From its emergence in the early 1980s, gothic studies has been a predominantly Anglo-American critical discourse, both in its institutional locations within English departments and in its primary focus on English and American literature and film. There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, with critics including Avril Horner (2002), Peter Mortensen (2004), Diane Long Hoeveler (2010), Matthew Gibson (2013), Angela Wright (2013) and many others demonstrating that the gothic has been a transnational and trans-European phenomenon from its inception in the eighteenth century. In recent years, the framework of globalgothic developed by Glennis Byron (2013) has made a compelling case for conceptualising the gothic in even less anglophone ways within the continental and global realignments of politics, society and culture of globalisation. The cross-cultural manifestations and inflections of European gothic are familiar in discussions of late-eighteenth-century gothic, but in this chapter I aim to situate contemporary gothic narratives in literature and film from Europe against the background of ‘the collapse of blocs and borders, the emergence of transnational and economic unions, [and] spectres of superstates’ that Fred Botting and Justin Edwards have identified at the heart of globalgothic (2013, 12). The most obvious reference point in thinking about European gothic in this way is the emergence of the European Union (EU) as precisely such a transnational union, or ‘superstate’, over the last thirty years. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the critical neologism ‘EU Gothic’ to describe different manifestations of the gothic that have emerged within the ambit of the EU, taking the processes of enlargement beginning with German unification in 1990 and the creation of the EU with the Maastricht Treaty (1993) as a key historical reference point. The EU will become visible as a backdrop for fictional narratives which are haunted by the effects of past nationalisms and national traumas, while also engaging with new insecurities arising from contradictions within the EU's formative ideologies between the national and transnational, the local and dislocated, and the liberal social policies and restrictive neoliberal biopolitics of and in the bloc.

Documenting the Spectres of Nations

From its inception, the EU has been haunted by historical traumas. The bloc's history begins with Robert Schuman's suggestion that a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) between France and West Germany could reduce national competition and military conflict in post-World War II Europe.

Gothic Terrorists: The Inside View

For most of its history, Hollywood has indulged its audience's fascination with terrorism, creating, in the process, what Tony Shaw calls, with equal parts sardonic humour and exasperation, ‘filmic “terrortainment”’ (Shaw 2014, 3). In The Whip Hand (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1951), an idyllic American small town harbours a conspiracy to create an army of terrorists. Their nefarious nature as communists is barely distinguishable from the Nazi saboteurs that had been haunting wartime cinema not too long before (e.g. Saboteur, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). The embedded terrorist awaiting activation would make a spectacular comeback in The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962). Its tortured eponymous assassin would bring the vague anxieties lingering after the Korean War home to American politics; a remake (dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004) would update the topic for the Bush years. While cartoonishly evil terrorists would pop up in action films of the post-Cold War era (e.g. James Cameron's True Lies, 1994), the thriller, especially in its handling of international espionage, would imagine characters more subtly seduced into terrorism (like Damian Lewis's case study of a POW-turned-assassin by way of Stockholm Syndrome in the TV series Homeland, 2011). At his most vaguely defined – as in the television series Jericho (CBS, 2006), in which it is never quite clear if terrorist attacks are to be expected from within or without the eponymous Kansas small town – the terrorist is pure paranoid potential, nowhere to be seen but present everywhere. Not only does this vagueness, this lack of clearly defined definitional boundaries, make the terrorist a more monstrous figure, drawing on abjection's scandalising power to transgress categories and boundaries;1 by demanding updated concrete iterations to fit new contexts, this vagueness also retains the terrorist's flexibility as a trope, allowing both the left and the right to mobilise it within its respective political discourse. Hence, terrorists in Hollywood productions, and in American culture at large, are more ubiquitous than these few examples would suggest. Their gothic features are also dramatically amplified by genres ranging from male melodrama to the thriller and science fiction. Whenever terrorists are at their most gothic, they are most deeply anchored in the villainous iconography of popular culture.

In its focus on hyperbolic and tumultuous emotional affect, on anxiety and paranoia, on destabilisation and violence, the default story about terrorism told in these films follows one of the basic scripts of the gothic.

Film, like most forms of cultural production, is expected to be responsive to external social control. The character of such control dynamics is contextualized by specific national and regional factors. In Ontario, Canada, the relevant body has (until recently) been the Film Review Board, a rotating committee of classification “experts.” Prior to 2019, all films required the approval of the Board before being distributed or exhibited in Ontario. This approval being mandated by law, any filmmaker refusing to comply could face legal consequences.

