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This chapter discusses nervous degeneration and its literary representation in the 1890s. Much of the fiction of the 1890s self-consciously engages with the physical and medical sciences to configure the new disease of ‘neurasthenia’, a nervous malady which came to be both casually and symbolically linked to the period. George Gissing's The Whirlpool and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure are novels which situate narratives of nervous breakdown at the problematic intersection of biological theories of determinism and cultural anxieties about the alleged deleterious effects of modern life. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond the particulars of plot and personality which link these books thematically to New Woman fiction in order to reveal the extent of the influence of the biological and physical sciences in creating a culture of unease around the issue of sexual equality.

This chapter examines the portrayal of unnatural childhood in Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure. The novel was influenced by the over-pressure debates of the 1880s and associated concerns with child suicide, but placed them in a new light. This chapter describes a scene from this novel where the narrator superimposed on the childhood sorrow of the character of Jude an adult's pessimistic vision of a Darwinian struggle for existence which overturns the comforting religious order of natural theology.

In the years after 1980, with rapid social change in sexual and political mores, Hamlet came more and more to be a text reflecting the new age of anxiety and social conflict. The poststructural method in criticism of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault found the play a fertile territory for exploration of virtually infinite flexibility in language. The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt and others focused on such matters as Elizabethan attitudes toward Purgatory. Feminist study by Coppélia Kahn, Marjorie Garber, and others studied the play in terms feminist anthropology. Productions on stage and in film followed suit with revisionist interpretations by Mark Rylance, Mel Gibson, Jude Law, Kenneth Branagh, David Tennant, and others. The impact of Hamlet on the modern world continues to grow.

This chapter describes the events that occurred from 1 September 1895–31 December 1895. It covers revolting ladies; welling up; silver and rubies; Trilbymania; Ave Satani!; far from dear father; exit Jabez; Jude the obscene; and an epidemic of indecency.

With Thomas Hardy, this book comes to the first canonical British novelist to take an active interest animal-welfare and anti-cruelty politics—which had moved from the margins to closer to the mainstream in the decades since the 1824 founding of the SPCA (later the RSPCA). This chapter considers Hardy’s representation of animal life and animality both as important in its own right, and as deeply intertwined with his depiction of human life. It does so through a consideration of various Hardy texts and aspects of his biography, but especially through a reading of what is defined as the “pastoral plot” of Far From the Madding Crowd. This novel teaches its readers to “pity the sheep” and to push beyond an exclusively human-centered perspective. To pity the sheep is to “follow after” and live with the animal, to be willing to risk symbolic infection from proximity to the non-human. Hardy’s shepherd Gabriel Oak represents a new kind of protagonist for the Victorian novel, one who achieves his status not by asserting but by giving up the privilege of casting out the animal from the space of the human and the home.

The conclusion provides a summary of the key findings of the book, including major points at which the extra-biblical literature explored here has exercised a positive, formative influence upon the sayings and self-understanding of Jesus and the teachings of James and Jude.

The Infancy Gospel of Thomas attests to a reluctance among early Christians to regard Jesus as learning from his senior contemporaries, a tendency that has persisted throughout the centuries, contributing to an image of Jesus standing apart from Judaism and addressing it from outside. This image is reinforced by reading practices that include the Hebrew Bible or Protestant Old Testament, but not the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals, such that the reader brings an anachronistic portrait of Judaism to the study of the early church. Familiarity with post-prophetic Jewish literature, however, leads to a much greater appreciation of how much Jewish sources contributed to the formation of Jesus and his brothers. Criteria for assessing influence are discussed.

The precise relationship of James and Jude to Jesus is examined on the basis of the evidence of early Christian writings and in dialogue with the classical positions of Epiphanius, Jerome, and Helvidius and their modern proponents. The evidence for the timing of Jesus' half-brothers' conversion to faith in him is also evaluated. While scholarship has tended to pass along the pseudonymity of the epistles of James and Jude as something of a dogma, the traditional arguments against their authenticity are found to be tenuous at best. Based on the level of apocalyptic expectation, reliance on church order, Christology, location, experience, and other factors, the author argues that these epistles preserve the genuine voice of Jesus' half-brothers, leaders in the Jewish Christian movement.

Like Ben Sira and Tobit, the presence and impact of 1 Enoch in Second Temple period Palestine suggests that it was also well positioned to exercise ongoing influence on thoughtful Jews. Each constitutive part of 1 Enoch is examined in turn: first its contents and historical situation and “agenda” are treated, followed by a discussion of points of possible impact on the teachings of Jesus, James, and Jude (the last, indeed, quotes 1 Enoch explicitly and refers to the story of the Watchers in detail). Special attention is given to establishing the relationship of the “Parables of Enoch” to early Christian literature and the authenticity of Jesus' uses of the title “Son of man” to refer to God's end-time agent.

