Critical Survey

In the last few months Britain has lived through several moments when the idea of being a citizen has been at the forefront of people’s minds. In the space of twenty-four hours in July 2005 we experienced the jubilation of winning the right to host the 2012 London Olympics and felt the horror and shock caused by the terrorist attacks on the London transport network. Both events showed in stark contrast what being a citizen means for a nation in the twenty-first century: the inevitable coming together of a people to celebrate national success turned to bewilderment as Britons struggled to understand how fellow citizens could inflict such destruction on their own country. Questioning citizenship is now a daily occurrence in the national press as tabloids call for loyalty tests, immigrants to be repatriated, and tougher laws for extremists. The following six articles, written before the aforementioned events, tackle some of the very same issues that now trouble us. They address themes such as identity, nationality, confinement, attacks on liberty, citizenship, and being the subject of oppression. Analysing at a fundamental level the nature of being a subject or citizen, these papers challenge notions of dominant ideology and highlight the importance of self in the construction of identity and a harmonious citizenry.

Many of the critical essays of the Canadian novelist, poet and theorist Robert Kroetsch, as collected in his 1989 anthology The Lovely Treachery of Words, explore the issue of how Canadian writers attempt to establish a cultural nationalism in the face of the decline of the British Empire. They are an initial expression of ideas about place and language, the problematic discourse of the 'New World', and the reinscription of First Nations peoples into the literature and culture of the Canadian nation. These are concerns which later came to be regarded as 'postcolonial' with the burgeoning of the term in the late 1980s through to the present day. However, his essays are due for reassessment in the light of recent responses to postcolonial subjectivity which critique the 'colonizer-colonized' binary as used in settler-invader contexts. This 'colonizer-colonized' binary has a troubling tendency to efface indigenous peoples. It conceals the imperialistic, land-grabbing aspects of settler-invader history by positing the settler as the true postcolonial subject, searching for a stable national identity – an authentic Canadian sense of citizenship and belonging – in the face of a cultural heritage largely defined by European imperialism.

This article builds on theories of space to suggest that the spatialised public-private dichotomy may be redundant and that civic space has become a more useful language of the success, or otherwise, of publicly accessible spaces. Taking my impetus from the seemingly hyper-privatised space of the shopping mall I argue that private space can be civic space if it encourages, using theorist Iris Marion Young's terminology, 'social justice', and the mixing of diverse peoples and uses. Alongside the shopping mall, I examine the much-hyped Disney town of Celebration in Florida to illustrate how distinctions between public and private space have become increasingly blurred, before concluding with a discussion of recent efforts on both sides of the Atlantic to produce effective design approaches in creating civic space. The approach in this article is more pragmatic than theoretical given the minimal theorising about 'civic space' to date. Although I provide a brief overview of the established literature, most still relies on the 1960s writings of French geographer, Henri Lefebvre, who called for space that 'signifies the right of citizens and city dwellers, and of groups they (on the basis of social relations) constitute, to appear on all networks and circuits of communication, information and exchange.'

This article examines two texts which contain representations of the female hobo: Harold Gray's comic strip Little Orphan Annie (1924–1964) and Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980). This article will focus on a section of Orphan Annie from 1926 and 1927. The many differences between the texts – which include their genre and their temporal setting and production – are acknowledged. However, I am primarily concerned with the figure that unites these disparate texts: the female hobo. This article makes use of two key concepts: the category and the frame. There are several categories within these texts: wife, mother, orphan, daughter, and that of wanderer. This article is also concerned with the collapse of categories. Marjorie Garber argues that the presence of a passing figure reveals a 'category crisis'. In Garber's argument this is 'a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another' (1993:16). The texts examined in this paper both contain passing figures: Orphan Annie features Annie as a crossed dressed female hobo and Housekeeping a hobo attempting to become a small town mother.