The legal dimension of the Ontario government's regulation of film content has the effect of equating certain forms of artistic expression with punishable criminality. Though rarely enforced, prosecution re-enforced the notion that government power remained the ultimate arbitrator of cinema's bounds of acceptability. This idea was problematic in many senses, not least of which is reflected in the idea that political power exists in a state of perpetual flux. The criteria by which cinematic expression could be declared criminal were subject to change, while the penalty of failing to comply remained constant.

Such issues came to light within the discourses surrounding OFRB's most recent high-profile controversy: its temporary refusal of classification to Catherine Breillat's critically lauded coming-of-age film À ma soeur! (2001), released to English-speaking markets as Fat Girl. The controversy surrounding this case demonstrates a rare instance of narrative filmmaking strategies constituting criminality, even though no aspect of the film and no part of the production process violated criminal law.

New Extremes and Classification Reform

By virtue of the way in which Fat Girl's abrasive aesthetic strategies combine with its storyline, and because of Breillat's reputation for using conventions of pornography in works such as Romance (1999), the film seemed to enjoy fewer grounds for protection as a controversial artwork than did Crash, posing what appeared to members of the OFRB to be a more serious and complex moral and ethical challenge. The film offers the story of two teenage sisters, both of whom lose their virginity (shown in sequences that are frank and explicit at times) during a weekend vacation.

This chapter examines the complex relationship between Gabriele D’Annunzio and Argentina. It explores references to Argentina in D’Annunzio's writing, his relationship to the Italo-Argentinian community, and offers a critical journey through key moments in the reception of D’Annunzio's work in a country with one of the largest Italian communities in the world. Italian migration to Argentina, as I shall show, played a marginal role as a subject for D’Annunzio's work, but a pivotal role for the poet's access to the Spanish-speaking world. Among the strange characters that stand out as intermediaries between D’Annunzio and Argentina are Guido Boggiani, who inspired one of the first representations of the Italian emigrant as a literary topos, and Giovanni del Guzzo, a real life immigrant who organised a trip to Argentina for D’Annunzio that was, however, never realised.

Three phases of D’Annunzio's reception in Argentina can be outlined within a period of fifty years, between 1894 and 1944. These do not correspond to the evolution of D’Annunzio's work and thought, but rather indicate three different stages in the intellectual and literary landscape in Argentina. In the first phase, which spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century, D’Annunzio's aesthetics spoke to elites and became a point of reference for the modern artistic innovation that Rubén Dario promoted in the Hispanic world. In the second phase, which coincided with the Argentina Centennial in 1910, D’Annunzio's work was read in connection to the discourse of latinidad, the idea of a cultural heritage shared by the Latin people, and celebrated by the ruling classes of the national bourgeoisie. During the third phase, which took place after the author's death in 1938, D’Annunzio became the most widely circulated Italian author in Argentina. His work was read extensively by the middle classes, the proletariat and suburban audiences alike; this increase of the author's popularity fits within nationalist and populist discourses that would later lead to Peronism.

Neither a strictly comparative lens nor an approach grounded in reception studies appear sufficiently apt to approach the complexity of D’Annunzio's reception in Argentina. Any such research necessitates significant methodological overlaps, accounting for instances of cultural and discursive mediation. For this reason, I have adopted a broad approach inspired by literary sociology and cultural history.

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Thomas Craven's A Treasury of Art Masterpieces: From the Renaissance to the Present Day and Other Sources

As a young St Lucian living on the outskirts of a fading colonial empire, Walcott had no direct access to metropolitan museums and in order to familiarise himself with the European tradition he admired so much he had no choice but to rely on reproductions and artbooks. The accessibility, portability and transferability of these sources ensured that they continued to remain central to Walcott's engagement with the visual arts throughout his career; as a result, his relationship with a particular painter or work ended up being mediated and inflected not only by editorial selections (and omissions) but also by the commentaries, art criticism and art-historical annotations that accompanied the reproductions that Walcott carefully studied.

