It is not surprising that bastards feel at home in the theatre because there was an immediate kinship between the two in Renaissance England. Generalised condemnations of playing, found in anti-theatrical writings, suggest that all theatre practice was perceived as socially disruptive, no matter what the performance space. Bastards' ideological, verbal and spatial detachment allow them to use the platea function. Their power to deconstruct the fictional world, or locus, was particularly important since censorship endeavoured to control the disturbing energy of the theatre by scrutinising and altering the texts of plays. The bastard is adept at using metatheatre to undermine powerful figures on stage and beyond. Obviously, he does not have a monopoly on such effects, but he is naturally located on the periphery of the drama and so is well placed to give this kind of commentary.
Bastardy is condemned by the highest moral authority, divine law, which is incorruptible. Religious authority formed the backbone of patriarchal order in Renaissance England so the spiritual condemnation of bastardy had important economic and social dimensions. In short, bastardy was ideal to create a humanised version of the morality Vices in a secular play while maintaining an easily identifiable evil 'type'. The majority of Renaissance plays linking bastardy and the Church do so to criticise Catholicism. The Bible's exclusion of illegitimates from the kingdom of heaven is a starting point for characters who, instead of being allied with satanic powers, are utterly detached from religious doctrine, unnervingly atheistic in outlook. These characters make an outright rejection of the moral order which labelled bastardy as the accursed share. Fears about new rational thinking were actually exacerbated by the Protestant culture.
Mary Braddon's reputation in the 1860s was - as it still is - as a writer of sensation fiction. Through the representation of the theatrical world in contrast with other social contexts Braddon comments on moral values, favouring the traditional Christian virtues of compassion, generosity and purity of spirit. Braddon refers to the theatrical world through the character of Richard Thornton, violinist, scene-painter and translator. Even in her most 'popular' fiction, fiction that was written for the cheap weekly magazines, Braddon's interest in eyes, in the act of looking and in the interplay of gazes is not without subtlety. Braddon not only provides a flamboyant setting and characters, lending to the domestic the charm of the exotic, but she also conveys a moral message that is firmly grounded in traditional Christian values, however ambivalent she may be about theatre as an environment for the virtuous heroine.
The 'classic novel TV serial', or CNTVS, is a special television mode, and one that has perhaps had less attention than it should. To define it provisionally, and to introduce the 1994 BBC Middlemarch, this chapter begins by comparing the CNTVS with the classic novel film adaptation or CNFA. One of the greatest differences between the manner of the BBC Middlemarch and that of the novel is that on the screen the intimate style does not dominate. The BBC Middlemarch begins with the town and works in the key characters through a process of layering. It prefers to show the total community: each episode has a focus on a big event, whereas in the novel one follows individual characters and sees the events through their eye. Both the novel and the CNTVS obviously end with Dorothea's commitment to private life in the service of her partner-to-be, Ladislaw.
As an extension of the well-established Warcraft series, World of Warcraft is a subscription-based massively multiplayer role-playing game that came online in late 2004. Alongside an analysis of the game's specific stylistic and textural milieu, it is the way that this particular multiplayer game facilitates a balance between player agency and restriction and the relationship between interpellation and identity that provide the main focus of this chapter. In addition, a variety of issues around player identity arise because of the social context afforded by the game and it is a core contention of this essay that it is the complex interactions between text and player/s that breathe vitality and drama into this world. Assessing what impact playing a social and fantasy-based game like World of Warcraft has on personal identity is not easy, particularly as identity is performative and has playful aspects.
Beloved is the novel that demonstrates most obviously Morrison's concern to bear witness to the forgotten or erased past of African Americans. The process of writing Beloved, Morrison owns, was one of confronting not only her own reluctance to write about slavery, but the 'national amnesia' on the subject. Morrison regards the genre of the slave narrative, shaped and constrained as it was by the Abolitionist cause, as unable to bear the fullest possible witness to the interior lives of the slave-narrators. There are many stories told in this novel, each a testimony to a slightly different aspect of slave experience, none balking from revealing the psychic and physical horrors of slavery. In addition to exploring the trauma that slavery wreaked on those who survived into the post-Civil War period, Morrison ambitiously attempts an imaginative testimony of those who did not survive.
This chapter considers popular fiction's relationship to mass culture. It discusses the division between those critics who consider mass culture to have a negative influence on modern life and those who detail its positive as well as its negative aspects. Today the bestseller is the most familiar kind of popular fiction. It differs from previous forms in that it is entirely a product of the industrial age, mechanically reproduced alongside other goods, services and cultural artefacts. The concept of cultural hegemony challenges the idea that dominance is total. Instead unequal power relations are the product of a continuing social process: they have to be made and remade over time. This contrasts with both negative theories of mass culture and postmodernist criticism, both of which play down the importance of culture as a site of contestation. The chapter ends with a case study of the bestselling titles in Britain in 1995.
The publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (on 1 November 1790) was not exclusively a London event, even though the first editions reached the public through the good offices of Dodsley on Pall Mall. The Paine/Burke controversy was taken up in popular song, or at least in the printed broadsides which sought to condition public opinion. Though the Irish capital did see its own editions of the Reflections into print, and the Paine/Burke controversy had its own Irish colouration, the battle to control public opinion shifted away from Burkean themes. Among the hundreds of publications debating in 1798-1800 the proposed union between Britain and Ireland, the name of Burke is not often cited. The preceding examination of the record PRO: CO 904/2, conceived as the obverse of Burke's Reflections, is intended to recommend the historical method.
For German politicians as well as the public at large, Kosovo had remained in the shadow of other crisis-areas in the former Yugoslavia - particularly Bosnia, which absorbed a great deal of political, military and diplomatic attention. The Kosovo crisis provides a number of lessons useful in a more general assessment of German foreign policy in the late 1990s. The government's desire to be a reliable North Atlantic Treaty Organization partner is crucial for understanding the position taken by the Red-Green coalition. Kosovo marked a new plateau for German foreign and security policy since it intensified the discussion about the strategic orientation of the country's foreign policy and enhanced the instruments available for international action. The Common Foreign and Security Policy was among the first victims of the Iraqi crisis.
On 25 March 1999, the Swedish Government decided to appoint a commission with the task of presenting an 'overall, exhaustive and definitive survey of the domestic operations of the security services' after 1945. This Commission, which went under the name of the Commission on the Swedish Security Services (SÄKO), appears afterwards as one in a number of critically investigative historical commissions, churned out of the ideological reorientation of the 1990s. The three problems that can be summarised in the key words: deadlines, lack of competence and forced compromises, were all in different ways also relevant for SÄKO. Like the majority of historical commissions SÄKO was expected to present evaluating conclusions. According to the Government's, it should 'outline and evaluate' the 'weighing up' done by the political, police and military leadership. Nor did it look at contemporary views of the weighing-up between national security and individual rights in any systematic manner.