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This chapter examines two films that illuminate indie cinema’s range of performance experiments, Julie Dash’s 1991 oral history epic Daughters of the Dust and Hal Hartley’s droll three-part study of desire, uncertainty, and identity in Flirt (1995). The chapter also shows how performances reflect the culture’s focus on identity politics, even in films that use genre conventions and Hollywood stars. It thus analyzes performances in Kasi Lemmons’s 1997 reworking of gothic and noir formulas in Eve’s Bayou, as well as the inventive pairing of actors in Spike Lee’s He Got Game (1998), which features Hollywood star Denzel Washington and basketball legend/first-time actor Ray Allen. Looking at performances in Gas Food Lodging (Anders, 1992) and My Family (Nava, 1995), the chapter traces filmmakers’ sustained interest in the experiences of marginalized characters. Exploring the sometimes-critiqued iterations of New Queer Cinema in the late 1990s, the chapter considers performances in High Art (Cholodenko, 1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce, 1999). Despite the fact that some of these titles were released in the subsequent indiewood phase of contemporary American independent cinema, the analysis suggests that their aesthetic and performance choices fall under the indie label.

Edith Cavell has been portrayed in many different ways, and this book examines her myriad “faces”, as they have been constructed and handed down by propagandists, biographers, and artists. Its introduction relates these ideas to a rigorous form of “public history”, in which analysis can intersect with commemoration. Edith Cavell was first introduced to the British public through a series of Foreign Office statements which claimed to establish the “facts” of her case. Her own voice, along with those of her family, colleagues, and friends, was muted, as a monolithic image of a national heroine and martyr emerged. The two main areas of tension in her commemoration are identified. The difference between the complexity of her behaviour and motivations and the simplicity of the “legend” that was constructed around her is highlighted. And the attempts of individuals and professional organisations to commemorate her life and work are contrasted with the public construction of a “heroine” who could be of value to the nation state.

This chapter examines British movies—The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Legend of the Werewolf (1975), The Company of Wolves (1984)—as well as werewolf films that feature Britain, including Werewolf of London (1935), The Wolf Man (1941) and An American Werewolf in London (1981). It investigates werewolves’ origins and migrations, as films demarcate territories of ‘home’ and the exotic or marginalized, amidst the multiple versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ that permeate the films. Motivating reflection on what makes us human, or animal, the werewolf expresses tensions between conscious / unconscious (or repressed / liberated), predicated upon a dualistic (Jekyll / Hyde) understanding of self /‘other,’ or culture / nature. Despite the films’ final containment, their critique of societal repression has an indelible force.

In this chapter, I address parallel processes of adaptation and cartography through an examination of literary maps: maps that aim to recreate and, in some cases, create the experience of a particular narrative landscape through visual, pictorial, and spatial representations of writers, characters, settings, and scenes from preexisting creative works. This chapter begins with an overview of the genre of literary maps and the manner in which they organize information, as well as their target uses. I then examine two sets of literary maps as representative of two types of cartographic adaptation: the “Map-of-A-Book” calendars issued by the Harris Company from 1953 to 1964 and the maps produced by the Aaron Blake Company in the 1980s. I distinguish the two sets of maps in terms of both their functionality and engagement with source material: one set of maps privileges the literary work and emphasizes appreciation over user interaction, whereas the other privileges the reader and posits interactivity as appreciation. I conclude the chapter with a brief look at contemporary digital literary mapping projects and consider their contribution to adaptation and adaptation networks.

Chapter 5 concentrates on Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi (“The Four Branches of the Mabinogi”) and the tale of Taliesin. Alan Garner’s Carnegie Medal-winner The Owl Service (1967) is examined alongside Jenny Nimmo’s The Magician Trilogy (The Snow Spider, 1986, Emlyn’s Moon, 1987, and The Chestnut Soldier, 1989) and Catherine Fisher’s Darkhenge (2006). All three works are intrusion fantasies, in which the traditional narratives of Wales literally erupt into the primary world of the novels and become something much more powerful than just “old tales.” All three fantasy works reimagine (and have contemporary teenagers re-enact) particular scenes from Welsh legend in order to explore the transition from childhood to young adulthood in terms of personal, national, cultural, and class identity.

The decorative literary annuals and gift books that emerged in the 1820s provided an accessible home for women’s Arthurian poetry and cultivated a pictorial aesthetic that would come to dominate much nineteenth-century medievalist verse. Garner examines poems by Louisa Stuart Costello, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Howitt, and Caroline Norton in their original annual contexts, and argues that the annuals ushered in a new fashion for individual poems about the Arthurian legend’s female characters. Particular attention is paid to Arthurian poems in The Gem, Forget Me Not, Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book, and The Tribute. The chapter ends by arguing that Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ should be read in the context of annual Arthuriana and earlier poems on the subject by his female contemporaries.