All the painters from the Italian tradition that Walcott mentions in Another Life, for example, are those Craven had identified in A Treasury as the cornerstones of Western art and, almost invariably, the visual referent evoked in the lines Walcott devotes to these artists is to be found in Craven's colour plates: from Giotto's ‘cherubs’ in The Deposition (1305–6) to Crivelli's ‘jewelled insect’ in Virgin and Child (c. 1480); from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1508–10) to Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks (1483–6); from Fra Angelico's ‘golden plaits’ in The Coronation of the Virgin (1435) to Verrocchio and Leonardo's John the Baptist's ‘kneeling angel’ in The Baptism of Christ (1472–5). In his analysis of Another Life, Baugh and Nepaulsingh single out Craven's volume also as a primary example of Walcott's simultaneous engagement with the verbal and the visual and highlight how the poet quickly absorbed textual interventions and responded to them just as much as he did to the paintings themselves: for example, they observe that when Walcott refers to Andrea del Verrocchio's The Baptism of Christ in Another Life, he not only directly acknowledges Craven's book but actually builds on the information it provides, namely the fact that Leonardo, still in his boyhood, painted the kneeling angel's hair (AL23).

One-Act Play Adaptations

History has shown myriads of ways in which various cultures and people groups have survived waves of colonialism and immigration through religious practices. In North America, specifically in Canada and the USA, the pursuit of God among Christian communities has been interwoven with the pursuit of freedom. Land has come to symbolise the time, space and rights that allow worship to be freely expressed. North American worship and spirituality are shaped by one's desire to freely express one's devotion while affirming one's uniqueness within a community that provides safety and acceptance.

Not all forms of worship have enjoyed liberty of expression. Historically, the First Nations of North America have faced many struggles in their homeland, fighting for the existence of their cultures, languages and people groups against the force of colonialism. Even when they came to adopt the Christian faith, their Indigenous traditions and rituals were condemned as heathen, pagan and occultic.

Another group that historically struggled to find acceptance in the North American Church was the Black Church. Forced to migrate across the Atlantic Ocean against their will, African Americans survived slavery as well as injustices in the exchange of trade, culture and religion between Africa and the Americas. They were separated from their motherlands and ancestral cultures and stripped of their individuality and their personhood. Yet through the Christian faith, an African American spirituality was born, as witnessed by vibrant expressions of song and dance as communal worship of the God of liberation. For both the Native Americans and the African Americans, even when they were oppressed by the impacts of colonialism, the Christian faith anchored a new source of hope. The power of the gospel took hold, transforming a spirituality originally rooted in animism.

In recent history, North American spirituality has been fuelled by immigrants, who arrived often after great sacrifice, leaving their native communities and identities behind for the pursuit of a better life. Continual immigration from Latin America, Africa, Oceania and Asia has led to these cultures finding a home in different places in North America. The influx of immigration led to the exponential growth in diaspora churches of various denominations, including Catholics, Charismatics, Orthodox and Pentecostals.

Notwithstanding the howlet warning of that envious and spiteful body John Waft, as I had such good reason to think him, we continued to sail down the rippling stream, jocund among ourselves, and joyous with the pleasant aspect which all things around us had put on. It was one of the few holidays of my ripened years; and every breeze, and bough, and blossom recommended itself into our gentle senses with the influence of a spell compounded of sweetness and charity, delight and love. I thought of the beautiful spring described in the Canticles of Solomon; and as I leant on the shoulder of my wife, with my eyes half shut, and my fancy floating in reverie, I had something like a palpable enjoyment of mildness and quiet fondling about my heart.

But in the midst of that innocent sensuality, the screech of the Paisley omen, “I have had a dream,” dismayed my spirit, and darkened the beauties of the heavens and the earth. The deep smooth pools of the crystalline river became black and sepulchral, and the sparkling hurry of the brisk and gladdening rapids grew into ravenous whirlpools, as remorseless as the salt-sea waves:—who could have thought that the most felicitous day of a harmless life could have been so overcast by the dormant vapour in the stomach of an ill-fed and fantastical old weaver?

But so it was; I could not shake off the bodement; it clung upon me like a cold waxen winding sheet, until I could see nothing but dangers in our sailing, and heard not a sound that told not of peril. I was miserable; I would have given the king's dominions, and all the United States, with the incomparable city of New York to the bargain, had they been mine, not to have been in that scow on that river on that day.

