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In tragedies of state, national unity is sought yet never secured. The past is always present as a warning and a mirror of contemporary fears. These plays address political concerns from behind the shields of fictionality and geographical or historical distance, a strategy that was already familiar to political writers who often drew on the examples of republican and imperial Rome but which became increasingly urgent as England had to define itself in response to external and internal challenges. Though the locations of such plays might
This review of the James Baldwin symposium at Virginia State University weighs the insights presented by a number of Black and white scholars, only a few of whom might be considered deeply informed about his life and legacy. Even so, the emerging thinkers provide a wealth of new and interesting perspectives on Baldwin, and the event was highlighted by Molefi Kete Asante’s critical lecture. His comments are a veritable call to arms, an invitation to Baldwin devotees to contend with his conclusions, a process which this article will begin.
realism, and sometimes also depicting a welfare state in decline. In Lindqvist's zombie novel Hanteringen av odöda (2005; Handling the Undead , 2009), the undead people are locked away by the Swedish government in a residential area called The Heath in a desperate attempt to handle a horrific situation in a rational and bureaucratic manner. A communal space at The Heath is described as follows: ‘The courtyard was dominated by the large structure in the centre… it had been planned as a combined laundry, social space and refuse centre. However
Although composed before 9/11, Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s My Kinsman, Major Molineux and Thomas Ligotti‘s The Shadow at the Bottom of the World are both prescient in their critique of the impulse of American communities following 9/11 to monumentalise and concretise the nation-state and in particular the remains at Ground Zero. In this essay I discuss Ground Zero as a suggestive trope for the illusiveness of the nation as an imagined community. These complementary Gothic short stories operate as allegory and offer a way of reading how patriotic communities cohered around what remained at Ground Zero and (re)produced it as a site of patriotic performance. A new Gothic trait in our age of terror(ism) is the anxiety over the absence of a stable centre that anchors national continuity. This article places these short stories in conversation with Benedict Anderson,,Étienne Balibar and other theorists who engage critiques of nation-building in order to draw out what is Gothic about the nation-state and to further substantiate how 9/11 revealed the nation-state as a principally Gothic phenomenon.
The John Rylands Library’s recently rediscovered Spencer Album 8050 contains a proof state of the Battle of the Romans and the Sabines, an engraving pivotal in the short-lived but ambitious collaboration between Jacopo Caraglio (1500–65) and Rosso Fiorentino (1495–1540) in Rome. This proof impression was first printed in black ink, and then densely covered with hand-drawn ink. A comparison between the new proof state and previously identified states of the engraving using a novel technical approach involving long-wave infrared light to isolate the printed lines optically indicates that the Spencer proof state precedes any other known state of the engraving. The use of penwork and printing on this early proof and subsequent proof states demonstrates how Caraglio and Rosso saw drawing and printing as intimately connected, iterative steps in the print’s production.
In 1869, Parliament disestablished the Church of Ireland, dissolving what Benjamin Disraeli called the ‘sacred union’ of church and state in Ireland. Disestablishment involved fundamental issues – the identity and purpose of the established church, the religious nature of the state, the morality of state appropriation of church property for secular uses, and the union of Ireland and Britain – and debate was carried on at a high intellectual level. With disestablishment, the Church of Ireland lost much of its property, but it recovered, now as an independent Episcopal church with a renewed mission. The idea of the United Kingdom as a semi-confessional Protestant state, however, was dealt a serious blow.
he appears to feel a certain amount of guilt about or, at least, does not wish openly to acknowledge. His status as a ‘schoolmaster’ places him in a liminal state akin to that of a female governess in a respectable or middle-class family, intimate to and dependant upon the family but not of the family. Similarly, Headstone occupies his position by reason of education rather than birthright. It should be remembered that even ‘public-school masters were often of lower social status than their pupils’ in the nineteenth century. 8 For Headstone, this immediately