WITH his cantata Prometheus Unbound, a setting of scenes from Shelley's epic poem, Hubert Parry (1848–1918) strode into the midst of all that was conventional and ‘safe’ in English choral music and unwittingly became, in the words of Herbert Howells, ‘a near revolutionary’. Every conceivable obstacle stood in the way of his success.

In spite of his championship of Three Choirs as a Steward over many years, Parry's father, Thomas Gambier Parry, squire at Highnam Court near Gloucester, would not tolerate music as a profession for his children and forbade his eldest son, Clinton, to pursue it. Following his education at Eton and Oxford, Hubert was obliged against his will to take up a career in insurance and to limit his musical activities to those of an amateur. His first offering to Three Choirs was an Intermezzo religioso (1868(G)) which, in the judgement of the Pall Mall Gazette of 12 September 1868, ‘in no way belied its amateur origin’. In 1877, following seven years at Lloyds Register of Shipping – which ended in financial disaster – he was at last able to take up music as his chosen profession. Meanwhile, in 1873, he had begun regular lessons with the concert pianist Edward Dannreuther, who introduced Parry to the music of Wagner and provided him with free tickets to visit Bayreuth for the first performance of The Ring there in 1876.

Parry returned from Bayreuth aglow with inspiration; but many of the English critics were scathing about the ‘so-called Prophet of the Future, Richard Wagner’. Except for Dannreuther, Parry's friends pilloried him for turning towards ‘the music of the future’ in his own composition. By this time he had also further alienated himself from his father and contemporary society by renouncing Christian doctrine. Even so, uncomfortable isolation was no deterrent from his boldness in choosing a poem by Shelley as the inspiration for his first major choral work.

Women's contribution to British naval supremacy in the long eighteenth century tends to be neglected or sensationalised. Numberless women whose lives were blighted by naval warfare are forgotten, while the few who donned male clothes and went to sea remain figures that catch the public imagination. Hundreds of women boarded warships officially, since the wives of warrant officers (including gunners, boatswains, masters, pursers and carpenters) were allowed to accompany their husbands. But thousands more women were connected to the navy, though they never left dry land, and the importance of their work in enabling men to be kept at sea cannot be overestimated. They held families together while their husbands were away at sea for long periods, and dealt with household repairs, children's schooling, investments and debts. As consumers, the wives and female relatives of seamen also helped to support a brisk trade in naval commemoratives, contributing to the creative economy of the period.

Although a very few women went to sea disguised as men, contemporary ballads and accounts of their adventures do offer valuable insights into the lives of working-class women which might not otherwise be recorded. Hannah Snell's description of her time in the navy gives a unique, female perspective on life at sea in the mid-eighteenth century. Snell alleged that she donned male clothes and joined the marines to find her lover (a commonly used convention), and was drafted to serve in Admiral Boscawen's fleet, bound for the East Indies. In contrast, Mary Anne Talbot maintained that she was forced to go to sea, seduced by an army captain who disguised her as his servant when he was posted overseas. She claimed that he was killed in 1793 and that afterwards she served for three years in the navy before coming ashore, still only nineteen. Much of her story seems to be embellished, if not pure fiction, but, like others, Talbot may well have served at sea in male dress. The navy was desperate for recruits and took those who passed for young boys without question. Crossdressing women were never punished if found out. They often became celebrities afterwards and their stories found a ready audience.

AS ELABORATED IN THE INTRODUCTION to this study, the Waldheim affair of 1986–88 was a turning point in Austrian society, sparking the beginning of a belated process of coming to terms with the country's National Socialist past. The debates that the exposure of the presidential candidate Dr. Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past provoked, signaled the end of the postwar era in Austria and led to “eine massive Umwertung zentraler Werte” (a wide-ranging reassessment of central values), as Robert Schindel has asserted in an interview. Robert Schindel's Der Kalte offers a literary treatment of the Waldheim affair, which, nearly three decades on, has become historical. While it is certainly not the first literary treatment of the Waldheim affair, as some critics have asserted, it is the first novel to offer such a sustained literary exploration of the political scandal. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, by drawing attention to the events of the late 1980s in Austria and the disturbance of the past that they provoked, Schindel's fictional narrative in turn disturbs and challenges our interpretation of this period in Austrian history, refusing to lay the ghosts awakened during that time to rest. Ultimately, Schindel's performative interventions, reinscribing aspects of the Waldheim affair, serve to draw attention to the work that remains to be done in order for Austria to fully confront its past.