In her introduction to Globalgothic, Glennis Byron observes that ‘the late twentieth century saw a growing number of articles and books appearing on new national and regional gothics, from Kiwi gothic to Florida gothic, Barcelona gothic to Japanese gothic’ and continues by identifying ‘increasing evidence of the emergence of crosscultural and transnational gothics’ that ‘were intrinsically connected to … the development of an increasingly global economy’ (Byron 2013, 1). The geographical regions identified here are also popular (if in some cases pricey) tourist destinations. As is well known, this ‘global economy’ is, in actuality, an economy dominated by a comparatively small number of nation states, which have acquired the sometimes geographically inaccurate label ‘Global North’. Tourism is in effect, then, worldwide travel originating predominantly from the Global North, even when its point of departure is located in well-developed economies located in the world's southern hemisphere, such as South Africa, Australia or New Zealand, among others. This chapter considers the gothic's preoccupation with travel, examining how that travel becomes intertwined with global tourism. As the narratives under discussion make clear, that tourism often shadows the routes of historic colonialism and, at times, even risks the perpetuation of a perceived cultural inequality as its by-product.

Like tourism, gothic narratives offer a safely packaged exploration of the relationship between humanity, the home (heim), the unhomely/uncanny (unheimlich) and space: architectural and natural, claustrophobic and agoraphobic. A former PhD student of mine undertook, as part of her methodology, a ghost tour of the City of Caves site in Nottingham, a popular tourist attraction usually offering history-based tours. This specialist tour was, reputedly, led by a spirit medium. On entering the caves, the guide assured the visitors not to worry if they encountered a ghost, for that ghost would not follow them home (Bevan 2018). Such ‘reassurance’ surely provokes anxiety: the promise of a ghost not following you home places in one's mind the previously unconsidered possibility that it might do exactly that. Indeed, there is a political precedent for this idea. The concept of coming home, but bringing the ghost with you, is a metaphor for the end of the colonial period.

A Japan Times review of Tokyo Family (Tōkyō kazoku, 2013), director Yamada Yōji's remake of Ozu Yasujirō's classic Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari, 1953), expresses a critical sentiment that was perhaps widely felt by audiences when the film was theatrically released: ‘The standard critical compliment for a good remake (and yes, they do exist) is that it makes the audience want to revisit the original. Tokyo Family will have served its purpose if it encourages viewers to check out not only Tokyo Story, but Yamada's other, better films as well’ (Schilling 2013). Upon its domestic and international release, Yamada's film, which hews to the original's basic plot and depiction of the transformations of modernity on the Japanese family, prompted more than a few critics to wonder why a remake of a motion picture that regularly appears on lists of the ‘greatest’ films ever made was necessary at all. According to the author of the aforementioned review, the ‘purpose’ of a film remake is apparently to draw the attention of viewers back to the original film on which it is based (Ibid.). This chapter takes into consideration the ‘standard critical compliment’ of the remake, particularly as a concept that, when deployed in journalistic reviews, typically privileges uniqueness and originality at the expense of reiteration and variation. In doing so, I seek to reconsider Yamada's work and career in general so that his status as an auteur creating films in the spirit of Ozu's cinema can be better appreciated as a vital link to Japan's cinematic past. As we shall see, this ‘spirit’ can be described somewhat specifically, in terms of story and casting, as a way to begin thinking about the serial nature of Yamada's filmmaking practice.

Remaking a Classic

Let me begin by briefly focusing on a series of key formal and narrative features in Tokyo Family so that we might consider how they rework Ozu's film. The stories of both are set mostly in Tokyo in the heat of summer. Both are put into motion by the same initial premise: an elderly couple, Shūkichi and Tomiko Hirayama (played by Ryū Chishū and Higashiyama Chieko, respectively, in the original film, and by Hashizume Isao and Yoshiyuki Kazuko in Yamada's remake), arrives from the countryside in Hiroshima prefecture (Onomichi in the earlier film and Osaki-kamijima Island in the later) to visit their grown children in Tokyo.

The story of ecology and Christianities in the land that became known as North America begins long before Christianity was born and long before the term ‘ecology’ or North America existed. The story goes back to the biblical creation stories, their anthropocentric interpretation throughout time and the platonic hierarchical dualism that informed Christianity as it arose from Judaism. The saga continues with the beliefs and practices of Christian communities as those unfolded and changed throughout two millennia in relationship to the Earth. Those beliefs and practices were highly varied. However, by the time Christianity landed on the shores of Turtle Island (as North America was known to many Indigenous peoples), dominant streams of Christianity – including those that arrived as part of the colonisation of the continent – saw the other-than-human aspects of creation as far below humans in the dualistic hierarchy of being that Christianity inherited from platonic philosophy.

