• Analysing Metaphor in Religious Discourse in Literature

      Neary, Clara; University of Chester (Routledge, 2023-12-14)
      Religious language is everywhere, “embedded in unexpected places like advertising, politics, news media, popular culture and even healthcare, to name a few” (Hobbs, 2021, p. 2). Belief construction and reconstruction also underpins much literary endeavour. However, consideration of the presence of religious language in literary texts is missing from Hobbs’ (2021) otherwise comprehensive coverage of the nature and functions of religious language across religious and non-religious text types and discourse situations. This chapter aims to redress this critical lacuna by sketching the ways in which metaphor and its analysis can be used to both identify and explicate the religious discourse underpinning literary texts. As Dorst notes, “[m]etaphor and religion go hand in hand, given the fact that our religious and spiritual experiences are highly personal, emotional, and abstract” (2021, p. 251). As a by-product, this chapter hopes to illustrate that the presence of explicitly religious language should not be a prerequisite for work in this area, particularly because, as van Noppen asserts, “almost any word, phrase, or sentence may take on ‘religious’ meaning when set in a ‘religious’ situation” (1981, p. 5).
    • 'Men Shall Not Make Us Foes': Charlotte Brontë’s letters and her female friendship networks

      Wynne, Deborah; University of Chester (Routledge, 2023-12-01)
      Sharon Marcus in Between Women (2007) highlighted the variety of friendship models employed by Victorian women, focusing on the female friend’s role in the development of women’s emotional lives and sexualities. Drawing on Marcus’s key insights, this chapter will chart the role of the female friend in the development of Charlotte Brontë’s professional identity and her creation of characters such as Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, who speak powerfully of feminist concerns. The chapter will argue that female friends played a crucial part in helping Charlotte Brontë develop an understanding of women’s rights and she went on to find ways to represent feminist ideas in her novels. During her childhood and teenage years Brontë wrote prolifically ‘as a man’, always employing male narrators. Indeed, her juvenilia is characterised by an overtly ‘masculine’ style forged through her collaboration with her brother Branwell and her immersion in the male-dominated discourse of the Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. She gradually gained a feminist voice following her inclusion in a network of close female friends at Roe Head School, particularly valuing the influence of the radical feminist Mary Taylor, who went on to teach in Europe and then emigrated to New Zealand to set up a shop and become a writer. The letters exchanged between Brontë and her female friends offer valuable insights into the importance of the female network in the mid-nineteenth century, when the professions and higher education were closed to women. Later friends, such as the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, gave Brontë further opportunities to discuss women’s social roles and explore alternative identities to the prescribed ones of wife and mother. Examining Brontë’s letters, as well as her major novels, this chapter shows how her feminist ideas were shaped through the channels of a Victorian female friendship network.
    • The Sensuous Pastoral: Vision and Text in Pre-Raphaelite Art

      Leahy, Richard; University of Chester (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023-09-01)
      Much of the recent scholarly criticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has focused on the relationship between Artist and Muse. Dinah Roe, in her introduction to her edited collection of Pre-Raphaelite Poetry, states that ‘Pre-Raphaelitism maintained strict demarcations between women’s roles (as muses) and men’s (as creators).’ This paper, however, will suggest that through the use of shared pastoral metaphors and imagery, female Pre-Raphaelite poets gained a sense of agency through appropriating techniques used by male poets. This was also further encouraged by Pre-Raphaelite muses’ writing of poetry, and the highly visual intertextuality between portraiture and the written word. The minutiae of detail employed in descriptions of pastoral scenes in such poems as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, ‘Genius in Beauty’ and ‘Silent Noon’ (amongst others) are explored to a depth that exposes the Pre-Raphaelites’ use of the natural to explore sensuality: ‘Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, - the finger-points look through like rosy blooms’ writes Dante Gabriel Rossetti in ‘Silent Noon’. This marriage of body and nature, with an intense attention to sensual visuality, is highly characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites almost erotic evolution of Romantic literary sensibilities. Similar imagery is employed in the works of female Pre-Raphaelite writers. Elizabeth Siddal, most well-known for being Dante’s muse for a number of his artworks, as well as his sister, Christina Rossetti employ a similar sensuous focus on natural detail to exemplify their position as objects of desire. Rossetti’s use of the Petrarchan Sonnet form, most commonly used as a medieval expression of courtly love, also contributes to this idea. This paper will explore how the patterns of such imagery react to the pastoral eroticism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and how this appropriation may be seen to reclaim feminine sexuality and desire. At the core of the argument will be the intensely visual relationship between muse and artist, and the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in conversions of image to text, and text to image.
    • Wilkie Collins's Journalism