Chapter 4 examines Lloyd Alexander’s series The Chronicles of Prydain (The Book of Three, 1964, The Black Cauldron, 1965, The Castle of Llyr, 1966, Taran Wanderer, 1967, and The High King, 1968). The chapter focuses on ideas of interpretation and authenticity when adapting the wider Welsh tradition (from the Mabinogion to the Welsh Triads and the legend of Taliesin) for a child readership. Alexander’s books take place in a secondary world, for which Wales is the blueprint, and the chapter discusses how they blend disparate ideas about the “Celtic” past with often-contested interpretations of the medieval Welsh material.

Chapter 6 explores Susan Cooper’s reimagining of the (Welsh layer of the) Arthurian legend in The Dark is Rising Sequence (Over Sea, Under Stone, 1965, The Dark is Rising, 1973, Greenwitch, 1974, The Grey King, 1975, and Silver on the Tree, 1977). The chapter focuses on Cooper’s representation of the “Arthur of the Welsh” as a Romano-Celtic hero, and also explores ideas of British vs. Welsh vs. English identity in Cooper’s fantasy novels, and the way those are tied with the entwinement of landscape, folklore, and history.

Women’s travel writing and topographical poetry provided rich ground for Arthurian allusions in the Romantic period. By reading the travel narrative as a malleable literary space, Garner argues that its flexible boundaries allowed women to offer antiquarian assessments of Arthurian sites without encountering hostility from critics. A range of travel texts and topographical poetry by Mary Morgan, Anne Wilson, Louisa Stuart Costello, Felicia Hemans, Eleanor Anne Porden, Anna Sawyer, and Mary Russell Mitford is examined. As part of its attention to places and spaces, Garner also addresses the nationalist impulse at stake in treatments of the Arthurian myth and concludes that English women poets ultimately failed to appropriate the legend successfully in their verse.

In The Queen’s Wake: A Legendary Poem (1813), Hogg imagined an event which had never taken place. Although the title of the work appears to announce a narrative of national loss, bearing connotations of death and aftermath, the antiquated meaning of the term ‘wake’ yields more positive implications — referring to the musical celebrations once used to commemorate the dedication of a church or the eve of a feast day. The subtitle ‘A Legendary Poem’ similarly plays on different meanings: the possibility of the poem being based on a legend, creating its own fiction to win fame, or already being famous. In The Queen’s Wake, the modern- day Ettrick Shepherd sings of a poetry contest or ‘wake’ for Scottish bards, hosted by the young Mary, Queen of Scots, over three nights, early in her reign. Although 30 bards are said to have competed, he can only recite the 15 ballads which have supposedly survived through oral tradition. Through this narrative frame, Hogg posited the founding of a Scottish tradition of poetry through Mary’s contest — lamenting what had been lost, celebrating what had been saved, and addressing the role of poetry in the 1810s by drawing comparisons with the 1560s. Through this interplay, he repeatedly alerts readers to tensions in his Marian tradition.

The hybrid genre film, The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, incorporates the genre conventions of kung fu and those associated with Dracula. Lee analyzes this unique Hong Kong-UK transnational horror co-production in which Count Dracula goes to early twentieth-century China, and Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) teams up with Chinese martial arts brothers to fight against seven golden vampires, and ultimately Dracula, who takes over the body of the Chinese villain, Kahn. Reading The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires entails that we should situate the film in terms of its geopolitical and generic positions in Hong Kong and the UK film history and legacy. Lee provides much-needed critical insight into the politics and poetics of transnational co-productions.

All Dutch and Flemish people have heard of Luilekkerland (“the land of milk and honey”). This imaginary country is portrayed in many anecdotes and paintings. One of the most famous—The Land of Cockaigne (1567)—was executed by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Influenced by his illustrious compatriot Hieronymus Bosch, in this painting Bruegel achieved a creative synthesis of Bosch’s demonic symbolism with his own personal vision of human folly and depravity, providing a profound and elemental insight into humankind and its relationship to the world of nature. The painting shows a Renaissance notion of Utopia, in the form of three recumbent figures, seemingly exhausted after having stuffed themselves on a splendid meal. These figures—a knight, a peasant, and a burgher—whose forms radiate outward from the center of the picture—produce a sensation of dislocation in the spectator, suggesting that this painting may have been intended as a critical commentary on life in the real world at that time. Renowned through legend, oral history, and art, Cockaigne became the most pervasive collective dream of medieval times, an earthly paradise to counter the suffering and frustration of daily existence, allaying anxieties about an increasingly elusive heavenly paradise.

The legend of blues musician Robert Johnson, selling his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta in exchange for blues immortality, is one that will resonate with scholars working on the American South and on the Southern Gothic. Given the explosion of scholarship in this area over the last two decades, defining the South and the Southern Gothic is not a task for the faint of heart. In recent years, scholars have moved beyond traditional views of the South and of Southern literature as characterised by a strong sense of place, nostalgia for a lost past and a Lost Cause, and a history of defeat, articulated by white male writers. In her influential 2005 overview of the field of Southern studies, Barbara Ladd comments, ‘At present, southern studies takes shape at crossroads,’ and adds, ‘Inquiry into creole and creolist discourses in the South has taken us into New World, Americas, and African studies.’

