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The Sinn Féin party that was born after the civil war was soon torn by internal divisions, which led to the 1926 split and the departure of de Valera. The end of the decade was thus characterised by the rapid decline of the party, being outstaged by the newly formed Fianna Fáil. Although it was kept under close surveillance by the Free State authorities, Sinn Féin became progressively estranged from all Republican organisations and operated in a political vacuum. In spite of its claim to the heir of the Revolutionary period, it progressively disintegrated and was practically extinct by 1932.

This chapter outlines government concerns about the danger of insurrection in the early nineteenth century and fear of soldiers’ subversion and involvement on the side of radical revolution. It reviews the reality of these claims, analysing soldiers’ involvement in key events and incidents. These range through riots and protests in the 1790s, the distribution of radical handbills subverting troops, the Despard Conspiracy, Luddism, the Post War discontent of 1815-6, working-class drilling and the use of government spies, Peterloo, the Scottish revolt of 1820, the Cato Street Conspiracy, the Queen Caroline agitation, the Reform Crisis of 1831-2, and Chartism. The chapter concludes that whilst some threats were serious, British rank and file soldiers always obeyed officers and did their duty to Crown and country, so revolution was unlikely.

The award-winning American television series Mad Men uses historical fiction to reflect on issues that remain pressing, including tensions in family and intergenerational relationships. This chapter scrutinizes the link between childhood and old age by analyzing how the relationships between Sally Draper and two of her elderly relatives are played out. The companionship between children and the elderly is constructed as rewarding for both parties, yet as provocative rather than romantic and harmless. The (substitute) grandparents take on the roles of both gatekeeper and enabler in relation to the child. When the elderly are portrayed as enablers they make it possible for the child to transgress the borders of childhood, and as such they themselves subversively transgress the borders of grandparenthood and challenge age norms and the authority of the middle generation.

The chapter traces the lines that weave together wireless technology and subversive politics in Berlin, Germany. It examines a new wireless networking paradigm, and the creation of a free information infrastructure by a social structure known as Freifunk, or ‘free broadcasting’. Freifunk came into being from a background of political/technical (h)activism, squatters movements, and the re-merging of the two halves of Berlin/Germany. Tracing the development of the Freifunk network, the chapter argues that technology choice is both political action and a process of constant re-creation of society. The chapter shows the ways in which frictions between available technical models, forms of social organization and cultural values are productive of new effects. The subversion of wireless networking devices by the ‘DIY’ community in Berlin led to the development of a new networking paradigm and a free alternative mode for digital infrastructure. The Freifunk movement became a conduit for new cultural and technological expressions, and in doing so worked to subvert the hegemonic structures of (techno)society and expand a politics of subversion.

Taking up Toni Morrison’s thesis of the “symbolic figurations of blackness,” this chapter aims to reveal that questions of race and ethnicity are at stake even when they appear invisible. The analyses of the films confirm that social class occupies a more prominent place in the 1970s films that rarely tackle issues of race and ethnicity head on and tend to favor a metaphorical mode. These films underline both the specifities of, and connections between, these issues, while the representation of the “monster” often calls into question the essentialism traditionally attached to these notions. One of the “disturbing” aspects of the 1970s films, then, has to do with the way the “monster” can enable a politically subversive subtext. In the remakes, the treatment of class, race, and ethnicity is more explicit, but the focus on one issue is often detrimental to a focus on others. Though the remakes increase the number of characters from different racial backgrounds, they tend to suggest that problems of race and ethnicity have largely been resolved.

This chapter, which is much indebted to the works of feminist film scholars, examines to what extent the films promote an essentialist vision of gender and sexuality, and/or emphasize that these aspects of identity are cultural constructs by undercutting traditional binaries such as male/female, masculine/feminine, and active/passive. It reveals that the remakes tend to uphold the very masculinity the 1970s films undermined, nostalgically clinging to patriarchal attitudes. Deviant sexuality in contemporary American horror films often means deviant forms of heterosexuality and is regularly associated with the “monstrous” characters. The abstract quality of the monsters in the 1970s films enables them to reveal that their sexuality and/or gender is constructed by other characters or by themselves. The attempt to punish the male spectator who employs the Final Girl as a “male surrogate” for castration anxiety confirms that contemporary filmmakers are familiar with Clover’s writings about the Final Girl, but it does not keep the films from sometimes fetishizing the heroine or, more implicitly perhaps, utilizing her to safeguard masculine values.

Chapter 3 focuses on the particular form of parody, which I call comic realism (kokkei), with which the writers and print artists created a literary and artistic method called ugachi that was capable of generating humorous and satiric effects and laughter. It was the most commonly used form of parody to accentuate the prevalent sense of social stagnation and rigidity, the lack of innovative spirit, and the culture of corruption and hypocrisy epitomized by the obstinate defenders of the status quo, samurai and elite intellectuals. Comic realism generated these effects through symbolic inversion (sakasama), a visual and verbal operation that reversed the relations of binary opposites— high and low, mind and body, rice and money, productivity and idleness, propriety and impropriety, elites and commoners— by celebrating the lower terms of the diacritical pairings. And the vulgar materialism of the body— farting, defecating, carnal desire— played the pivotal role in producing sakasama effects by valuing cheerful vulgarity over solemn propriety and dignity. With symbolic inversion, comic realism defamilialized the values and distinctions that supported the established social hierarchies and foregrounded hitherto unarticulated perspectives on the prevailing truth of the established reality.