Dualism aligned spirit and reason with good and saw matter (including the Earth) as either evil or relatively insignificant compared with humans, as well as having value primarily as resources for human use. The hierarchy placed Earth farthest from God and male human beings of dominant classes at the top and closest to God. Many scholars have argued (beginning with the famous essay by historian of medieval science Lynn White, published in Science) that these assumptions helped lay the groundwork for modernity's relentless onslaught against the other-than-human parts of creation. Eco-feminist scholars have uncovered the extent to which this hierarchy, linking women more closely to the Earth, also linked the domination of woman with the domination of the Earth, sanctifying both.

With the advent of European colonisation and conquest, ‘race’ emerged both as a social construct and as another dimension of the hierarchy. Non-European people ranked lower than Europeans in their inherent worth and rights. Kelly Brown Douglas, in a brilliant essay on American exceptionalism, demonstrates the origins of white supremacy in the first-century tract Germania, penned by the Roman historian Tacitus. This trajectory is integral to the ecology and Christianities story because, as demonstrated by Willie James Jennings and others, the divine mandate to subdue and use the ‘natural world’ was theologically linked to a divine mandate to subdue and conquer dark-skinned people.

The Pentecostal/Charismatic Movement has emerged as a unique Christian tradition in the landscape of North American Christianity. These ‘Spiritfilled’ denominations, congregations and small groups within established churches have flourished over the past century due to their vibrant spirituality and emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit – including prophecy, healing and speaking in tongues – through the empowering experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit. From humble beginnings among the poor and marginalised in North America, the various global Pentecostal/Charismatic bodies have seen exponential growth, and they now count over 644 million ‘Spirit-empowered’ believers worldwide. In North America, Pentecostal/Charismatic believers number more than 67 million and have distinguished themselves among the few Christian movements reporting growth in an ever more secularised society. While Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity is a global movement, North America features prominently in its development and expansion around the world.

The first wave of renewal began in North America in the late nineteenth century when frontier Holiness evangelists preached repentance, salvation and the ‘second blessing’ of sanctification through the baptism in the Holy Spirit. During the 1890s, periodic episodes of Charismatic manifestations, including speaking in tongues, were witnessed in B. H. Irwin's Fire Baptized Holiness Church in the Midwest, Richard G. Spurling's Christian Union in Tennessee and North Carolina, Frank Sandford's Bible school in Shiloh, Maine, and Charles Parham's Bible school in Topeka, Kansas. Spurred on by a restorationist ‘latter rain’ narrative, they believed they were witnessing the last days’ revival in which the gifts of the Spirit were being restored to the Church as first given to the apostles in the Book of Acts. Animated by this belief, Parham added the expectation that Spirit baptism should be accompanied by the ‘Bible evidence’ of speaking in tongues. As this ‘apostolic faith’ message made its way across the Midwestern United States, the normalisation of glossolalia as the sign of this empowerment helped to distinguish this new ‘Pentecostal’ movement from the Holiness movement.

However, those sparks of the nascent Pentecostal revival did not ignite a fire until an African American holiness preacher named William Seymour started an Apostolic Faith Mission in Los Angeles, California, in 1906. In a humble two-storey building on Azusa Street, a revival broke out that quickly became ground zero for the spread of Pentecostalism across North America and eventually around the world.

First Steps: Immortalisation, Delight and Homage – From Rembrandt Van Rijn's The Polish Rider to Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa and Romare Bearden's The Obeah's Dawn

In 1984, when Walcott was asked to write a poem for the opening page of the catalogue for Bearden's exhibition Rituals of Obeah, he declared that he had never ‘written poems out of a painting’ before, a remark which might sound surprising if one considers Walcott's lifelong preoccupation with the visual arts. Nonetheless, when he wrote ‘To Romare Bearden’, if Walcott had often commented on distinctive qualities of an artist's general performance – Hollander calls this mode ekphrastic ‘capriccio’ – he had not written many poems entirely focused on one painting and had seldom engaged in a specific and sustained ekphrastic effort.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary defines ekphrasis as ‘the rhetorical description of a work of art’ but ‘description’ is a rather vague term: practically speaking, for example, when does description end and narrative or interpretation begin? Does ‘description’ refer only to the subject of the painting, or does it extend to the technique of a painting, its handling of shapes and colours, the discourses and counter-discourses that it promotes or challenges, or the reactions it might trigger in viewers? Is the subject of a painting only what we see? What if a poem is more concerned with what is left out of the picture's frame? And what shall we make of Walcott's choice of prepositions in his reference to ‘To Romare Bearden’: does ‘out of a painting’ suggest a relationship between the visual and the verbal where the emphasis is placed on continuity rather than simply on reference? At the same time, does the very effort implicit in wrestling a poem ‘out of’ a painting indicate that this continuity does not presuppose full translatability and transparency between the visual and the verbal, and demands respect for their individual differences? As we have seen, when dealing with paintings, Walcott was interested in the narratives that emerged from the relation between painting and viewers but also in those that the image might have contained, conveyed or hidden.

