This is a selection of my essays. Below you will find a summary and keywords for each essay.

Historical. June 1996 / June 2010. Posted July 2010.

In the midst of the war between England and revolutionary France, a minority of craftsmen rose up in revolt in the heart of industrial Northern England. They were named the "the Luddites". Indignant at seeing their livelihoods threatened by the increased use of machinery, they protested, rioted, and carried out sabotage on the hated machines.

The essay accounts for the conditions and events which led to the activities of the Luddites, the nature of those activities and the organisation of the Luddites, and how the British government responded to the situation.

Keywords : 19th century England; the Luddites, frame-breaking, riots, textile industry, machinery, Orders in Council, unemployment, workers, status, organization, revolution, terror.

[ Read "The Luddites" ]

Literary. May 2010. Posted August 2010.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

"While, indeed, placeable within the science fiction tradition, it is also postmodern, and Gothic ... It is my distinct sense of "Blade Runner", however, that the Gothic and the postmodern provide the central discourse of the film, as well as the prevailing aesthetic experience; an experience which haunts and unsettles and which demands the audience to address (and revise) their concepts of knowledge, identity and reality."

Keywords : Blade Runner; aesthetics, gothic, conventions, motifs, terror, the sublime, abjection, transgression, postmodern, universality, reality, identity, knowledge, death, hyperreal, symbolic death, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Burke, Radcliffe, Kristeva.

[ Read "Aesthetics and Identity in Blade Runner" ]

Historical. May 2006. Posted August 2010.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

"The intent of this essay is to assess the major events and changes that took place in Ireland during the first half of the 17th century and compare them with modern perceptions of this period in an attempt to understand the dynamics of myth and fact in present-day tensions in Northern Ireland."

Keywords : 17th century Ireland; history, myth, legends, separatism, religion, politics, England, Catholic, Protestant, Gaelic, Old English, New English, Dissenters, the Stuarts, the Graces, Oath of Supremacy, Ulster Plantation, Insurrection of 1641, Covenant Rebellion, Cromwell, Northern Ireland, hostilities, peace.

[ Read "17th Century Ireland - the Dynamics of Myth and Fact" ]