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This chapter demonstrates the role of Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess (1719–20) and several shorter works of amatory fiction including Lasselia (1723), The Lucky Rape (1727), and The Padlock (1728) within the early eighteenth‐century discursive struggle to define tory sensibility under the Whig government of George I. In these early fictions, Haywood explores the implications of the political, social and spiritual reorganizations her generation inherited, and suggests a revised way to value practices of unavoidable complicity. She constructs a new version of “collusive resistance,” a strategy for reconciling female virtue and sexual agency, that models a virtuous, tory‐oriented response to the political necessities of the early years of George I's reign, especially the implication of high‐level Tory ministers in Jacobite plots against the government and invasion scares in 1715 and 1718. This chapter argues that the great success of Love in Excess owed much to Haywood's ability to exploit and revise Behn's and Manley's earlier representational strategies for the 1720s.

The comparatively poor contemporary health profiles of Scotland and, in particular, Glasgow have become widely known. Drawing on a body of research compiled by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, this chapter provides a detailed examination of the health profiles of these populations as they have been shaped over time. The chapter begins by tracing their historical development in their UK and European context, before turning to examine the political, social and economic causal factors and processes which have, over time, contributed to the particularly poor health outcomes experienced in Glasgow. Building on this knowledge, the chapter draws to a close by exploring the potential future health trajectory of the city’s population. Glasgow provides a potent case for other cities and countries as they consider the ways in which politics and policy come to shape health, and health inequalities, across their populations.

From the early 1970s, the Kipper Kids (Harry Kipper and Harry Kipper, aka Brian Routh and Martin Von Haselberg) became notorious for the danger, excess, strangeness, and baffled hilarity of their frequently drunken ‘ceremonies’. This chapter accounts for the former notoriety of the Kipper Kids to ask further questions about the performance of extremity as an aesthetic category in the 1970s. The theme of sabotage – or self-sabotage – emerges as a crucial element in the performance art of the Kipper Kids, in terms of their devising and presentation of specific ceremonies and works, and in their pursuit of careers as artists committed to art’s anti-aesthetic sensibility.

The chapter underscores the powerful emotional ambiguity that characterises the final moments of As You Like It and Twelfth Night. This alteration introduces a new understanding of melancholy that revolves around ideas of mood, time and setting. No longer tied to physical characterisations but grounded instead in the languor elicited by the inevitable passage of time, melancholy impresses itself into the very fabric of the plays it occupies. It finds particular resonance within the various musical interludes they contain, as well as in the several allusions to the bittersweet temporal perception that characters express. In both plays, the sense of a comic ending is seriously problematised by the growing sense of wistfulness that develops. Despite the promise of a return to court, the multiple loose ends in As You Like It undercut the otherwise joyful resolution. Similarly, a strong sense of this more spectral melancholy, embodied in Feste’s closing ballad, sweeps through the final act, coating it in a wistful longing for times past. The powerful emotional ambiguity of these final moments underscores the symbiotic revisions of melancholy and comedy into a melancomic theatrical and philosophical affect.

The final chapter deals with recurring motifs that resist categorization, motifs which can be understood as excessive or abject. From the streetwalking sex workers known as panpan, to the shape-shifting female monsters of the horror genre, this chapter considers the affective impacts of representations of the female Other. Excessive star personae such as that of Kyō Machiko are analysed alongside characterizations drawn from myth and legend to demonstrate that the female Other is a recurring trope throughout literature, film, and even journalism. The final section considers the excessive abject icon as a representation of the sublime. Case studies include Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi, Mizoguchi Kenji, 1948), White Beast (Shiroi yajū, Naruse Mikio, 1950) and Gate of Flesh (Nikutai no mon, Suzuki Seijun, 1964).

This chapter discusses the social costs of taxation other than those due to distorted real behavior caused by tax-induced relative price changes (known as excess burden). These include the administrative costs incurred directly by the tax authority and the compliance costs that are borne by taxpayers in following the rules and in planning to reduce tax liabilities. Conceptual and measurement problems are addressed, and estimates of these costs for the U.S. and across countries are presented.

This chapter analyses the presence of the cinema in Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. It argues that cinema does not have a consistent role in the novel as motif or metaphor but functions instead an element of excess. As such it functions like history in what is a historical novel of gay life, the history that will exceed and foreclose the story’s suspended temporalities. History is the Other to the novel’s enchanted summer, ‘the last summer of its kind there was ever to be’. History is also HIV, ready to spread its appalling blossom through the Utopia of sex beyond book and summer’s end. Like this history, the cinema in The Swimming-Pool Library must be held at bay: it resists integration into the middlebrow poise of the novel and the unruffleable surface of its realist prose.

Identifying a link between trauma and mysticism as a thread that connects his body of work, this essay also explains the ways in which the work of Georges Bataille has been an implicit point of reference throughout Jeffrey Kripal’s career. The essay illuminates not only the key concepts of Bataille’s work—eroticism, sacrifice, the sacred, violence—but also uses Bataille to cast new light on connections between Kripal’s seemingly disparate texts.

This chapter focuses on the financing of the Korean War and its within-case variation. Korean War finance can be divided into two periods, from June 1950 to mid-1951 and from mid-1951 to the end of the war. During the first period, both the fear of inflation and support for the war effort were high. As a result, the Revenue Act of 1950, eliminating an excise tax reduction and increasing both corporate and individual income taxes, and the Excess Profit Tax Law of 1950 were swiftly signed into law. During the second period of Korean War finance, however, the political-economic landscape changed, and President Truman was only able to get half of what he requested in terms of revenue, as reflected in the Revenue Act of 1951.