This chapter describes the works of tragic writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. Features of Hardy's tragic perspective that reflects the impact of Darwinism are elaborated. George Eliot was interested in the tragic and tragedy as a form both critically and philosophically and discussed them in several essays. Eliot is less willing than Hardy to give the tragic the last word. The tragic in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure is also addressed. Tolstoy's Anna Karenina has often been called a tragic novel, though ‘tragic’ tends to be used in a rather general sense. Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a ferocious exposure of colonialism and imperialism, at least as practised by non-British colonialists. Conrad can be compared to Tolstoy since both resist the tragic.

This chapter describes various challenges faced by Kay Swift and her efforts to share her music and her talents with different audiences in the second half of the 1950s. It explains that she explored a variety of opportunities to write in London where her most successful effort was incidental music written for a 1958 play by Marc Connelly titled Hunter's Moon. In the U.S., her connection with George Gershwin offered other professional experiences. These included the composition for A Candle for St. Jude and Samuel Goldwyn's film version of Porgy and Bess.

This chapter discusses a bogus Christianity that is being peddled on television over and over again. It is centered on the themes of “health and wealth” and “name-it and claim-it.” It is a crossless Christianity. The words at the end of the brief epistle of Jude are filled with calmness and reassurance, but they do not compose the whole part of the epistle. There is an earlier part, which can be read in but a few minutes; it has but one chapter. In it the writer speaks of clouds without water, of trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit twice dead plucked up by the roots. That is true of the New Testament because most people look upon it as a kind of calmness.

This book concludes by showing how Sister Thorn represents the dilemmas that faced the in-between generation in the history of Catholic spirituality in interwar America. This group has been closely identified with the women who brought into being the cult of Saint Jude during the 1930s; they were not immigrants themselves, but as daughters of immigrants, they experienced the unique stresses of being torn between Old and New World gender and religious norms. Sister Thorn, too, is a transitional figure who lived the devotional Catholicism characteristic of immigrant life in America since the mid-1800s, which drew its strength and habits from European precedents. But some of Sister Thorn's followers were already engaging in the liturgical reforms that would soon produce a more active understanding of a public faith that characterized the European church in the 1930s and international Catholicism during the Cold War.

This chapter explores Terry Gilliam's last major film to date, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), and its traumatic journey to screen following the death of actor Heath Ledger during the production. The death of Ledger on 22 January 2008 placed the production of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in turmoil, and led Gilliam to continue to shoot with the addition of three well-known actors to replace Ledger: Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell. The film is a “fantastical morality tale set in the present day”, and tells the story of an Imaginarium, a travelling show in which the ancient Doctor Parnassus guides members of the audience to enjoy an “irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom”. It then takes its audience on a somewhat melancholic journey constructed by aesthetic and philosophical bricolage.

In Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy presents a history that focuses less on sustained or developing action than on the breaks that convert events into intervals. These intervals allow time and space to move in different directions as they break apart linear constructions of planned time and break into contained spaces, through persons or objects that interrupt and intervene in one another. Within the city, Hardy poses persons as thresholds through which pass parts of self and other and as translations of one another; and he poses, too, the possibility of community in assemblages of persons’ parts.

This chapter reviews Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Hardy was one of those who, as they engaged with the narrative of scientific epistemology, opened themselves to the inhuman coldness of material reality. Jude the Obscure might be taken as a final test among fictions of the dying-to-know model, an antiheroic inversion of it. It participates in key developments in late-century England in which the philosophy of empiricism, the dualism of mind and body, and the radical bleakness of the news that science was disseminating joined together in a new celebration of art. Moreover, it dramatizes the material impossibility and brutal self-destructiveness of that radical self-denial that marks Rene Descartes' progress through the Meditations and that was for the nineteenth century the indispensable condition of scientific knowledge.

This chapter explains that Free to Be … You and Me came about as the author was trying to do something for one little girl. That it would grow to become a cultural phenomenon was never a part of the plan. It has been forty years since Free to Be first arrived in homes across America as entertainment for children. Though its journey since then has been, to say the least, remarkable, the author has never been able to pinpoint precisely how it took root as a cross-generational touchstone. What the author has had is an enormous amount of anecdotal evidence. The author traveled from city to city performing in plays and raising funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. In every town the author visits, she receives letters from teachers inviting her to see their classes' stage productions of Free to Be. As often as the author can, she attends them, and has always been knocked out by the spirit of the children and their complete grasp of the material.