This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the grotesque in contemporary British fiction from a number of different perspectives. It explores how the grotesque's status as non-classical results in a paradox where it comes both before and after the establishment of classical norms. The book outlines a tradition of the grotesque in European art and literature of which the contemporary works under discussion are a part. It illuminates the economies and 'classical' nature of the aesthetics of realism, and the strength such economies still hold is demonstrated by the tenor of much of the contemporary criticism. The book examines a particular strand of the grotesque in contemporary writing.

Comics provide an essential, alternative visual space to expand hip-hop style and narratives – and even have a claim as the essential vehicle for the visual representation of hip-hop today. The visual and lyrical comic art of Ronald Wimberly is exemplary of the productive and critical relationship between comics and hip-hop. This chapter puts his collaboration with M. F. Grimm (on 2007’s Sentences) into conversation with his largest solo work, Prince of Cats (2012; rereleased 2016), to demonstrate how Wimberly’s stylistic renderings and linguistic experimentations with the sounds of hip-hop create a parallel – if absurd and satirical – historical perception and critique of the visual registers of Black life in American politics and popular culture, even as (and because) the comic form depends on the visual and the lyrical.

This chapter reviews the origins of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU), its aims and philosophy, objectives and relations with other civil society actors and the state, up to and in the course of social partnership. It seeks to bring out the experience of the INOU in social partnership as a good illustration of the concept of asymmetric engagement in the case of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). The founders of the INOU were trade union-minded, and regarded the employed and unemployed as sharing a broadly common economic interest. The INOU's first general secretary was Eugene Hickland and he was succeeded by Mike Allen, both originally from the Galway Association of the Unemployed. One great difficulty for the INOU and local centres was to create a positive sense of identity and motivation for the unemployed.

This chapter traces the transformative literary, scientific, and cultural events of the 1810s that shaped the period’s fascination with making life out of death. It was during this tumultuous decade that debates about materialism and vitalism came to a head. Literary and scientific writers alike boldly repositioned the human mind as dependent on the body. But this brought with it a host of anxieties. What kind of immortality can reside within the embodied mind, susceptible as it is to material dissolution? What kinds of fertility – intellectual and otherwise – can withstand mortality? For some writers in the 1810s, these questions may lead darkly, as in Frankenstein, to ‘the unhallowed damps of the grave’; but for others, and especially for poets, that same grave becomes a site of regeneration. This chapter argues that the 1810s witnessed a form of Romantic decadence centred on the human body, one in which newly vocal philosophies of materialism combined with radical poetics to briefly reimagine and even celebrate the function of decay.

Much of the most commercially successful hip-hop of the 2010s reveled in the ephemerality and hype of digital cultures. This music jettisoned “street” poeticism for an improvised palette of garbled Auto-Tune experiments, hyperactive ad-lib flurries, and absurdly persistent repetition. This chapter offers a panoramic survey of the aesthetic development of this “mumble rap” in the context of streaming services and social media, briefly examining work by Lil Wayne, Future, Young Thug, Chief Keef, Migos, Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. Stylistic links are located across this dizzyingly diverse and amorphous genre, foregrounding rap vocals that assume an (in)authenticity fostered in “techno-human syntheses.”

The overarching question addressed in this chapter is how to study spatial semantics in individual languages. This question refers to individual languages by way of foregrounding documentation, description, and typology. At the same time, the discussion should be useful for students of spatial semantics in child language, psycholinguistics, and corpus-based research. It proceeds from a consideration of the kinds of concepts that populate the spatial domain (Section 9.1). This is followed by several sections that examine the lexicalization and grammaticalization of spatial properties across languages (Sections 9.2–9.6). An inventory of tools and methods for the study of spatial semantics concludes (Section 9.7).

This considers the crossovers between lesbian and spinster identities in the interwar period. Lesbian novels by Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann, and Clemence Dane are scrutinized in the context of sexological debates about perversity and abnormality, advice literature on female friendship and arguments about lesbian modernism and female masculinity. I develop queer readings of the ‘apparitional lesbian’ and question whether the lesbian heroine can be rescued from isolation. Such arguments are related to the normalising and coding of same-sex desire in autobiographical accounts.

The introduction of devolution fundamentally changed the nature of the policy-making and policy-implementing process in Northern Ireland. It also required that local political actors in Northern Ireland refocus their attentions away from the constitutional question and consider broader policy questions. This chapter details the growing pervasiveness of EU policies and outlines the extent to which the increasing policy competence of the Union impacts on the policy remit of the Northern Ireland devolved unit. The region’s response to this new policy environment is identified via an examination of a series of official policy documents produced by the Northern Ireland Executive, Northern Ireland Assembly and the European Commission since 1999. The chapter notes that the development of a vision for Northern Ireland’s engagement with the EU has tentatively emerged. Pronouncements in relation to managing and directing the EU agenda suggest the emergence of a more advanced and sophisticated engagement with the EU. Importantly, these dynamics and developments were aided by direct engagement between Belfast and Brussels – a situation which was permitted by the UK government. Progress in the EU policy domain has been dependent on the domestic national political arena and is not solely attributable to new and novel forms of governance.

Using critiques of ‘the human’ drawn from Black feminism, this chapter examines the aesthetic components of ‘race’ as the concept begins, in the early nineteenth century, to resemble its current form. After a brief introduction featuring Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the main test cases are early to mid-decade representations of Khoikhoi women and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The chapter ends by looking forward to works like Sanditon by Jane Austen and Ourika (1823) by Claire de Duras. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the 1810s were a period where the concept of race became simultaneously more unsettled and more established as a distinct realm of human experience. Further, it argues for the crucial role aesthetic representation played in this contradictory state of affairs and in the development of modern identity categories.