      Wynne, Deborah; University of Chester (Cambridge University Press, 2023-08-31)
      This chapter examines Wilkie Collins's work as a journalist, from his earliest published writings to his later well-known articles, such as 'The Unknown Public' published in Dickens's journal, Household Words. The chapter identifies Collins's distinct style as a journalist and argues that his journal articles present a unique insight into the culture and social mores of the mid-Victorian period.
    • “This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend”: Romantic Satanism and Loving Opposition in Good Omens

      Tankard, Alex; University of Chester (McFarland, 2023-08-08)
      In the last years of the Cold War, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a buddy-comedy about two disillusioned field agents putting humanity before their respective sides to avert nuclear Armageddon. Gaiman’s 2019 television adaptation of Good Omens updated its setting to the present day – a questionable decision in the light of how successfully Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010), Stranger Things (2016-), and The Americans (2013-2018) demonstrated the stylistic and dramatic potential of blending a variety of genres in Cold-War settings. More importantly, while the adaptation kept brief scenes of secret agents meeting in St James Park, they were unrooted from their Cold War context, discarding the novel’s effective (and affective) shorthand for friendship between enemies in the shadow of mutually-assured destruction. In his DVD commentary, Gaiman explained that he “wound up having to write this [screenplay] as a love story. And part of the joy of writing a love story is the breakup” (“Hard Times” 51:58-52:12). For the necessary emotional tension, the adaptation found an imaginative framework in the novel’s literary ancestry: Romantic Satanism. With their partnership as gentleman-spies stripped away, the adaptation exposed, at the core of Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship, the paradoxical opposition and fluidity of angels and devils found in British Romantic-Satanic literature, like William Blake’s illustrated Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).
    • “[E]verything that is to be made whole must first be broken”: religion, metaphor and narrative alchemy in Hilary Mantel's Fludd (1989)

      Neary, Clara; University of Chester (Taylor & Francis, 2023-07-18)
      In its depiction of the events initiated by a stranger’s arrival to a rural Catholic parish in 1950s England, Hilary Mantel’s (1989) novel Fludd is built upon fundamentally metaphoric foundations. Most noticeably, the novel’s articulation of alchemy captures the defining opposition of literal and fantastical meaning at the heart of all alchemical symbols. It does so via a metaphorical construction that is first outlined in the opening paratextual 'note' before continuing to provide the narrative backbone to the whole novel. This article adopts a broadly cognitive approach to illustrate how metaphor fulfils multiple crucial functions in the text, acting as a tool of characterisation, a means of narrative compression and a form of meta-textual referencing, all of which directly link to the novel’s central theme of transformation, particularly in the context of contemporary Catholicism. In so doing, it draws upon Biebuyck and Martens concept of the ‘paranarrative’ to demonstrate metaphor’s potential to fulfil a wide range of fundamental narrative functions.
    • Stylistics, point of view and modality

      Neary, Clara; Queen's University Belfast; University of Chester (Routledge, 2023-05-29)
      Revised version of chapter for 2nd edition.
    • Silence Is Golden: John William Bobin’s Sylvia Silence and the Emergence of the British Girl Detective in Golden Age Crime Fiction

      Andrew, Lucy; University of Chester (Newberry College, 2023-05-17)
      Sylvia Silence is a little-known figure today. Created by story-paper writer John William Bobin under the pseudonym Katherine Greenhalgh, she appeared in the Amalgamated Press story paper Schoolgirls’ Weekly in a series of detective narratives from 1922 to 1924 in the early years of the Golden Age of crime fiction. Despite her relative obscurity, however, Sylvia played an important role in the development of the girl detective tradition in juvenile fiction, predating famous American girl detective Nancy Drew by several years. This article explores Sylvia’s emergence from the Victorian and Edwardian tradition of the financially motivated professional or personally motivated amateur female detective and that of Holmesian genius prominent in the Amalgamated Press boys’ story papers into a new detective model for the Golden Age of crime fiction. The article identifies the Golden Age characteristics of Sylvia Silence, particularly those she shares with a much more famous Golden Age female detective, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, and draws links between the spinster detective and the girl detective. In particular, it considers why Golden Age crime fiction was a suitable form for the girl detective tradition to develop and thrive within.
    • Urban Varieties