This chapter summarizes the findings of the analyses conducted in Part Two and explains how openness unfolds in aspects regarding both form and content. The means of generating openness in comics are grouped under four broad categories based on ambiguity, suggestiveness, and subversion which are elaborated by beginning with the technical aspects of the medium, in particular its disjointed essence, and moving on to the media references, which often function self-reflexively. The relevance of characters subverting comics conventions is also highlighted. The section then discusses the role of subversive and self-reflexive themes such as autofiction and metafiction. The final section in this part connects comics' increasing indulgence in more allusiveconnections between panels and references to other media to the current prevalence of multimedia and the digital age in general.

This chapter argues that Butler–both before and after her “ethical turn”–presents two distinct images of the human that track competing drives for subversion and survival in her work and that have very different political effects. First, Butler’s focus on “grievability” and precariousness offers a view of the human as a category necessary for one’s life to matter and bear political agency. This figure of the human overstates the power of the “human” to protect us from state and social violence, and it can undervalue the agency of lives outside dominant norms of the “human.” Second, Butler presents an image of the human as a dynamic field of contestation that is always in the flux of reiteration and subversion. This image of the human comes closer to realizing the potential of Butler’s work to trouble the terms of the human and provoke a politics of difference. Examining these theorizations of the human, I consider the uncertainty of “the human” as a power both to redeem and to abject. In so doing, I develop a politics of the human that dramatizes moments where the human expresses itself in spite of attempts to stifle it or snuff it out.

Chapter Three explores the development of British propaganda policy towards the Soviet Union. While Ministers began the process of dismantling the wartime information machinery, the developing threat of the Soviet Union forced them to sanction defensive measures where British interests were threatened. The chapter also looks at discussions on anti-Communist propaganda that would ultimately lead to the formation of the Information Research Department (IRD) in 1948. The chapter also shows how, while agreeing to overseas information activities, Bevin resisted calls for Britain to start a Cold War offensive involving subversion and special operations inside the Eastern Bloc.

Chapter Seven explores Government attempts to combat Communist influence in and around Britain’s overseas territories and dependencies and the development of security agencies across the Commonwealth. The Attlee era also saw the development of internal security agencies around the Commonwealth modelled on British lines, resulting from Soviet espionage and American fears that Britain’s allies were far from secure. Responding to American threats to cut-off secret information to Australia, the British government responded by assisting in the development of a new internal security agency, the Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). The chapter looks at the role played by Attlee and others in Commonwealth security liaison and the role of the Commonwealth Security Conferences of 1948 and 1951, highlighting the political dimension of intelligence and security liaison. Using the recently declassified files of the Colonial Information Policy Committee, the chapter assesses British attempts to direct overseas anti-Communist publicity. Chaired by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Commonwealth Relations, Patrick Gordon Walker, the committee was formed in the autumn of 1948. The chapter explores the role of the Committee and IRD in combatting Communism in Britain’s African colonies.

This chapter takes a close look at the semantic richness and transgressive potential of the Cairo Bustan’s illustrated frontispiece, a double painting opening the manuscript and representing a celebration in a royal palace. While the double painting belongs to the tradition of the Persian royal frontispiece, whose main task was to reflect the royal patron’s glory, it also considerably departs from it. In the painting, the king is marginalized, pushed to the periphery by a host of details and scenes. Visual abundance derails the viewer’s attention and suggests multiple lines of interpretation. The frontispiece can be read as a mystical scene, a parody of royal portraiture, and a self-reflective device, shifting our attention from patron to painting.

This chapter explores the works of Evgeny Messner, an Imperial Russian émigré officer whose books were prohibited in the USSR due to his strong anti-Communist views. After the Cold War, however, his works have become increasingly popular, taking a more central place within the Russian school of military thinking. After a short introduction of the author and his career, the chapter explores the concept of “Subversion-War” (Myatezhevoyna), developed by Messner during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Due to his anti-Communist views and alliance with the White Movement, and later with Nazi Germany, Messner remained generally unknown in the Soviet Union. In the post-Soviet period, however, Messner’s works have become available to a broader range of military thinkers, and there has been a growing revival of Messner’s concept of subversion-war to analyze the contemporary geopolitical situation and political, military and economic confrontations.

This chapter analyzes two contemporary approaches towards confrontation: net-centric and information wars, developed during late 1990s early 2000s by two Russian scholars, Aleksandr Dugin and Igor Panarin. Although neither mentions Messner’s works, the essence of their concepts echo many of Messner’s ideas discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the core of Dugin’s net-centric war and Panarin’s information war (as well as Messner’s subversion-war, as it was interpreted by many Russian contemporary military thinkers) is quite similar. As this chapter shows, all these theories claim that with the geopolitical and technological realities of the twenty-first century, it is easier to achieve political goals by undermining the political authority of the adversary through the manipulation of political elites and the generation of political dissent, separatism and social problems, rather than by waging classic wars and military operations.

Exploring the interpretative game Wolfe plays with the reader, this chapter highlights the potential difficulties that such a game may pose for the critic. In so doing, it argues that Wolfe makes a concerted effort to establish parallels between the reader's reception of his work and the trials of his misguided, manipulated protagonists. In essence, it indicates how Wolfe extends his thematic preoccupations into his texts’ hermeneutic circles. It draws attention to how Wolfe compels the reader to experience his particular conception of existence by utilizing, either singly or in combination, four key strategies: the employment of unreliable first-person narrators, the introduction of ambiguity and ellipsis, the inclusion of an often dense intertextuality, and the subversion or hybridisation of familiar generic conventions. The chapter observes that such literary games-playing has fostered consistent misreadings of The Urth Cycle. It concludes by arguing that The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun can be productively reassessed in the context of the recurrent themes characterising Wolfe's oeuvre.