Der Kalte is Robert Schindel's second novel in his planned trilogy focusing on the legacy of the Second World War and the Holocaust in Austria, entitled Die Vorläufigen (The Provisional Ones), reflecting the provisory, transitional nature of societal models in the twentieth century, and also the characters’ ultimate mortality.

In the previous chapter I discussed representative works of French literature from the years of jazz's heyday in the French capital to the present. In each, African-American music offered, with varying degrees of subtlety and varying degrees of naivety, a site of racial consolidation and expression. We saw that, though the attitude toward the relationship between jazz and race evolved over time, from the 1920s to the present jazz remained a vehicle for the idea of race to a degree that none of these novels was entirely able to deconstruct or dismiss. In sum, these Euro-French authors, following a score that was 2,500 years in the making, privilege jazz as the signifier of blackness. For Soupault and Sartre, the adequacy of this new art form lay in its ability to preserve and/or tame the compound unit of African primitivity and American industrial modernity, what Jean Cocteau called a ‘catastrophe apprivoisee’ [domesticated catastrophe]: the primitive rhythmic subtext to the sounds of the factory that is jazz. Subsequent authors, beginning with Boris Vian, engaged with the music's racialization in far more self-conscious fashion, trying at various junctures and in various ways to disentangle jazz from the history of its discursive formation as a distinctively racialized aesthetic artifact. What we saw in these later writers was that, despite such attempts, the scoring of race through jazz, and jazz's construction as a fundamentally racialized idea within the white French imaginary, has rendered it an unalterably racialized phenomenon. Thus, even much more recent French authors who recognize the racial history I have traced nevertheless fall prey to its endlessly and uncontainably reverberating effects. Because producing race was, in a sense, the principal motivation behind the music's consolidation as ‘jazz,’ and because this was in turn the effect of a long Western tradition's association of all music with difference, there is no way to remain within any discussion of jazz and yet be unfettered by its essential racialization. For this simple reason, (white) French writers have not been the only authors to grapple with this new music, the nature of that engagement is not identical. Because the foreignness of jazz was also national – jazz was very specifically an American product – the difference it offered was not only racial but national as well.

‘It is easier for an officer to keep men healthy, than for a physician to cure them’, Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson concluded in 1804. Naval officers and surgeons had expressed such sentiments before, yet the Royal Navy had a patchy record regarding the well-being of its seamen. Life afloat offered few advantages. True, by the early nineteenth century some medical officers contrasted the bracing sea air which filled a sailor's lungs with the foul atmosphere of Britain's industrialising cities, and they spoke highly of the regimented work and discipline imposed by the daily routine of a man-of-war. It was also observed that sailors and marines were paid regularly, even if many squandered their money on foreign shore leave or in the backstreets of Portsmouth, and, further, that they were spared many of the responsibilities which weighed upon men in civil life. But for the most part seamen had to contend with hardships which endangered their lives or destroyed their constitutions. In 1799 the eminent naval physician, Sir Gilbert Blane, asked why sailors appeared to age prematurely. After ten years at sea their bodies were worn out and the contrast with the civilian population was plain to see. Invaliding seamen no longer fit for duty was a common chore for medical officers: for hernia alone, the navy invalided on average 3,714 men annually between 1744 and 1800 – one in seven of the entire force. Vast numbers were less fortunate. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries naval men perished in their thousands in warfare and from exposure to diseases which were a mystery to medical science.

Warships, of course, were dangerous places and accidents abounded. Men fell from masts and rigging, or went overboard and drowned. They could be crushed as guns, stores and equipment broke loose in heavy weather. Drunk or sober, they slipped through unguarded hatchways. Boats capsized; wheels smashed arms and faces when spinning out of control in storms; recoils or false discharges during gunnery practice cost arms or legs; and sharks might attack men bathing alongside the vessel.

The poetry of Western Europe, in the period of its ‘early modernity’—in this case, let us say, from around Boccaccio's time to the waning of the age of Rococo, though the scope of the present study is not quite so wide—was full of kisses: repeated kisses, with a complement of repeating but evolving figures through which they were stylistically realized. Critical readers, for the most part, are so used to them that their functions and histories go unquestioned. In exceptional cases we may be struck by something compellingly different in the presentation. At other times, the thing most likely to strike a modern reader or scholar about a given literary kiss is its very conventionality; and it is all too easy to take conventions for granted, unless we have a good reason for being interested in them. Part of my argument in this book is that the conventions of the kiss in Renaissance poetry are worth examining, and that such an examination might make us more sensitive to the subtlety with which convention is treated in this or that example, as the poet variates upon a well-tried theme. But what makes the incidental kiss worth notice, what gives the literary scholar an excellent reason for attending to the conventions with which so many of these kisses are engaged, is the fact that the Renaissance had actually generated a complete poetic genre almost entirely devoted to the subject of kissing.

