Critical Survey

This special issue of Critical Survey stems from a conference at Canterbury Christ Church University in June 2010 that was intended to explore continuities and ruptures in the representation and deployment of angels and demons and related binaries, be they in nineteenth-century print media or seventeenth-century Protestant texts, twenty-first century bestsellers or company PR strategies. From the first it was decided that discussion should not be limited to actual angels and demons, but the more general binaries of good and evil, lucid self and obscure Other. Considerations of the generic processes of demonisation and its opposite were also welcome, as were attempts to think outside such binaries (insofar as such is possible). Was it the case that the undoing of binaries, vital to Cixous’ feminist enterprise and deconstruction generally, was salient today for the various politics of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, class, disability, and place, or had such deconstruction been so co-opted by conservative commercial culture (as was always possible according to Christopher Norris) that alternative strategies were necessary? All these ways of thinking about angels and demons are represented in the essays that follow.

Early modern political discourse was no stranger to the use of angels and demons to denote the binary opposition between good and evil, Self and Other - and neither was the early modern stage. References to the divine and the demonic might be used to clarify complex political issues to the public, legitimise one's own position, or sling mud at one's opponents. This article focuses on two early Jacobean history plays, Barnabe Barnes's The Devil's Charter (1606) and Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1605); it examines the use of angels and demons in the staging of issues of religious difference and political action in the confusing years following Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, when old attitudes to traditional 'Others' had to be reconfigured in the light of the views and interests of the new monarch, King James VI and I.

Demonic belief in Scotland has primarily been addressed in the context of the witch-trials, in which the devil appeared as an external figure that convinced morally weak people (mostly women) to renounce their baptisms, enter into a demonic pact, and commit atrocious crimes. Encountering the devil, however, could also be a very personal, internal experience that arose from the questions of sin and salvation that formed an intrinsic part of reformed Protestant piety. I propose that in order to understand the importance of the devil to early modern Scotland, and Europe more generally, we must look beyond the witch trials and the dichotomy of good versus evil and ask how early modern men and women actually experienced the devil in their daily lives. By exploring the diaries and letters of both ministers and laymen in seventeenth-century Scotland, I demonstrate that the devil was not simply an evil, non-human "Other"; for early modern Scots, the demonic represented something innate and intimate about humanity itself, serving as a constant reminder of the moral depravity man, the potential for God's wrath, and the insecurity of salvation.

Jerome K. Jerome was the founder and editor of the weekly periodical Today, begun shortly before the media showdown between Sarah Grand and Ouida made the New Woman one of the most demonised constructions of the mid 1890s. In a series of editorials and commissioned articles between 1894 and 1897 the journal explores the range of meanings starting to accrue around this figure. Unlike some of his contributors Jerome notably attacks both the New Woman herself and the reactionary male attitudes he sees as partly responsible for her rebellion. In his later fiction Jerome continues to explore the problem of gender relations. In Tommy & Co. (1904) the eponymous protagonist is (somewhat unconvincingly) unable to tell as a child whether she is male or female. In one of his last novels, All Roads Lead to Calvary (1919), the recent war has further problematised the question of women's proper role.

This article examines interpretations of the ideal media corporation by analysing corporate social responsibility engagement and communication of the largest media organisations in the world between 2000 and 2009. The study found that CSR engagement and communication are relatively limited and narrow among these firms, hence it is not surprising that public trust about them is low and perceptions of these organisations as 'demons' to society are widespread. Although CSR communication of multinational media companies has increased during the last decade, this was from a very low level of reporting and likely to have been mainly the result of organisations in the sector responding to a general trend in the corporate world towards a greater emphasis on CSR. The article argues that the increase in CSR communication arguably is part of a PR effort to improve the companies' image rather than a genuine transformation of the organisations to try to live up to the expectations of the ideal media corporation.

This article reads Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse novels as contemporary developments in the Gothic genre reflecting current issues of group and national identity. It extends the trope of the vampire as a site of national anxiety to a globalised, post 9/11 context where national identity is renegotiated and transformed. In Harris's novels, the vampires reveal themselves as Other to humans but integrate by accepting human definitions of nation and race which are then superceded by globalised trade. In Meyer's series, supposedly discrete groups of humans and non-humans evolve niche groupings that transform and react to the exigencies of history. Drawing upon Bill Ashcroft's use of the term 'articulation' to describe the cognizant construction of identity through the influences of social, national and religious traditions, the contemporary vampire is read as the place where renegotiations of national identity in a transnational era are visible.

This article explores the opportunities for resisting what Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) see as the reproductive nature of higher education. Originating in an empirical and theoretical study of resilient learners, this article inhabits an interdisciplinary space between Education and Literature. It seeks to read the exceptions to Bourdieu and Passeron's schema - what they call 'des miraculés' - openly and optimistically. A reading of Shakespeare's late play, The Winter's Tale, is offered in the light of two other texts - conclusions extrapolated from a range of data from the study, and Hélène Cixous's essay Sorties (1975/1986). As a result, the presumption that teaching and learning in the university is inevitably a self-centred and exclusive enterprise is challenged and an alternative way of thinking about pedagogy suggested.

May The Dark by RUTH O’CALLAGHAN

The Assay by Yvonne Green (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2010), 75 pp. ISBN 978-1-906613-14-3, £8.95.

No Apples in Eden: New and Selected Poems by John Lyons (Smith/ Doorstop Books, 2009), 64 pp. ISBN 978-1-902382-99-9, £9.95.

Lip by Catherine Smith (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2007), 64 pp. ISBN 978-1-902382-89-0, £7.95.

Bonehead’s Utopia by Andrew Jordan (Smokestack Books, 2011), 64 pp. ISBN 978-0-9564175-7-2, £7.95.

Open Plan by Graham Fulton (Smokestack Books, 2011), 64 pp. ISBN 978-0-9564175-6-5, £7.95.

Pavilion by Deborah Tyler-Bennett (Smokestack Books, 2010), 80 pp. ISBN 978-0-9560341-5-1, £7.95.

Dances with Vowels by Kevin Cadwallender (Smokestack Books, 2009), 120 pp. ISBN 978-0-9554028-6-9, £7.95.

Crucifixion in the Plaza De Armas by Martin Espada (Smokestack Books, 2008), 72 pp. ISBN 978-0-9554028-1-4, £7.95.

Our Common Ground edited by Peter Brooks and Lorna Parker (Silverdart Publishing, 2011), 160 pp. ISBN 978-0-9560887-5-8, £8.99.

Notes on contributors