Introduction

As the climate crisis deepens and its effects continue to be experienced unevenly across the majority world, the globalgothic becomes entangled with ecological thought. In the past decade, diverse writers have been exploring climate futures through speculative genres in fiction. Common themes and modalities are emerging despite differences in geographical location and political context. This chapter identifies one common modality as animism, which is a relational concept of subjectivity and sociality derived from the beliefs and practices of indigenous people across the majority world. Animism is an ontology that insists that the world is alive and ‘that to be means to participate in this aliveness’ (Vetlesen 2019, 16). That is, animism necessitates a recognition of human embeddedness in a more-than-human world and, as such, offers a compelling means to think through the crisis of the Anthropocene towards modes of being-with that offer better futures for all life on the planet. Such a thought, however, is not utopian: it elicits a confrontation with what the philosopher Timothy Morton has called ‘dark ecology’, an ecological awareness that has much in common with what philosophers in the West identify as ‘uncanny’ because of its defamiliarising effects (Morton 2016, 26). It also confronts the vulnerability, suffering and damage that characterise life in the Anthropocene. Dark ecology, a gothicised discourse, tempers a straightforward appropriation of animism by the West as a utopian solution to the climate crisis. Indeed, the turn to animism already complicates the universalising assumptions behind the Western term ‘Anthropocene’, the name for a geological and historical epoch in which humans have altered planetary conditions, and one that suggests that all humanity is equally responsible for the ensuing crisis. As many critics have noted, such a designation elides the historical and ongoing effects of imperialism, capitalism and colonialism in creating climate change, as well as effacing the ways in which its effects tend to fall most severely on those communities least responsible (Moore 2016; Satgar 2018; Yusoff 2018). As Kathryn Yusoff argues, ‘imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence’ (2018, 12). In its alternative cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies, animism reveals the violence inherent not only in these global systems that have driven climate change, but in the modes of thought in which they are grounded and through which they are justified and normalised (Vetlesen 2019, 72).

This note was written to me by a student in a religious studies course on the history of the Brown Church. His conflict of cultural and religious identity reflects several of the notable demographic and sociological trends discussed in this volume and presages the future of Christianity in the USA. As the North American church has diversified through immigration from Latin America, Asia and Africa in recent years, a reactionary movement of white Christian nationalism has arisen that conflates the church with US civil religion and rejects immigrant Christians as undesirable newcomers and even illegitimate believers. One result is that millions of Latino young adults, as well as millennials and GenZ of all cultural backgrounds, are fleeing the church, repelled by the increasingly explicit equation of Christianity with white nationalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, and despite their loud and vocal presence in the popular US imagination, this brand of white Evangelical Christianity is in sharp numerical decline.

At the same time, however, the opposite pole of progressive Euro-American Christianity is likewise experiencing a strong downturn. Some elements of this politically progressive expression of Christianity limit faith to social activism, while de-emphasising personal transformation and deep spiritual encounter with the Holy Spirit. The fundamentalist– modernist debates of a century ago seem to have reached the end of a road as their contemporary denominational progeny do not seem to possess within themselves what is required to successfully address the pressing problems and spiritual hunger of our current day.

In Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise, Anat Zanger writes, ‘The relationship between original and version [of a film] encapsulates the dialectic of repetition, the dialectic between old and new, before and after, desire and fulfilment’ (2006, 9). Such ‘dialectics’ are especially palpable when directors decide to remake one of their own films, bringing the filmmaker's motivation to retrace or return to past work into metareferential focus. For David Desser, ‘directors remaking their own film within the same broad national context’ represent ‘cases that move beyond the typical auteur who persistently works in the same idiom or with the same motifs’ (2017, 164). Constantine Verevis notes that this phenomenon ‘might be located in a filmmaker's desire to repeatedly express and modify a particular aesthetic sensibility and world view in light of new developments and interests’ (2006, 60).