The tradition began in the fifteenth century, with the imitation of a handful of ancient poems. As the High Renassiance reached its culmination, the poem of kissing developed into a fully conventionalized Latin ‘kind’. The Basia of Janus Secundus, let loose upon the humanist world in 1541, set the pattern for another hundred years and more of Latin kiss-poems, not to mention French baisers, Italian baci, and all manner of kissing, bussing and biting in vernacular verse across Europe. Succeeding chapters will show the kiss-poem in the process of becoming generic, blossoming, and then exhausting itself as a formal genre whilst continuing to spread ever wider as a mode. In the latter guise it crept into other genres without losing its own generic identity, and so its life was extended.

WHILE DER LOHNDRUCKER's PROTAGONIST Balke walks a fine line between hero and traitor, Muller places a wholly paradoxical being at the center of Der Horatier. Like Der Lohndrücker, Der Horatier explores questions regarding democracy, and attempts to make the audience members into a democratic collective in the theater; in the case of the former, this was necessary against the backdrop of the fortifying of a seemingly un-German socialist democracy, and in 1968 this problem had by no means gone away. Der Horatier appears to have been received without much enthusiasm in the GDR. Although a stage manuscript of the play for professional use was printed by the East German Henschel Verlag in 1969, it was another decade before its East German premiere at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater in Schwerin in 1979. Instead, it was first printed for a wider public in the theater program accompanying its premiere in West Berlin in March 1973, and had to wait to be published in book format, when it appeared in 1978, again in the FRG. The delay in the first GDR staging of the text does not, however, necessarily indicate that Der Horatier is critical of Eastern European socialist society. While, according to Muller, most of Der Horatier was written in August and September 1968 (W, 8:185), and therefore against the backdrop of the quelling of the Prague Spring, the significance of this historic moment and the text's treatment of it was not confined to the East. It is clear that Muller was reacting to the failure of the reform movement in Prague, which sought to carve out a new form of democratic socialism distinct from both Western democracy and traditional Eastern European socialist democracy. Accordingly, Der Horatier encourages audiences to question the prevailing interpretations of the relationship between the individual and society in both capitalist and socialist or communist social realities, and to consider further just what “democracy” could be and how it could work. This form of audience activity serves, in turn, to create a public space in the auditorium that looks very different to the one depicted on stage. Indeed, Muller had audience interaction in mind from the very beginning of his work on Der Horatier, and his appeals to aspects of Brechtian Lehrstücke are designed to invite the audience to participate and intervene in the process of public decision-making depicted onstage.

AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK I stated an intention to locate and describe a positive political program in Muller's theater. Instead of seeing Muller as merely subversive or oppositional in relation to the GDR's political situation or the status of civilization in both East and West, I argued that we might find a definition of Muller's radical program of inviting numerous interpretations in his work as both playwright and director in his understanding of what it is for theater to be democratic. In his assessment of Wilson's work in 1985, he speaks of theatrical performances that invite individual spectators to undertake their own interpretive work as both “democratic” and important. Notwithstanding the very real limitations on such a form of directorial and interpretive practice in the theater, at least from the late 1960s to the mid- to late 1980s, Muller speaks and writes of the theater as the ideal space for individual audience members to generate numerous interpretations of material and find their own ways of relating it to their external reality. As already cited in this book, while Muller's utterances on democracy are occasionally negatively colored, he regards democracy as the only political system capable of allowing for the generation of political alternatives—alternatives even to democracy itself. Outside the theater, that is, democracy presents the formal organization of a public forum in which ideas and ideals can be created. What follows from this is that if the audience within the theater becomes a democratic collective, then that collective is a space in which utopias can be generated. Of course, the role of the audience in finding new answers to the questions raised by political reality has been well established in Muller research to date, but in this book I have shown that Muller's work is underwritten by a political program of democratic socialism. That is not to say that he subscribes to the form of socialist democracy championed by the SED, nor to the form of democracy practiced in Western liberal democracies. Muller's theater sets out to create a radical form of democratic socialism, in which dissensus promises a form of public forum in which new directions forward can be found.

