Critical Survey

The importance of the 'word' in sixteenth century theology cannot be overestimated in both its literal and literary manifestations. As the incarnation of divinity, it is given form and material substance through scripture. From a Reformed perspective, this presents a theological anomaly: God is both form (word) and meaning (Word). As a duplicated representation of divinity encoding both nominal and intrinsic properties I propose that the 'W/word' can be read idolatrously. This article considers the implications of such a reading in the theological arena of early modern England. It focuses on the ways in which a theory of duplicated representation, or what I call, the 'double-body of the sign', strengthens while it also problematises early modern conceptions of authority. To date, few scholars have examined and debated these ideas through a stylistic framework using contemporary linguistic models. Focusing on the unstable signification that underpins monarchical and divine authority, I offer an analysis of William Shakespeare's Richard II which aims to address this critical lacuna. Reading Foucault and Kantorowicz, for example, alongside Fauconnier and Turner, I pay particular attention to the ways in which the relationship or bond of resemblance between signifier and signified animates the space in which tension, contradiction, and ultimately, schism can operate to disrupt the process of signification. It is this space within which representation can both exploit and be exploited politically, religiously, and culturally, having the power to destabilise monarchical authority and more devastatingly, the foundations of the Reformed argument.

If Thomas Chatterton is remembered at all now, it is for his supposed suicide rather than for his work. He has become the all-but-forgotten 'poster boy' for tragic Romanticism, a talented but misunderstood teenager who killed himself in the face of social prejudice and poverty. This article attempts a revaluation of the work, both the forgeries of mediaeval manuscripts (the so-called 'Rowleyan' texts) and the 'acknowledged' writings. Recognising the importance of the Chatterton mythology in shaping narratives of interpretation, it also makes a case for understanding his creations as uniquely prescient of the current age of digital production. In this respect, Chatterton's apparently antiquarian manner and reputation are seen to be in complex tension with a formal critique of emergent mass media culture. Particular concerns of the piece are the essential materiality of Chatterton's forgeries and the dissenting animus of his non-Rowley works. Establishing a critical framework that encompasses critical and new media theory, the article suggests that Chatterton's collected works constitute a singularly political engagement with modernity.

During the 1916 Tercentenary of Shakespeare's death, commemoration of the playwright and his plays was crucially shaped by the First World War. This paper departs from previous studies of the 1916 celebrations in its approach to the 1914-1919 war, which is not regarded here as a mere background influencing Shakespearean reception but as a dynamic presence, directly triggering appropriations of the playwright as cultural icon and of the plays as revered texts. In the course of examining sermons, lectures, and addresses delivered during the Tercentenary, this essay argues that the Great War impaired the celebrations to some extent, but it also fostered the commemoration cult of Shakespeare. The evidence examined shows how Shakespeare was worth fighting for in both local and European terms - how Stratford competed with London in their respective claims to Shakespeare and how England feared German appropriation. It also shows how in France, instead, quoting Shakespeare's words in 1916 was not a belligerent act of appropriation but a gesture meant to erase the memory of Anglo-French enmity at Agincourt and construe a bond between current allies fighting against the same foe in the trenches of the Western Front. Unlike other studies on the 1916 Tercentenary, this paper favours a European approach that integrates the reception of Shakespeare in Britain with his presence in other European countries.

How have exercise, the body, and modes of imprisonment become so imbricated in modern societies? The treadmill started its life as the harshest form of punishment that could be meted out, short of the death penalty. It remained so for two centuries. Today, we pay membership fees equivalent to a household energy bill for the dubious privilege of being permitted to run on them. The treadmill is a high-functioning symbol of our anthropocene life that chooses to engage with self-created realities that knowingly deny our creaturely existence.

This essay aims to bring a number of genres and disciplines into conversation with one another to effect a mode of reflective but insightful cultural analysis. Through this ecological interdependence of genre, (including history, philosophy, literary analysis, sociology, psychogeography, autobiography, and biography) the essay aims to look at the ways in which our condition in modernity conspires against our psychological, physiological, geographical, and personal freedoms. Using Oscar Wilde's experiences of life on the treadmill, some of Hardy's poetry, Simone Weil, Pater, Foucault, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, and Lukács, the essay draws attention to the ways that inauthenticity and dehumanisation have become the mainstay of life in the modern gym.

Attempting to convey the experience of the present in all its seeming confusion and disorderliness is a challenge that pushes realist fiction to its limits. Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday (2008) is an ambitious attempt to concertina the space/time between event and representation by portraying the news items of the summer of 2007 with an immediacy rare in narrative fiction. Melding the structure of rapid, associative shifts common to 24-hour news presentation with the docu-realism of the non-fiction novel, Burn articulates the complex symbolic interactions that inform an aesthetic and cultural snapshot of the early twenty-first century. This essay explores the novel's portrayal of the mass mediatisation of contemporary British society and its blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. By comparing the quasi-celebrity attributed to the parents of the abducted child, Madeleine McCann, with the manipulation of the media employed during the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown exchange of power, the essay argues that the dominant logic of specular commoditisation goes hand in hand with the novel's focus on narratives of loss, abandonment, and emptiness.

Codicil by BARRY COLE

Measures by RICHARD KELL

The Levellers The End Of The Road by IAN PARKS

Notes on contributors