In his letter to Spenser, “A Pleasant and Pitthy Familiar discourse, of the Earthquake in Aprill last” (1580), Gabriel Harvey makes an unexpected allusion to John the Baptist’s command to “[r]epent: for the kingdome of heauen is at hand” (Matt. 3: 2). Discussing the possible causes of earthquakes, Harvey dismisses those who hastily ascribe divine causes to natural disasters as ignorant and uneducated. According to Harvey, this presumptuous belief is grounded only vpon these two weake and deceitfull groundes, Credulitie and Ignoraunce: if so be inwardly (not onely in Externall shewe, after an Hypocriticall and Pharisaicall manner) it certainly doo vs good for our reformation, and amendment, and seeme to preache vnto vs, Pœnitentiam agite (as in some respect euery suche straunge and rare Accident may seeme:) how Ordinarie, and Naturall so euer the Cause shall appeare otherwise to the best learned. (617–18)

Blackness, queerness and performance are inseparable for me. I learnt all I know about blackness/queerness from the life of boxing legend and black leader Muhammad Ali. When the heavyweight boxer danced on his toes and declared ‘I’m pretty, I’m as pretty as a girl’, he was playing with people’s perceptions and prejudices of what a black man could be (Hauser 1997: 52). Ali troubled gender stereotypes and racist beliefs about black masculinity being monolithic, inarticulate, even savage (Butler 1990; Wallace 1979). But Ali did not slug. He kept his hands low and shuffled lightly on his feet; he danced — backwards — did magic tricks and recited poetry, until they took his licence away for refusing to go to Vietnam and shoot his fellow brown-skinned man. When he changed his name and his religion, from Christian Cassius Clay to Muslim Muhammad Ali, he undid the idea of what an American was supposed to be. As performance theorist Peggy Phelan has stated, ‘self invention and re-invention structures the performance of identities’ (1993: 168). Muhammad Ali was a master of self-/re-invention, which is a quintessentially queer quality. Ali is heterosexual, but he showed me that blackness and queerness do not need to be seen as sparring partners, but as dancing partners.

In 1817 Robert Southey speculated that if Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur were to be ‘modernised’ and ‘published as a book for boys, it could hardly fail of regaining its popularity’.1 Writing in the introduction to one of three new editions of Malory’s romance to appear between 1816 and 1817, Southey nostalgically recalled reading a ‘wretchedly imperfect copy’ of Le Morte Darthur as a ‘schoolboy’.2 ‘[T]here was no book’, he wrote, ‘except the Faery Queen, which I perused so often, or with such deep contentment.’3 But no appropriately modernized edition for children appeared for over 40 years. Southey’s call was eventually taken up by the architect and editor James Knowles, who produced what is generally regarded as the first edition of Malory for children, The Story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (1862).4 Repeating Southey’s earlier predictions, Knowles surmised in his preface that, if ‘modernised or adapted for general circulation’, ‘boys … would probably become the principal readers of the Arthur legends in a popular form’.5 Cultivating knowledge of the Arthurian legend is now firmly a masculine responsibility and a form of patriarchal inheritance: ‘The story of King Arthur will never die’, writes Knowles, ‘while there are English men to study and English boys to devour its tales of adventure and daring and magic and conquest.’6 The volume was dedicated to Tennyson, whom upon receiving a copy told Knowles that his ‘boys of 9 and 7 could think of little else but King Arthur and his Knights’, and that he had no doubt that the book would be ‘hailed with delight by numbers [of] men no less than boys’.7

In his travel memoir Pictures from Italy (1846), Charles Dickens turned to the analogy of the magic lantern to describe the way his mind mediated the beauty and spectacle of the landscape. He observed the ‘rapid and unbroken succession of novelties that had passed before me’, noting that ‘[a]t intervals, some one among them would stop’ to allow his mind to focus on the image for a moment before ‘it would dissolve, like a view in a magic lantern’ (1846, p. 107). Decades later, Proust’s narrator in the opening sections of Swann’s Way in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) wrote of the magic lantern images of Golo from the medieval legend of Genevieve of Brabant, ‘advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with their curves and diving into their folds’

‘Glorious News, Wellington in France and Bonaparte out of Germany!!’1 Such was the tone of many broadside songs in early 1814, developing a giddy, celebratory rhetoric in keeping with the crowds around the mail coach and the eager anticipation of peace. Comedy kept its place, especially in songs describing the Dutch revolt, two of which were later republished in an Edinburgh songbook.2 Yet on the brink of victory, the mood of the establishment press was savage, with half of London’s writers baying for Napoleon’s head.3 The song entitled ‘Glorious News’ ends in glee as the trapped emperor ‘trembles for his neck’. Batchelar’s ‘Swaggering Boney’ proclaims that ‘He will never be easy till in death he’s fixt.’4 With the coming of peace and Napoleon’s exile as the ruler of Elba, many felt cheated of blood. Certainly Britain’s foremost poets were not inclined to magnanimity. From one extreme, Shelley wrote: I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan To think that a most unambitious slave, Like thee, should dance and revel on the grave Of Liberty…5