Wife Swap, made for Channel 4 by RDF Media, began in January 2003 and has so far reached its seventh series, with a further eighth series already planned. The relatively rapid spawning of new series is indicative of Wife Swap's popularity: the programme has become one of Channel 4's undisputed successes, attracting audiences in excess of 6 million viewers. The basic premise of the programme involves two wives swapping households for two weeks and living with each other's family. This article aims to examine the ways in which Wife Swap uses the citizen as its central focus. More generally, I seek to situate the programme within the context of RDF Media's output, the Reality television genre and the Swap format on British television, before providing a more sustained analysis of the programme's themes and conventions as they relate to the role of the citizen as subject.

The terrain and identity of the blockbuster, particularly the subset represented by X-Men, are among the least mapped and consequently misunderstood of Hollywood phenomena. Though the entertainment media deploy the term blockbuster without difficulty across almost every genre of film, academically the term has been more elusive. Previous to Julian Stringer's edited collection Movie Blockbusters, the blockbuster had usually been conceived as an unproblematically American phenomenon. Stringer's attempt to map the blockbuster's terrain usefully brings in the notion of nationality, which will form the focus of this analysis. However, it also begs an explanation of the blockbuster as it will be understood here. This discussion will use John Tomlinson's formulation of globalisation as complex connectivity as the basis for a more flexible framework within which to view the blockbuster film. Thus this article will seek to make sense of the flows of culture represented in X-Men, not as emanating from a central 'American' locus, but rather as shifting around what David Morley and Kevin Robins would term a global-local nexus. In this way the transnational and the national will both be shown to play a role in dispersing elements of films (and indeed this might be extended to other 'global' products) to the maximum number of potential audiences worldwide.

A social warrant is a collectively sanctioned understanding of obligations and entitlements that has the force of law, even though it is rarely written down. Social warrants author and authorize new ways of knowing and new ways of being; they challenge and transform what is permitted and what is forbidden. The social warrant of the Fourteenth Amendment opened the door to equality for many more people than the slaves and their descendants. Yet the triumph of abolition democracy did not destroy the regime of white male propertied power. Social warrants do not only succeed one another, they answer one another, contest one another, and constrain one another. The social warrant of white male Protestant propertied power in the United States is not simply the mal-distribution of rights, resources, and recognition, but also a systemic structured advantage, a way of life and a world view. Most important at this particular moment of danger, the social warrant of white male Protestant propertied power perpetuates itself through state sponsorship of spectacle, sensation, and sentiment connected to the war on terrorism.

More interested in enriching her oeuvre with new plots, forms and styles than in sticking to winning formulae or following the more acclaimed trends of the times, Joyce Carol Oates counteracts the prevailing notion of the isolated, minimalist and exclusivist literary genius. Her work defies pre-established views about the parameters of 'serious' writing, not only because of its astonishing prolixity but also for its ability to attract a popular readership. Oates's phenomenal productivity is uncommon in twentieth-century literature. To date (27 February 2006) Oates has written fifty novels and novellas, twenty-eight short story collections, eight poetry collections, eight volumes of drama, and eleven volumes of essays and criticism.

The Length of Days Balance is RUTH O’CALLAGHAN

Climb The Horncastle Executioner A Note In Devizes Museum ROBERT ETTY

Whereabouts by Mark Roper (Calstock: Peterloo, 2005) 96pp. ISBN 1 904324 30 4 £7.95

Between Dryden And Duffy: Another Collection by Ann Drysdale (Calstock: Peterloo, 2005) 96pp. ISBN 1 904324 29 0 £7.95

Score! by Sarah Wardle (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005) 80pp. ISBN 1 85224 706 1 £7.95

How the Stone Found Its Voice by Moniza Alvi (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005) 64pp. ISBN 1 85224 694 4 £7.95

The Toast of the Kit-Cat Club, A Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Linda France (Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2005) 80pp. ISBN 1 85224 677 4 £7.95

The Outsider by Christine McNeill (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2005) 54pp. ISBN 1 904886 15 9 £8.95

The Cartographer Sleeps by Barbara Daniels (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2005) 64pp. ISBN 1 904886 14 0 £8.95

Notes on contributors