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8 ‘The lion turned into a lamb’: the consumer politics of popular liberalism The Liberal leader William Gladstone understood both the pleasures and pains of consumerism very well. He amassed an impressive art collection during his political career, which he reluctantly sold for financial reasons when nearing retirement. More mundanely, Gladstone also participated in the ‘china craze’ that gripped the middle classes in the 1860s, and could wax lyrical about his Worcester porcelain.1 Though his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer is much better known to
, was coloured by medieval traditions, chivalric and imperial (the Order of the Golden Fleece), amorous (Petrarchan comparisons of a mistress’s hair to the Fleece) and spiritual (identification of the Fleece with the Holy Lamb). 1 All this informed reception in continental Europe as in England. 2 Jonathan Bate analyses the myth in The Merchant of Venice in the wider context of Shakespeare
Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein reflects both Romantic critiques of autonomy, as they have been recently defined by Nancy Yousef, and discourses of isolation and addiction as they appear in key texts by Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb. For Coleridge and Lamb, addiction leads to what current specialists often call ‘terminal uniqueness’, a feeling of isolation both incommunicable to others and incapable of being heard by a non-addicted audience. In its own portrayals of isolation, Frankenstein may be seen to intersect with these larger discourses of isolation, chemical dependence, and what Anya Taylor calls ‘the empty self ’ of Romantic addiction.
R&G 17_Tonra 01 11/10/2013 17:27 Page 180 17 Reading Howard Barker’s pictorial art Charles Lamb (Editors’ note: This paper was given at the 2009 ‘Howard Barker’s Art of Theatre’ conference in Aberystwyth, Wales, at which an exhibition of Barker’s oil paintings formed a backdrop for the plenary lecture space, and for a performance; and the author provided further illustrations of Barker’s drawings and paintings, with powerpoint projection. The prohibitive costs of colour printing means that images from the drawings and paintings cannot appear to accompany this
of their era … punctuated by references to a sharp economic recession, homelessness, social exclusion, the welfare state and the broader disintegration of civic and community values’ (Piper 2015 : 66). This thematic outlook is framed by a visual appetite for the ‘spectacularization of the body and site of crime’, as was occurring in horror films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and literary crime fiction by
. Hunt is widely regarded to be reminiscent of John Thaw’s Jack Regan in The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–1978) owing to his ‘rejection of analytical procedures, reliance on instinct, penchant for violence’, and ‘working class vernacular’ (Lamb 2014 : 204). Compared to the interrogation of Raimes, which takes place in a purpose-built interrogation suite, Hunt uses a cluttered lost-property room on account
Chinese dreams in Romantic England tells the extraordinary story of Thomas Manning (1772–1840), a brilliant polymath who risked everything to discover the secrets of Chinese language and culture. A young idealist whose imagination was fired by the French Revolution and ambitious plans for making a better world, Manning participated in the ‘first wave’ of British Romanticism alongside famous friends such as Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Disillusionment with events in France encouraged other Romantics to seek inspiration in the poetic imagination and the English countryside, but Manning looked further afield – to China, one of the world’s most ancient and sophisticated civilizations. In 1790s Britain, China was terra incognita, and Manning’s quest led him first to the salons of Napoleonic Paris, then to the sealed borders of the vast Chinese Qing Empire, and finally to Tibet’s holy city of Lhasa. There, on the ‘roof of the world’, Manning became the first Englishman to meet the Dalai Lama. When he finally returned to England, he confronted an increasingly Sinophobic climate, and his outward-looking vision was neglected and later forgotten. This book uses newly discovered archival sources to tell Manning’s story in full for the first time. In doing so, it not only helps us understand the bold and forward-looking vision of this remarkable man. It also provides a surprising new perspective on China’s contribution to the Romantic imagination, and the wider course of cultural exchange between Britain and Asia at the dawn of the nineteenth century.
You’re nicked is a genre study of police series produced by UK television from 1955 to the 2010s. It considers how the relationship among production practices, visual stylistics, and resultant ideology has evolved over the past sixty years, and how this has had an impact on changing cultural definitions of the police series genre.
To chart the development of the genre each chapter focuses on a particular decade to examine how key series represent the changes that gendered identities and social-class demographics were experiencing economically, socially, and politically in light of the disassembly of the postwar settlement. Depictions of the police station, domestic scenes of criminals, and the private lives of police officials are examined to unearth the complex ideology underpinning each series and to determine how the police series genre can be used to document socio-economic changes to British society.
The conclusion demonstrates how this study’s research aims have been achieved, and discerns to what extent television programmes can be considered evidence of social change. It concludes by stating that the biggest change the genre has undergone is the loss of its social-realist desire to use police characters as an incidental means of learning about people’s lives and wider British society.
The last chapter analyses how Broadchurch (ITV, 2013–2017) and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014–) typify the British police series genre’s latest narrative and stylistic direction. It specifically considers how the use of HD aerial cameras mounted on drones in both series ideologically navigate the growing socio-economic inequalities of their specific localities in relation to gendered identities deriving from austerity politics.