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David Punter and Glennis Byron note how the Gothic novel has been divided into two categories: the ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Gothic. Where the former emphasizes violence and ghosts, the latter focuses on female representation and the disavowal of the supernatural. The Hollywood Gothic films of the 1940s can be said to translate this aspect of the Female Gothic onto the cinema screen: Rebecca (1940), Gaslight (1944) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) all feature narratives stressing the haunting nature of domestic spaces but there are no actual ghosts present. Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath (2000) breaks this convention. The film clearly draws on the Female Gothic lineage, situating Claire as a Gothic heroine, and yet there is an important difference: the supernatural is now an integral – and acknowledged – part of the story. This chapter explores this twenty-first century change, arguing that whilst the inclusion of the supernatural can be said to break with previous definitions of the Female Gothic, What Lies Beneath’s depiction of a ghost actually re-imagines and re-emphasizes the concerns at the centre of this tradition: the dramatization of marital and domestic experiences; an interrogation of feminine perception; and the reality of male violence against women.

This special section of Studies in Symbolic Interaction offers papers originally presented at the Second Anselm Strauss Colloquium, “Forty Years of Grounded Theory,” held at UC San Francisco on October 5, 2007.¹ The colloquium celebrated several events: the 40th anniversary of The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Doctoral Program in Sociology at UCSF (1968), the centennial of the UCSF School of Nursing (2007), and the life and work of Anselm Strauss.²

This is a paper about the soft and hard drivers for English sub-national governance. It posits that the recurrence of claims for inter-urban linkages across the two distinct conurbations of the North-West of England have been bedevilled by entrenched differences in the leadership cultures of the city-regions.

It contrasts the highly localised forms of ‘soft power’ – or the ways in which leaders mobilise brands, plans and strategies to tell stories about place – arguing that there is a considerable divergence between the way that this symbolic capital has been deployed within and across the two city-regions. Whilst this is striking it is still true that ‘Hard powers’ – fiscal, legislative or regulatory mechanisms – are elusive for both Manchester and Liverpool notwithstanding recent moves towards combined authorities for both places. The only model of English urban governance with statutory powers covering transport, economic development and planning is located in Greater London, a legacy of the post-RDA institutional landscape in England.

This paper argues that it would be extraordinary if forms of leadership capable of meaningfully connecting the two cities cannot be found but that this must be seen within a sclerotic English context where there is a huge disconnect between desirable form and functions of urban governance, and the effect this has on regional economic performance. It concludes that local government austerity has had a negative effect on the sort of ‘soft power innovations’ necessary in both cities and that rhetorics of English localism have provided neither a propitious context for inter- nor intra-urban governance innovation.

This paper seeks to describe some of the ways in which collaborations within the city-regions of Manchester and Liverpool have been achieved, making the case that there have been divergent governance experiments which may hamper the aspiration for extensions beyond their border and for intra-urban leadership and governance which combines the two great cities and their areas of influence.