This chapter analyses how the religious tragedies represented suffering through the actors' performances. Driven by faith, the participation in the sufferings of Christ and the quest for redemption induce the dialectic of martyrdom so that the violence of suffering can guarantee eternal life in the Kingdom of God. The chapter shows that French tragedy, from the 1580s to the 1630s was diverse, contradictory, and of astonishing cruelty, highlighting classical legends and emphasising freedom of the imagination. The pleasure of violence was derived from witnessing the great spectacle of suffering, which in its turn seemed to overrule the biblical histories, from the Old or the New Testament. As in all of the hagiographic tragedies of the period, the life of the saint, in Le Martyre de Saint Vincent, is a factor of unification and intrigue, which allows for a linear, episodic organisation.

This chapter examines the strategies employed by the local governments of Manchester and Hull to govern the space of their cities in the immediate post-war period by examining policies and projects that sought to control the built environment. The techniques of spatial governance local governments deployed ranged from zoning large areas, to prohibiting certain types of business, display or activity and included control of land, buildings and even the air. The chapter argues that in the immediate post-war period local corporations attempted to expand their ability to control their cities in a holistic sense through the application and expansion of national planning legislation. Their aim was the assertion of a long-term, rational approach to the physical development of their cities, but their means were often mundane or small-scale: control of fun-fairs, the regulation of air or advertising as well as the siting of shops were all part of corporations holistic view of the functional city. These attempts were contested by the agencies of the national state, commercial elites and the inhabitants of the cities, illustrating the deeply contested character of modernity in the post-war.

This chapter outlines how the Land Plan came to incorporate Chartism's improvement culture, largely because of their shared basis in social Radicalism's critique of industrial capitalism, societal degradation, and urban living conditions. During the early 1840s there was a revival of interest in schemes to establish Radical communities upon the land. The electoral strategy deployed in 1841 provided activists with few concrete political achievements, but nevertheless was an effective way of mobilising Chartists, which became a core strategy of the decade. Tensions had been obvious from the trade disputes and strikes evident throughout the year, with a stone mason's strike in London prominent during the spring and eliciting support from the English Chartist Circular. The Land Plan therefore came into being as part of this broader interest which Thomas Frost reported appealed to 'Chartist-socialists' disillusioned by the failure of the National Petition and the strikes.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It reflects the double perspective on pain and suffering. The first part of the book focuses mainly on performing bodies (on stage). The second part discusses the pain of someone who watches the suffering of others, both in regard to theatre audiences and beholders of art, as well as to the onlooker in art: the theatre character or individual on canvas who is watching another hurt body. The third and final part analyses how this circulation of gazes and affects functions within a specific institutional context, paying particular interest to the performative context of public space.

Artists working in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the communist period adopted performance art as a free-form, open-ended means of expression. Performance art gave voice to concepts, relationships and actions that otherwise would not have been possible in the official realm of art or in the public sphere. In the post-communist period, artists continued to embrace the experimental nature of performance. Performance art created under the communist and post-communist systems manifests other points of continuity as well. Just as East European artists working under communism faced potentially severe repercussions for actions deemed politically or otherwise subversive, so, too, have their post-communist successors, as the controversy surrounding Pussy Riot, among other examples, attests. The fact that performance art continues to be relevant in the region attests to its lingering efficacy in both the world of art and the public sphere.

Roselee Goldberg reductively characterizes performance art from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall as almost 'exclusively' political. This chapter traces artists' efforts to cope with the communist environment, the period of transition and the complexities of life in the post-communist era that ensued. In Normalisation-era Czechoslovakia, artists utilised the medium of performance to express their views on events transpiring in the sociopolitical sphere. After the lifting of cultural restrictions on 22 July 1983, a number of public performances took place that decade that directly responded to the sociopolitical situation. The transition period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was also observed by artists through performance. Zoran Naskovski, one of the key artists of Serbia's independent art scene of the 1990s, marked the end of that decade with two related works: Apollo 9 (1999) and Death in Dallas (2000).