Near the ruins of the ancient city of Miletus, you can still walk out into an open field at night and gaze at an extremely rich array of stars. According to a famous legend, in the sixth century BCE, Thales of Miletus, one of the first philosophers to appeal to naturalistic explanations, walking across a field and gazing at the stars, found the heavens so wondrous, or was so lost in his astronomical calculations, that he walked directly into a well. Wonder has a double meaning nicely captured in the uncertainty of Thales’ mental state. Was he so awestruck by the starry vista that he was caught up in the reflective emotion of wonder, or was he so busy just wondering, intellectually, how the heavens worked? The two senses of the term meet in the claim that wonder is the beginning of philosophy. The first sense is closely tied to the feeling of awe; the second to the feeling of curiosity.

The topic of cultural measurement often evokes the quotation, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ Although commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, there is no evidence that Einstein actually wrote this, as the legend goes, on the blackboard in his office at Princeton University. Based on an older expression, the phrase should probably instead be attributed to sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963, 13), who writes: It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Dun na mBan tri Thine (The Women’s Fort is on Fire) has much to say about Ni Dhuibhne as an Irish female writer and, indeed, as an Irish-language writer. Marking Ni Dhuibhne’s debut as a playwright on 10 November 1994 at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin, Dun na mBan tri Thine makes extensive use of ‘The Old Woman as Hare’ legend, a tale of a woman who transforms herself into a hare to challenge social boundaries and traditional hierarchies. In the fairy legend, becoming-hare is central to the protagonist’s freedom; in Ni Dhuibhne’s work, the otherworldly connections and associations with women’s creativity ensure that becoming-hare is concerned with the power of perceiving differently, of tearing perception from its human home. The literary critic is discouraged from over-coding the hare as a signifier of some ultimate meaning. Rather, the process of ‘becoming-hare’ encourages us to see the animal as a possible opening for a new style of perception, one which leaves itself open to what is not itself. Ni Dhuibhne’s narrative is not about the expression of meaning but rather about the production of new senses, new perceptions, and new worlds.

Following the unprecedented success of Scream (dir Wes Craven) in 1996, the next few years saw a resurgence of horror films, primarily in the same postmodern slasher style as their progenitor. This neo-slasher cycle would often utilize successful young actors known for their television work and have a self-referential approach to the genre. Notable, and memorable, films include not only the two initial sequels to Scream (1997, 2000; dir Wes Craven) but also the I Know What You Did Last Summer films, the semi-reboot sequel Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998; dir Steve Miner), and Urban Legend (1998; dir Jamie Blanks), as well as numerous others. Released in 2001, towards the end of the cycle of films, Valentine (2001; dir Jamie Blanks) is perhaps one of the least remembered, potentially due to its lacklustre box office results, and is perhaps most noted for its performance from cult television star David Boreanaz.

Lady Gaga, one of the biggest popstars of the 2000s, produces a genuine queer nostalgia, an emergent collective memory with its own sensuous and sensational aesthetics. Her extravagant look, outfits, hairstyles, songs, and concerts, as much as her outrageous public statements, constitute an accumulated (counter)cultural phenomenon which integrates hyper-technological contemporariness with imaginary, legendary past-ness, and spectacular, almost prophetic retro-futurism. In her unique status as a young and classic pop star she combines innovativeness and iconicity, unruly womanhood and calculated marketing, global fandom and queer identification. Her multi temporalities are interwoven with her multicultural, intercultural, and countercultural identifications. In her queer way, she creates a fantastic, imaginary, and imaginative history, an invented history that transcends the limitations of reality, naturalness, daily routine, and traditional or conventional frameworks. She creates legendary landscapes, legendary spectacles, and legendary worlds. She is a legend.

The East African Front in the Great War is no longer a forgotten theatre.1 In recent years works by Hew Strachan, Ross Anderson and Edward Paice have promoted a more sophisticated understanding of the Great War in East Africa.2 It is questionable whether it was ever truly ‘forgotten’. The dynamic exploits of the German field commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck captured the imagination of the German public at the time and have loomed over the historiography since the war’s closure in November 1918. Feted as an expert in guerrilla warfare and the man who evaded the might of the British Empire until 23 November 1918,12 days after the Armistice, the legend of Lettow has periodically stoked the fires of interest in the campaign.3 Leading a force overwhelmingly composed of regionally recruited ‘native askari’, the German commander fought a campaign that is remarkable for its improvisation and coordination. Nevertheless, as Hew Strachan has recognised, it is one that has largely rested on the false premises that Lettow’s achievements were unique and that his conduct was consistently rooted in the practices of guerrilla warfare.4 Conversely, the British conduct has been portrayed as blundering, hamstrung and ill-conceived. This is not a position without merit; indeed, many of the battles were defined by a lack of organisation, poor preparatory measures and strategy.