This chapter shows that Jacques Lacan combines insights from Saussurean linguistics with an innovative reading of Freudian psychoanalytic theory to account for the ways in which meaning is generated from the differential relations between signifiers. Lacan does not offer a theory of evil per se; prior to doing so, he argues that we needed to account for how meaning is created and accounted for this by introducing the three registers of the imaginary, symbolic, and real. By suggesting that ‘evil’ is found at the intersection of what he calls the real and the symbolic, Lacan argues that it needs to be understood as the signifier that aims, but, due to the nature of the Lacanian real, always fails, to designate the non-signifiable real within the symbolic order. ‘Evil’ is then the symbol that stands at the liminal point between the symbolic and the real and designates the ineffable excessive aspect of existence that, because it cannot be comprehended within the symbolic order, is strange, indescribable, and beyond comprehension.

This chapter takes as its subject nothing less than “everything involved in the Eucharist.” The author seeks to give a hermeneutic response to the phenomenological excess of sense over non-sense, of flesh over body, and the weakness of forgetting force, which are all part of the understanding of the Eucharist. This reading sees the viaticum as the joining in the union of bodies in Eucharistic communion, and places desire in relation to the “abiding” of the real presence in the Eucharist. In the Eucharistic communion, the communicant is “fully incorporated into God” such that her animality, corporeality, and desire and made meaningful and converted.

This essay applies Marion’s notion of the “saturated phenomenon” to natural phenomena and suggests that they might be interpreted as “saturated” in Marion’s sense. The essay also insists that such phenomena require interpretation, therefore providing a critique of some aspects of Marion’s project. The author draws out the implications of what it might mean to interpret phenomena of nature as saturated and how this might help address certain concerns in environmental philosophy, in particular setting this paper in relationship with other issues raised in the same volume.

This chapter traces the evolution of a discourse of consumption and predation throughout the Victorian period. The East India Company’s transformation from a commercial concern into a government was accompanied by intense public debate over its role in India, focusing on economic relationships of exploitation, and moral relationships of corruption. This debate crystallized around the impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1795). The ‘nabobs’ of the Company were represented as exploiting India and its residents for their own material gain, and simultaneously as themselves corrupted by contact with India. Their return to Britain gave rise to a sense that their moral and financial corruption was being imported into the British body politic. While this political moment quickly passed, the debate established the terms and metaphors – greed, excess, predation, and contamination – in which British people imagined their role in India, and India’s effect on them.

“The city,” so does Park argue, “shows the good and evil in human nature in excess.” Which inspires him to read the city as a laboratory to study human behaviour. In my chapter I connect the notion of excess to the significance of the ring roads in Beijing. Beijing is an excessive city par excellence, too big, too polluted, too crowded, too ugly, and changing too fast, making one lose his way time and again. The ring roads function as a symbolic device to keep a sense of control over this excess; they help to locate people and places, they function as the highway in the centre, and they create the mental map of the city. How do Beijing citizens relate to the ring roads? And how do art and popular culture help reimagine the ringroads and contain or parody the excessiveness of Beijing?

Chapter Four provides a wider theoretical basis for the ‘sophistication’ and self-consciousness that characterises post-classical or postmodern forms of sentimentality in US film culture, with particular attention paid to notions of ‘excess’ and distanciation. It accounts in particular for the influence of key modernists like Adorno, Benjamin and Brecht on taste categories that persist in contemporary film studies, with particular reference to the ‘ideological stoicism’ that is alleged to predominate in critical film culture. The discussion will provide context for a discussion of the ‘affective’ turn in film theory, around which the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell loom large in their centralisation of a film-as-thought paradigm.

This chapter chronicles the beginning of prose fiction's popular form: the novel. Prose fiction has existed since classic times, although Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, and Samuel Richardson's Pamela would all be considered examples of “the early novel.” Though before the eighteenth century there had already been in existence romances produced by the ancient Greeks as well as in the Middle Ages, by the sixteenth century, French romances had won over an expansive readership in England. The chapter focuses on the eighteenth century in marking the beginning of the novel, a period wherein novelists showed a certain interest in delineating psychological experience. Thus the chapter approaches the history of the novel from a new angle.

Lewis, Beech and Rudkin all took advantage of government opportunities and actively resisted its intrusions, and this was essential to their success. Close examination of the World War II and Korean War eras—key episodes in the expansion of the federal government as regulator and customer—shows that for these businesswomen building a relationship with government was both necessary and important. Military contracts and Reconstruction Finance Corporation loans kept Lewis and Beech in business while Excess Profits Tax posed a real threat that both women fought and wartime rationing as well as regulations by the Office of Price Administration fundamentally shaped Rudkin’s business strategy and success. Prevailing scholarly interpretations have argued that women’s businesses were too small to attract federal attention but the experience of these entrepreneurs reveals that for women who operated businesses big enough to cater to a national market, government programs were fundamental to their success and federal regulation threatened significant losses in profit. By the mid-twentieth century, in fact, developing a relationship with the federal government was hardly a choice; a strategic one could determine a business’ future.

The 1947 budget presented by Liaquat Ali Khan was a path-breaking step towards social engineering. It came with the establishment of the Commodity Prices Board which was responsible for formulating a coherent price policy. The inherent conflicts between the Congress and the Muslim League in attitudes to industrial and agricultural producers prevented the board from playing the role originally assigned. More crucially the budget provisions, of an excess profits tax, a wealth tax and the proposal for an Income Tax Investigation Commission signalled that corporate financial irregularities were to be professionally scrutinized. However, G.D. Birla and the industry organization FICCI led a virulent campaign against the budget provisions and moulded the Congress into a lobby for business interests. While Jawaharlal Nehru had been privy to the budget proposals, which economists of the time found incisively framed, the Congress ensured that the budget proposals were seriously diluted.