Beyond the Fringe. The end of empire provided fertile ground for new innovations in British comedy. The satire boom has generally been interpreted as a symbol of profound changes in the dominant values of post-war British society.

In the context of contemplating representations of history and histories of representation in the changing Northern Ireland, there are numerous works by artists that struggle with testing means of recording or seeking evidence, investigating archives and exploring the 'potentiality' of testimony. This chapter considers the examples of speculative history-making in the work of two artists Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O'Beirn, who have been engaged with the effect of the past on the landscapes of the present. It focuses on the work of two artists whose work with film and video has engaged quite differently with historical narratives in the north of Ireland. They are Glasgow-based, Dublin-born artist Duncan Campbell, and German-born, Irish-based artist Miriam de Búrca. Campbell's film-making method heightens the tension between what we perceive to be 'real' and what is more obviously 'constructed' through the mediating process of documentary.

The conquest of the Boer republics in South Africa presented a slightly unusual case of imperial expansion in that the enemy were of European origin. This lent a defensive edge to British rhetoric since, in continental Europe, the war was often seen as a human rights issue, the independence of a small proud nation against the might of British imperialism. The concentration camps, with their high mortality, became the measure both of the inhumanity of war and the morality of anti-imperialism. The British attitude to Boer men in the camps was particularly ambivalent, mediated by middle-class notions of masculinity. On the one hand the Boers were the enemy, portrayed as an uneducated African peasantry. On the other hand Boer men were redeemable for they shared with British men the virtues of a military nation.

During his month-long visit to Cuba in 1965, Allen Ginsberg’s ideals of expressive freedom, sexual openness, and poetic individualism came into direct conflict with the increasingly repressive Castroist regime. Invited by the state organization Casa de las Américas to judge a poetry competition, Ginsberg quickly drew scrutiny from the regime for his outspoken views on homosexuality, drug use, and freedom of expression. His subsequent surveillance by the state’s vice squad, arrest, and deportation underscored the Cuban government’s intolerance for nonconformist expression, especially as it pertained to sexuality and dissent. Ginsberg’s experiences, recorded in his Cuban diaries, letters, and poems, reveal a central paradox of revolutionary politics: While seeking liberation, regimes might deploy repressive mechanisms of censorship and control. Ginsberg’s confrontation with Cold War ideologies – both US and Cuban – solidified his vision of a humanist poetics aimed at disrupting authoritarian systems and expanding consciousness through individuals’ radical self-expression.

Colonial scientific practices were fundamental to colonial political practices, and vice versa, even as science and politics underwent fundamental transformations. The case of Mauritius may raise new questions for southern African historians interested in the politics of scientific research. It was only during the depression of the 1920s and 1930s that peasants revealed that they, too, had the knowledge to produce and distribute new kinds of sugar canes. In 1937, when the social order seemed on the verge of collapse, the Department of Agriculture reached out to the peasants and disseminated sugar canes directly to them. Many Indo-Mauritian peasants rioted and nearly succeeded in shutting down the entire Mauritian sugar industry. The rhetorical and social practices of sugar cane science were especially complex in colonial Mauritius, where cultural and linguistic differences as well as economic and political practices tended to keep people separate.