In these few paragraphs near the end of the novel, Jude Fawley revisits for the last time his childhood home and parts from Sue Bridehead, cousin and mother of his children, before returning to Christminster and the sensual Arabella, whom he has recently remarried. His painfully slow journey, evoked elegiacally, involves three object-symbols, and underlines the value of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of chronotope:2 the Brown House, scene of his parents’ parting; his chiselled inscription on the milestone,3 now virtually erased but a concrete reminder of early aspirations; and the absent gibbet, recalling a grim family legend further back in the past.

Arthur Ransome’s landmark series of books came to a close in 1947 when Titty Walker and Dick Callum rowed out to return the stolen Diver eggs to their mother. It is often a poignant moment for readers because as the last book it locks the Walkers, Blacketts and Callums into what Victor Watson describes as the ‘mythology of childhood’.1 They will never change, never grow old, never suffer, and in this sense Watson’s observation that ‘Eden’ lies within Swallows and Amazons (1930) is equally true of the series as a whole.2 Unlike Malcolm Saville, who chose to show his Lone Piners growing up (with Petronella Sterling turning 18 in the final book),3 Ransome’s children become the stuff of legend. As Watson has it, ‘They have something in common with Jason, Odysseus, Lancelot and Robin Hood. Their business is to appear unexplained at the beginning of each narrative, and go adventuring into our imaginative lives.’4

At the beginning of the 1980s, the main measure adopted by Swiss watchmakers to pull themselves out of recession was the merger of the two biggest Swiss watch groups, namely ASUAG and SSIH (1983). With gross sales amounting respectively to CHF1.3 billion and CHF815 million in 1979, they outstripped the other watchmakers, third place being jointly occupied by the Societe des Garde-Temps SA (SGT, brands Avia, Elgin, Fleurier, Invicta, Sandoz, Silvana, Titus, Waltham) and Rolex, whose gross sales at the time were valued at CHF190 million.1 What is more, in 1979 ASUAG and SSIH employed about half of the workforce in the Swiss watch industry2 However, their combined clout must be seen in perspective, as it was primarily due to the crisis which had impacted other companies. In reality, ASUAG and SSIH faced huge industrial and financial difficulties, and their survival owed a great deal to the support of the major banks.

It is now the stuff of legend in the world of detective fiction. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), a man lies dead at No. 3, Lauriston Gardens, Brixton, and above the body on the wall, written in blood, is the word ‘Rache’. After his accustomed examination of the scene, Holmes makes the following pronouncement: There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long.1

Between 1946 and 1990 DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the state film studio of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), produced a diverse corpus of around 180 feature-length films for children (Kinderfilme). Despite the success of these films with audiences and, for the most part at least, with critics and functionaries, the East German filmmaker Heiner Carow — later director of Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1973), the GDR’s most successful film, and Coming Out (1989), its first explicitly gay movie — identified as early as 1958 an ideological crisis in the industry. He summarised the problems facing children’s films as a deficit of realism, a tendency towards ’vagueness and vulgar materialism’, either they were too fantastical (the fairy-tale narratives) or too negative in their portrayal of contemporary society (the gritty, neorealist ‘every-day’ stories): ‘We can thus only conclude that the directors of films for children and young people […] are lagging behind the developments in society’ (Konig et al. 1996: 23).1 Whilst self-criticism of this kind was an obligatory ritual amongst GDR artists at this time, Dziuba does neatly identify a schism in films for young people in the wake of the success in the previous year of the most iconic of all GDR children’s films, the whimsical, faintly psychedelic fairy-tale Das singende klingende Baumchen (The Singing Ringing Tree, Francesco Stefani, 1957),2 and official disapproval of the candid portrayal of teenage disillusionment with GDR society in Gerhard Klein’s Berlin — Ecke Schonhauser (Berlin — Down Schonhauser Way, 1957).

First things first. For an uninitiated viewer (and reader) of Hindi cinema produced from Bombay, it may be imperative to recognize ‘who was Suraiya’. While biographies and interviews of well-known (male) actors frame her life in a particular way,1 especially highlighting her enigmatic presence/absence, it may be worthwhile to know that Suraiya (1929–2004) initially did a few playback songs (at the early stage of her career during 1941–42), and her popularity as a singer-actor, as well as a dancer, grew during the mid-1940s (especially during 1948–49) with the success of films like 1857 (1946), Dard (1947), Dak Bangla (1947), Aaj Ki Raat (1948), Kajal (1948), Vidya (1948), Pyaar Ki Jeet (1948), Gajre (1948), Shair (1949), Jeet (1949), Dillagi (1949), Duniya (1949), Char Din (1949), Dastaan (1950), Sanam (1951) and so on, along with films by influential filmmakers like K. Asif, Mehboob Khan, Chetan Anand and Nitin Bose—Phool (1944), Anmol Ghadi (1946), Afsar (1950), Waris (1954) and so on. Moreover, she also co-starred with the singing legend K. L. Saigal in Tadbir (1945), Omar Khaiyyam (1946) and in Parwana (1947), though her career arguably took off with Tamanna (1942). Let us say that she was one of the actors who continued to perform her own songs, even at the times when the popularity of the playback singers soared and their voices demarcated the scene with their extraordinary skills.2