The extensive history of Japanese cinema features numerous examples of high-profile directors evoking or directly returning to past work. As discussed in other chapters within this volume, Ozu Yasujirō was prone to revisiting and reshaping past ideas. Perhaps the most obvious example of this was his latecareer classic Floating Weeds (Ukikusa, 1959): a colour remake of his earlier silent A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukikusa monogatari, 1934). To give another example, Ichikawa Kon returned to one of his most famous films, the humanist anti-war drama The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956), and remade it as a sweeping colour version in 1985. In both cases, the gap between ‘original’ and ‘remake’ is vast (25 and 29 years respectively), spanning numerous technological and industrial changes that have reshaped film aesthetics and production practices (including changing preferences towards synchronised sound, colour film stock and aspect ratios). They perhaps also fulfil the promise of film remakes as ‘industrial products’ that ‘are “pre-sold” to their audience because viewers are assumed to have some prior experience, or at least possess a “narrative image”, of the original story’ (Verevis 2006, 3, original emphasis). This arrangement satisfied their director's desire to return to past material (whether that be for financial or artistic reasons, or to re-imagine older works with newer technologies), while also providing commercial benefit to the studios that produced them, allowing them to court new generations of audience with pre-existing scenarios.

At the start of this project, I provided a summary of the Animal Apocalypse as it has been handled in previous scholarship: as a product of the Maccabean Revolt. I can now provide my own summary, this time focusing on the Apocalypse of the Birds's function within the tumultuous and complex historical and literary world of first-century Roman Judaea.

As the first century ce progressed, an already fraught relationship between province and empire deteriorated. Various Jews acting in opposition to the Roman Empire (including Jesus of Nazareth) experienced some degree of local popularity but little military success. Then, for reasons still largely opaque to modern historians, what had previously been isolated and quickly extinguished sparks of resistance caught flame in 66 ce. Surprising ancient and modern observers alike, a Judaean resistance force rebuffed a Roman siege of Jerusalem and achieved a decisive rout of the retreating legion. According to Suetonius, it walked away from this stunning victory with no less a trophy than the legion's aquila, or eagle standard. This historical matrix is the first horizon in which I situate the emergence of the Apocalypse of the Birds.

Meanwhile, a work that I have labeled the Vision of the Beasts was in circulation among Jews. The Vision of the Beasts as it has come down to us is heavily invested in the idea of natural conflict. By this I mean, first, the idea of a kind of inevitability of struggle; any ancient people practiced in animal husbandry knows that sheep will always be beset by predators. But, second, this presumption of natural conflict is predicated upon an understanding of the world as inherently segmented into different and irreconcilable groupings. There are many ways to tell a story of Israelite history, but the Vision of the Beasts's particular symbolism ensures that the Israelites are envisioned as fundamentally vulnerable to and separable from other groups of people. Since we likely do not have the full version of the Vision of the Beasts as it once circulated, it is not clear to what end this imaging of the precarious position of the Israelites in history was originally pursued.

Passing by without further circumstantiality the matters of business, I ought, nevertheless, to notice that I narrowly escaped a tough lawsuit with the Albany Land Company, owing to the double dealing of John Waft, and it required some dexterity to get the matter amicably settled—in the end, however, settled it was; and by the time Mr. Hoskins was able to stir about again, the construction of the buildings for manufacturing the salt was actively undertaking. In the mean time the bailie had disappeared; he was never seen at Judiville from the day of our return from the lake; and it was reported, that in the expedition he had caught a severe cold, which made it doubtful if he would be able to weather the winter. It was on the day of Mr. Herbert's funeral that I first heard of his illness; but thinking it was only a cold by which he was affected, I paid no particular attention to the news.

When my tribulations began to subside, after the establishment of my brother in the bank, and I had leisure again to look about me, I missed the bodie, and heard with unfeigned concern that he was still far from being well. In fact, I never had thought there was much more the matter with him than shame for the way he had acted in the disposal of his discovery of the spring; and as the question respecting it between me and the company was adjusted, my wrath did not burn against him always, so that I would have been glad to have seen him on the old free terms of banter, give and take, in which we had so long lived.