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How, then, shall I finally end a book about ending? Sweet Peter, Everything you said about the joys of being together – works both ways. Janina and I go on missing you with an intensity growing by the day. 23 September 1997 We are waiting to see you, up or down the staircase … 19 February 1998 Sweet Peter, we are already looking through the window – are you approaching? August is so far ahead, as yet … yours ever Z. 11 April 1998 Janina and I wait at the window. 21 April 1998 You must have constant hiccup, we think of you
voices should not be dismissed, medieval attitudes towards death were far more complex. Christian belief gave meaning to death. It was not an ending, merely a rupture: the soul leaves the body and continues its journey. Visions of the otherworld suggested that souls retained their earthly identity and would remember past experiences and acquaintances. A romantic view is expressed by Carmesina as she
Popular culture became a crucial aspect of the rising consumer society in the interwar Britain. Romantic exchanges and happy endings were a defining trait of bestselling novels and popular films in 1920s and 1930s Britain. This book ties contemporary concerns about ex-soldiers, profiteers, and working and voting women to the heroes, villains and love-interests that occur in several films and novels. It addresses the role of the hero as a character who embodies traits collectively valued by readers and the audience. In books and films like Sorrell and Son, the pre-war masculine role model was re-established as patriotic soldier, breadwinner and pater familias. The male villain is the opposite of this value set, and in works such as Bulldog Drummond, he is concerned with profit and the undermining of the national economy and social well-being. The female love-interest often occupied a fairly dynamic role in bestselling novels and hit films. Women in A Star Is Born and Queen Christina are shown as giving up their careers for love and forsaking wealth and power for love. Villainesses, by contrast, seek wealth, status and power at all costs. Censorship of films by the British Board of Film Censors and of literature by the Home Office in interwar Britain contributed to the construction of a popular narrative formula. Censorship aimed to produce an idealised vision of man's and woman's place within the economy and nation. The troubles of the real world were not to have a significant place in film or fiction.
5 Ending and aftermath The strike ended painfully in Scotland, and in stages. It collapsed unofficially in Ayrshire in the last week or so of February. A return at the other pits gradually followed an NUM delegate conference vote to end the strike, in London on Sunday 3 March, and two NUMSA and SCEBTA delegate conferences on 4 and 6 March, the second reversing the decision of the first to stay out. Deliberation was particularly difficult in West Fife and Clackmannan. The East Fife strikers were back at work on Wednesday 6 March, and the West Lothian and
5 Never-ending stories? There comes a point in the life of most long docs when, just as with long-running soaps, one gains the impression they might have achieved a state of perpetual motion. As sure as night follows day, we are returned to familiar locations and reacquainted with characters whom we might not have seen for quite some time but instantly recognise when they reappear. Any thought that long docs have discovered the secret of eternal life is, however, tempered by the knowledge that all of them are, in reality, destined to be of finite duration. The
3961 Discovering Gilgamesh.qxd:Layout 1 24/6/13 12:50 Page 150 4 Present endings: rethinking closure in the Victorian novel Conclusions are the weak points of most authors, but some of the fault lies in the very nature of the conclusion, which is at best a negation.1 (George Eliot, Letter to John Blackwood, 1 May 1857) T he faultline in Victorian culture that the Gilgamesh controversy both highlights and contributes to suggests that the arts were at best struggling to form a sense of their relationship to the past within conflicting and emergent models of
This final chapter investigates Atkinson’s engagement with conventions regarding endings and closure as an entry into her aesthetics of hybridity. It is based on the premise that endings matter to the reader because they contribute to giving shape to the way we interpret our lives: ‘Men, like poets, rush “into the middest,” in medias res, when they are born; they also die
6 Towards an ending Introduction Among the questions I will be addressing in this chapter are the following: In what ways, given long docs’ generically inbuilt resistance to closure, do filmmakers begin to contemplate the prospect of terminating these works? What role does the sponsoring agency or broadcasting institution play in deciding how and when a long doc should be terminated? In what ways are viewers actively prepared for being separated, once and for all, from subjects with whom they may have developed especially close relationships over the years? As
3 Endings, pasts and futures: temporal complexities and memory talk Introduction Relationships with time came to preoccupy me in Dodworth. On the one hand, I was aware of social stereotypes that posit older people are ‘lost in the past’, but this was emphatically not the case for the people I came to know in Dodworth. On the other hand, Dodworth is a place where the past matters a great deal, namely through ‘memory talk’ whereby the past is highly valorised locally across generations and intersects with claims of belonging. Considerations of temporal relations
. Furthermore, the very themes of questing, of loss and death that run through the narrative are themselves essentially repetitive. Loss and death are eternal elements of the human condition, while the quest for woman is represented as never-ending, unfulfilled. From a psychoanalytic point of view, one might say that the male quest in both film and fairy tale, and indeed in all narratives constructed on this model, enact the Spaltung