In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare further emphasizes his identity as a rebel poet-playwright by aligning himself with the anti-Augustan Ovid, as he does throughout his Roman poems and plays. Shakespeare here uses the figure of Caesar — with its multifaceted legacy in history, legend, and myth — to explore the complex and ambivalent associations inherited from these past traditions and to expose the direct link between Christianity and its pagan Roman past. In foregrounding Antony’s rhetoric over the bleeding body of Caesar, Shakespeare documents the making of a martyr, showing how the blood and wounds of the body accrue meaning when transposed into a holy icon, simultaneously unveiling that process and reinvesting it with ritual meaning onstage. Shakespeare further extends this ambivalence by opening up larger debates concerning the limits of ‘constancy’ and the turbulence of fiery passion at the micro- and macrocosmic levels, involving pivotal questions that he explores throughout his Roman poems and plays.

It is easy to begin with a story. History, mythology, legend, religion, all begin with stories. On the one hand we tend to think of a story as an artefact, a narrative contained within a book that we can pick up and read, or a digital file we can replay on a screen. On the other hand we also know that the notion of story as a closed unity has been long challenged by stories that cycle through space and time, whether they be ancient tales reworked or digitally enhanced hypertext narratives with multiple coexistent threads. We also tend to think of stories as something separate from ourselves, that we consume at will, for entertainment or edification. But, whether we know it or not, stories are swirling around us and even through us as we play out narratives of identity and community, as we continually renegotiate our place in the world.

Jane Austen, wrote her brother Henry, ‘seldom changed her opinions either on books or men’ (NA, 7). In Persuasion, her novel of first love revived, the presence of Austen’s first loves — the books that inspired her to become ‘THE AUTHOR’ — is strongly felt. In her excellent monograph, A Revolution Almost beyond Expression, Jocelyn Harris suggests several sources for the origins of Persuasion: Sarah Scott’s 1762 novel of a utopian feminist community, Millenium Hall; a story recounted by Oliver Goldsmith in his Life of Bath legend Beau Nash; Austen’s own reflections on the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo; and her response to harsh criticisms of Frances Burney’s last novel The Wanderer. Austen’s use of these heterogeneous elements (third-hand gossip, political debate, new and forgotten novels and poetry) is typical of her artistic practice in weaving together in fiction strands of thought that are otherwise unconnected. This artistic strategy of Austen’s recalls Bakhtin’s insistence on the heteroglossia of the novel, its compulsion to absorb other genres and to allow their several voices to be equally heard. Harris insists on the shared significance of these sources, and ultimately constructs a compelling narrative for reading Persuasion, in which the idealised, fictional eighteenth-century hero Sir Charles Grandison (Mr Elliot) is replaced in heroic pre-eminence by the historic Captain James Cook (in the form of Captain Wentworth), naval celebrity and British ‘discoverer’ of Australia’s east coast, New Zealand and Hawaii.2

The premise of the recent low-budget indie horror film YellowBrickRoad (2010) is simple. In 1940, the entire population of a small town named Friar, New Hampshire, suddenly decided to walk into the wilderness. Most of the townsfolk froze to death or were torn apart by unknown perpetrators. In the present day, a group of researchers decides to follow the same trail, in the hope of turning legend into ‘recorded history’. However, within a few days, they find that despite all of their equipment and expertise, they are being changed by their time on the trail, and not for the better. As the tag line puts it, ‘They were searching for an evil in the forest… But the forest found the evil in them.’

The nature of truth as it is manifested through the interplay of history, fiction, myth and legend forms the kernel from which the Lead Books unfurled. Ancient and contemporary historical circumstances created the backdrop to a series of events whose uncanny synchronicities engendered a body of cultural and religious icons of ineffable significance for Catholics and Muslims alike. The stage upon which this intense and long-lasting drama was played out was the city of Granada, whose position as the primary city of Spain was, and in my view still is, at stake, largely due to its vital role in the momentous events which have formed the subject of this book. Modern Granada has an exotic allure unlike any other Spanish city; its stunning natural setting amid the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada and its striking Islamic architecture lend it a fairytale glamour. It is Spain’s most visited tourist location, embodying the idealized myth of this city as a site of unsurpassable beauty with a history to match, in which Christians lived side by side with their Moorish compatriots, whose cultural interaction has left its traces all around in the buildings, markets and lifestyle of the Granadans. The Moorish quarter of the Aibaidn, home to Miguel de Luna and crucible of the unrest which led to the Alpujarra war, is now a gentrified neighbourhood with narrow, winding streets boasting North African-style tea shops, where locals often greet each other in Arabic, and wish each other a Happy Ramadan.