Gregory Nava's 2006 film Bordertown, a gothic thriller starring Jennifer Lopez and Antonio Banderas, is based on the real circumstances of the murders and their failed investigations. Bordertown indicts the factory owners and managers and the governments of Mexico and the US, and specifically names North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as creating the conditions that allow these murders to happen. By representing the wealthy villain as a vampiric figure, the film also makes him into a personification of the predatory effects of the neoliberal political economy that keeps women like Eva living in precarity: unsafe at work, unsafe on the streets and unsafe in her shanty-town home. Thus, the real villain in the film is NAFTA itself, and the neoliberal policies that shaped it, especially as these exploit and exacerbate the existing power structures along racial and gender lines.

This chapter makes a case for the enduring persistence of the political contractual concept of friendship and its key place in early modern political and legal thought. The concept of political friendship was rearticulated in theories of the internal arrangement of and relations between political communities. This casts a new light on the political and social order at the dawn of the sovereign state and modern international regimes. Renaissance and early modern discourses on the law of nations and nature offer a distinct and clear range of reference for the concept. Contributions from various philosophical and juridical traditions overlap in linking friendship to ideas of contracted agreement, an 'international treaty' open to classification and specific duties that a contract obliges parties to pay. These ideas contain further implications for political equality and inequality, spatial order and territorial integrity.

This chapter discusses the 3rd Floor – an artistic movement of the late Soviet and early independence years in Armenia (1987-94) – in its complex relationship with the cultural politics of the perestroika period, the official art of the Union of Artists of the Soviet Republic of Armenia, and National Modernism. It argues that the 3rd Floor, thought its strategy of hamasteghtsakan art both reproduced the dynamic of the perestroika politics and surpassed it. The 3rd Floor affirmed the separation between autonomous art and all that falls outside this autonomous sphere – the social world replete with antagonism and discontent.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book describes how Manchester's civic administration has responded to calls to reduce its carbon emissions. It traces the development of the lounge and an attendant notion of 'loungification'. The book explores the tensions in how organisational processes and community aspirations are negotiated through physical sites in urban spaces. It argues that combining narratives of success and community with imagery and maps characterise and regulate Manchester's Gay Village as a distinct, bordered, hedonistic and particularly tolerant place. The book focuses on Manchester city centre to argue that exploring the futures that different stakeholders envisage for the city centre reveals tensions that are otherwise glossed over. It explores how people's lives interact with the dynamics of urban transformation and development in their daily experiences. Urban ethnography contributes to the analyses of cities across multiple disciplines.

This chapter explores the relationship between mega-events and cities in the context of long-term social change and with particular reference to the important theme of the significance of social space for modern cities. It looks at the 'green city' awareness during the first phase of modernisation, with particular reference to the history of the creation and changing public uses of urban parks in the course of the modern development of Western cities. The chapter focuses on Expos and a general exploration of their history of operating as urban park-creating projects, and thus as both space-creating and green projects. It also focuses on a set of case studies of Expos as urban policy projects, particularly in terms of their space-creating, park-creating and green aspects. The cases are those of the European set of contemporary-era Expos, namely Seville 1992 and particularly Lisbon 1998 and Zaragoza 2008.

This chapter considers several dramas, all of which were produced by the BBC. With ITV showing little apparent interest in the conspiracy genre during 1973, these serials can be broadly positioned in a specifically public service impulse to provide challenging dramatic engagements with contemporary issues. Firstly Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) is largely focused on anxiety surrounding the free market economy, particularly through the growing influence of sinister forces from an increasingly integrated Europe. The chapter explores the emphasis that the narrative places on computers and the surveillance state, adding new terrain for both individual agency and fear of political repression. It examines Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), a far more stylish and prestigious drama which mounts a sombre examination of the nuclear state in a climate of increased Cold War tension.