As seen in Chapter 1, according to the proclamation on the Eritrean National Service (ENS), all able­bodied Eritrean nationals aged between eighteen and forty are required to perform eighteen months of national service. Following the 1998–2000 border war against Ethiopia and the introduction of the WYDC, the ENS has become open­ended. Since then, with few exceptions, no demobilisation has taken place. At the end of 2012, the President intensified the process of militarisation by establishing the so­called Hizbawi Serawit (people's militia) comprising citizens up to the age of seventy for men and sixty for women, who were directly accountable to him. The level of militarisation in the country is unparalleled in modern history (see Hirt and Mohammad 2013; Pool 2013; Tronvoll and Mekonen 2014). The reality in Eritrea is almost identical to the archaic feudal institution of posse comitatus which, as seen in Chapter 2, refers to the intrinsic ‘power of the country’ to call upon a posse, that is, able­bodied men and women, to provide military service and to serve in national defence, law enforcement, maintenance of peace and so on against their will and without remuneration. Herein lies the link between the ENS and the old tradition of posse comitatus, or bondage. The accounts of the respondents interviewed in this study clearly show that Eritrean citizens are required by law to relinquish their rights over their labour power, and indeed their lives.

This chapter discusses the background of the Eritreanmilitary, especially the state of the military and its relationship with the government before and after the implementation of the ENS. The organisational structure of the Eritrean military and the constant changes it has been undergoing over time are also discussed. The rationales underlying President Isaias Afwerki's decision to constantly reshuffle the higher echelon of the army and to alter its organisational structure erratically are analysed. Notwithstanding the fact that in May 2016 the government had just celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, ironically, the organisational structure of the Eritrean military still remains in a state of flux.

The era from 1650 to 1815 was an enormously important period in the development of sea power; maritime matters were intimately connected with Britain's imperial and commercial ambitions. It would be impossible to overstate the import of affairs at sea to the engine of state. Certainly the battles and endeavours at sea during this time are the stuff of legends – whether that was Nelson's victories or those of the most infamous names in pirate lore. Whether English, and later British, seamen were serving Britannia aboard naval ships or in more self-serving undertakings at sea, the growth in British sea power during this long eighteenth century is apparent.

Prior to this period, a number of changes allowed for European and, consequently, British, expansion. If we were to focus on military technology and operational considerations, we would acknowledge that the prime means of, and reason for, change was the rise in Europe in the sixteenth century of the large, specialised, sailing, cannon-armed warship, built and maintained just for war, rather than also acting as a peacetime trader. These ships, able to take part in sustained artillery duels at close range, were expensive to build, administer and maintain. As a consequence of this cost and the related need for political support and organisational sophistication, the number of potential maritime powers was restricted, and, by the late seventeenth century, the powerful naval state was no longer coterminous, as it had earlier been, with the commercial territory or port.

The growth of English naval power in both the sixteenth century and the early and mid-seventeenth had equipped England with an important navy and a tradition of maritime power that subsequently affected political assumptions and views about the necessary identity and desirable policies of Britain (the correct term after the Parliamentary Union of 1707 with Scotland) as a military power. Thus, Britain became the leading naval power in Europe, and thus the world, in the period 1690–1715, a position it was to sustain until the Second World War.

Every February, Padua celebrates a saint's day nicknamed the Feast of the Tongue, honouring the sublimely eloquent St Anthony of Padua by genuflecting to the part of him still residing in the city: his miraculously preserved tongue, just as it was found by St Bonaventure upon the first translation of the saint's remains in 1263. Gorgeously housed in a reliquary, the tongue still stands in for the saint, now 750 years young and reputedly incorrupt, conjuring the power of Anthony's oration. It recalls, too, stories of saints who could not be silenced, where the removal of the tongue is no guarantee that the victim will cease to speak and, indeed, generally fails parlously in this objective. The substitution of an individual's tongue for their speech is by no means limited to stories of medieval saints, however, nor to those whose speech is beyond reproach: as the locus and instrument of speech, the tongue of a medieval subject whose speech proved corrupt was also liable to be punished or removed. Law codes and penitentials advocated speech be conditioned or curtailed; unruly speech – a sin of the tongue – was tameable but in some cases the only guarantor of governance is removal of the tongue, cutting off speech permanently. This chapter considers how tongue tearing might be contextualised and gendered in medieval culture, before examining the narrative of another tongueless orator – the late medieval reflexes of the Philomela legend. The story of the raped and maimed princess tells of speech that is torn away and then restored, but the proxies and prosthetics woven into Philomela's unexpected performance challenge the relation between silencing and silence. Does the one really lead to the other? The final metamorphosis into a nightingale, rather than causing Philomela's exclusion from (physical) speech, brings with it the return of her tongue – a songbird's tongue. By the end of her story, though, this has already become a superfluous reattachment, a relic of a conventional variety of speech that is no longer required when the secret of the unspeakable crime has been ‘spoken’ and exposed and the voice of the victim has returned through extraordinary and unforeseen means.