At around the turn of the nineteenth century, also the time that James Joyce was growing up, Dublin was becoming a significant literary and cultural centre in its own right. Much of this spurt in artistic activity took place under the auspices of the Irish Literary Movement, a concerted attempt to foster nationalist pride by reviving ancient Irish folklore and legend in contemporary works of literature.

Scholarly debate about the known facts and creative interpretations of the Sacro Monte story intersect in the arena of myth and legend. Since their condemnation in 1682, the polemics surrounding the Lead Books have developed into a vibrant field of research conducted by a small group of mostly Spanish and English scholars, including Arabists, historians, theologians, archaeologists and art historians, while Spanish novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have re-created the story in different fictional forms, assuming the mantle of Cervantes, who made the plomos and Miguel de Luna’s Verdadera Historia del Key don Rodrigo fundamental to Don Quijote. The Torre Turpiana parchment and the Lead Books continue to exert a fascination upon those who encounter them, even after 400 years. Why is this the case, and why is the mythical and legendary so central to these issues? What light have the most significant critical stances and fictional developments shed upon those events in late sixteenth-century Granada?

I begin with a quotation: Shah Rukh Khan is the face of a glittering new India. He is a modern-day god. On streets in India, his posters are sold alongside those of religious deities. Shrines have been erected in his name. For Indians and the varied non-Indian lovers of popular Hindi cinema, Shah Rukh is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined. Over fifteen years and fifty films, he has straddled Bollywood like a colossus. In the paan-stained studios of Mumbai, Shah Rukh’s story, how a middle-class Muslim boy from Delhi became one of the biggest movie stars in the biggest film industry in the world, is legend. So when he flicks away cigarette butts people pick them up as souvenirs. The media, in tones that aren’t ironical or mocking, refer to him as King Khan. (Chopra, 2007)

The first of Austen’s novels to be begun and completed in the nineteenth century, Mansfield Park, demonstrates Austen’s ongoing preoccupation with the literature of the eighteenth century. Just as importantly, the novel evinces Austen’s interest in the rapidly changing nature of literary culture in England. Bakhtin argues that ‘when the novel becomes the dominant genre … almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent “novelized”’, and this cooption of other genres to the services of the novel lies at the heart of Austen’s work.1 In Mansfield Park Austen takes on once again the question of what belongs, or does not belong, in a novel. In Sense and Sensibility she focused on the issue of representation, that is, the limitations of what could be shown in a novel. In Mansfield Park Austen turns to the equally important question of genre, exploring the novel’s potential to reflect on, cannibalise and transform not only other novels, but also oral legend, epic poetry and biography.

The subject produced from this renewed historical cunning, or perhaps vice versa, is the properly monstrous political subject for whom existing social categories and agential determinations are demonstrably insufficient. From the scholarly collaborations of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker to the plethora of cinematic and televisual incarnations, the first decade of the new millennium has seen an acute resurgence of interest in — indeed, a well-nigh global obsession with — the reckoning of this monstrous subjectivity. Of especial prominence has been the return of the zombie and its phantasmagoric next-of-kin, the werewolf, the alien, and the vampire, all of which have increasingly assumed the key features of the former. In fact, the twenty-first-century zombie is easily distinguished from its Cold War, pop-culture predecessor by two fundamental characteristics: its proclivity for mass social organization and its disarming speed and power. While the first attribute has gone largely without notice, the second provoked vigorous online debate (weighing the merits of the “fast zombie” against the traditional “slow” one) following the release of Danny Boyle’s British “viral zombie” film 28 Days Later (2002) and Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated remake of George Romero’s classic satire of US consumerism Dawn of the Dead (2004), either of which might legitimately lay claim as the originator of this now de rigueur representation.

This account from an alcoholic veteran describing the capture of Grozny in 2000 is fiction: very little testimony exists on the rapes committed by Russian troops since 1999 in Chechnya. If sexual violence occurred in the “filtration camps”, at control posts, in military barracks and during village raids, their scale is difficult to assess, if only because of the victims’ silence. The lack of evidence makes it even more striking that several sources of different types (testimony from victims and soldiers, literary texts, press articles) trace a link between rapes and the legend of women snipers in Chechnya. From overhead, our helicopters sprayed the area with anti-tank missiles, down below we were firing all our mortars, and then all at once, this tousled bitch shot out into the street, stinking of cellars and burning. So we caught her round her thighs: “So who are you?” Any fool would have known that this was a sniper. As for her, she began to scream: according to her, her twelve-year-old daughter was supposed to be in the cellar and her legs, that’s what she said, were torn off [...] So this kid of 12, she was a sniper too! All these people, all of them, they are all savages. With them, soon as they can walk, everyone shoots [...] Well let her die! That’s what I thought. She carried bandages to these wretched boeviki and she was telling us rubbish: “Seda” she shouted, “Seda! My little girl!” and we led her up to the sixth floor, we satisfied her female lust, for the last time .. what a joke .. and then we strapped F-1 grenades round her and threw her out of the window. She didn’t even have time to cry out: level with the second floor, all the grenades exploded. She was torn apart. Not a bit reached the ground.2

The medieval Irish origin legend, describing the peopling of Ireland as found in the Middle Irish treatise known as the Leabhar Gabhala (Book of Invasions), comprised a sequence of interlinked stories of waves of settlers who arrived and established themselves on the island. The sequence usually began with Ceasair, supposed daughter of Noah, thereby establishing a link with the genealogical material in the Old Testament. Subsequent invasions by Parthalon, Nemed, the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danann were recorded, culminating in the settlement of Ireland by the Milesians, the sons of Mil Espaine who journeyed to Ireland having ultimately come from the Middle East.1 It was from this last group — from the three sons of Mil, namely Eremon, Eber and Ir — that the Gaeil, the Gaelic Irish, were said to have been descended. Over time, the earlier elements of the ‘invasions’ story declined in popularity while the Milesian element retained its resonance, with the term ‘Clann Mhileadh’ (family of Mil) being used as a synonym for the Gaelic community in the seventeenth century. The origins of the Leabhar Gabhala tradition are obscure and many variant recensions of the text survive from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries, but its basis was essentially genealogical. Its significance was that it provided a broad, and ultimately biblical, context for the genealogical lore that was an indispensable element of each family’s collective memory. Throughout the medieval period both prose sagas and saints’ lives adopted the context of the pseudo-historical scheme of the Milesian origin legend for chronological or genealogical purposes.2 The framework of the Irish origin legend as recorded in the Leabhar Gabhala continued to be a requisite element of histories of Ireland down to the nineteenth century.3

Performance studies’ origin narratives have been well rehearsed. In seminars, at conferences, in the pages of TDR and other journals, the legend grows: the Tale of the Young Ones from New Orleans, When Richard Met Victor, The Performance Studies Turn. Elements of these stories appear in the pages of this very volume, and this is only fitting. They are an essential and important part of understanding performance studies’ past, present, and future. But this chapter tells a different story. This is the story of our field’s gawky, geeky adolescence and its transition from that awkward state to a seat at the Grownups’ Table. This is the story of (you should excuse the expression) performance studies’ bar mitzvah.

In the Founding Legend of Western Civilization, Richard Waswo shows how the Latin words for culture – culto, cultum, col – are also the root words for the verb ‘to cultivate’, and thereby serve to link all manifestations of high culture to the tilling of the soil. These ideas, created by and for settled agricultural communities that sow, harvest, and build walls and cities further serve to qualify as savage all other relations that people have with nature. Indeed, the ‘image of civilization is the city, usually in the form of walls and towers’ (Waswo 1997, pp. xi, 1). One obvious example of this is that for the Romans, the goddess Cybele – protectress of agricultural and civic life – is represented seated on a throne wearing a crown of walls and towers. Conversely, it was Herodotus who helped to define barbarians as people whose primary characteristic was their ‘ignorance of ploughing and sowing and the fact that they do not dwell in houses’ (Hartog 1988, p. 194). Accordingly, as the rhetoric that associated cultivation with civility and order began to emerge as an ideological strategy in Tudor Ireland, the humanist officials responsible for policies in Ireland became committed to the establishment of urban settlements and to the attendant material culture that they considered as essential markers of civilization.2

In 1760, the German town of Wittenberg lost a particularly notorious casualty to the fires of international war. With the territory embroiled in Europe’s Seven Years’ War, the town was set alight by a French bombardment which seriously damaged the Schlosskirche (or Castle Church) and permanently destroyed the wooden doors that adorned its entrance. Not long after their erection in the formative years of the sixteenth century, these doors became historically nominated as the location of Martin Luther’s posting of his ‘Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences’, the Ninety-Five Theses, which, so the legend goes, sparked the European Reformation and the various profound historical changes that it entailed.1 Although the wooden originals have long since been replaced by bronze replicas, the Church Doors, and the scroll that adorned them, remain at the imaginative centre of the early modern Reformation, as reconstituted in the mediations of historical memory and generic representation.2

The most popular rendition of the Greek-Turkish conflict as perennial is that it all started almost a thousand years ago, in 1071, at the epic battle of Manzikert in eastern Asia Minor when the Byzantines under Emperor Romanos IV Diogenis were defeated by the Seljuk Turks under Sultan Alp-Arslan. From this point on, the Seljuks were present in Asia Minor. When the power of the Seljuks declined in the second part of the 13th century, the Ottoman Turks succeeded them and reduced the Byzantine state to a small entity. The final phase of this first Greek-Turkish conflict ended in 1453, with the siege of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II Fâtih (the Conqueror), with the incumbents under their last Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, refusing to surrender. The outcome is well-known and has passed into legend. Needless to say, each side presents the period from 1071 to 1453 in bipolar mirror-image terms: by one side as heroic, noble and just, with great cultural achievements to boot in ‘our lands’ and by the other side as the abode of cruelty, injustice and darkness.