      West, Helen; University of Chester (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023-04-20)
      The investigation of urban varieties is founded in the remit of sociolinguistics: to investigate the social context(s) of language. A sociolinguistic investigation of an urban variety primarily focuses on internal (those governed by the language itself) and external factors (those governed by social factors) to try and answer these key questions: how does language vary in this variety?; how has it changed/will change?; and ultimately, do the patterns of variation and change observed in this variety mirror that of other investigations? The overall aim of answering these questions is to understand the mechanisms that motivate language variation and change. The study of urban varieties will be explained in the context of Labovian investigations in the US, which largely pioneered sociolinguistic investigation, before turning to investigations carried out in the UK
    • The Motto of the Mollusc: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics of Snails

      West, Sally; University of Chester (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022-12-07)
      Patricia Highsmith, who generally preferred animals to people, was particularly fascinated by snails. In her novels and short stories, Highsmith uses snails, and her characters’ attitudes towards them, to register a range of responses to American capitalist culture in the mid twentieth century. In Deep Water, Vic Van Allen is horrified when it is suggested that his pet snails should be eaten, rejecting the commodification of the creatures as things to be consumed. ‘The Snail Watcher’ concludes with its ‘vicious’ protagonist, Peter Knoppert, consumed by his pet gastropods; Avery Clavering in ‘The Quest for Blank Claveringi’ meets a similarly unfortunate end, eaten by the giant snail through which he had hoped to establish his own posterity. Gaston Bachelard regards the snail as a symbol of reciprocity between self and environment; the motto of the mollusc, he says, is that ‘one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in’. In Highsmith’s fiction, the crimes committed by her characters are frequently driven by a repressed fury with a capitalist culture which severs the link between self and social habitat; in Bachelard’s terms, her characters aspire to ‘the motto of the mollusc’. This chapter will argue that a significant and recurring site for this conflict is Highsmith’s juxtaposition of human behaviours with those of the non-human animal, in particular, the snail. In doing so, it seeks to read this aspect of Highsmith’s work as part of a continuum in detective fiction’s treatment of animals and to demonstrate how far her ‘suspense fiction’ can be situated within that genre. In Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ for instance, the orang-utan’s murderous spree is precipitated by its abstraction from its natural environment and its exposure to human behaviours. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, the hound is placed in an alien environment and weaponised by Stapleton. Both of these texts use animals to present nineteenth-century anxieties regarding atavistic degeneration, fears of the beast within the human form. Highsmith’s representations of animals partake of this tradition: the human and the non-human animal worlds are compared, with the beast repeatedly located in the former. In her representation of human/animal relationships, Highsmith is both conducting a searing critique of her specific culture and placing her work firmly in the traditions of detective fiction.
    • The Nineteenth-Century Sex Worker: Avoiding Surveillance, Stereotypes, and Scandal

      Geary-Jones, Hollie; University of Chester (Routledge, 2022-12-01)
      The subject of female sex work was a source of scandal throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter explores the writing of two males who defied the conventional approach to the topic, publishing three controversial texts which presented the female sex worker in an unseen light. Initially, the chapter studies William’s Acton Prostitution Considered in its Social, Moral, and Sanitary Aspects (1857, 1870) as a concerted effort to suppress the subject of female sex work. Geary-Jones analyzes Acton’s deeply rooted beliefs surrounding the working-class sex worker, investigating his traditional narratives that advocated and then supported the regulation of female sex work during the first and second editions of his publication. In particular, Geary-Jones examines the physician’s attack against a series of sex worker stereotypes which had been firmly embedded in cultural ideology since the beginning of the century. These stereotypes come under scrutiny in George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), demonstrating the author’s defiance of any conventional approach to the topic of female sex work in both his novels and personal relationships, resulting in scandal. This analysis is positioned against the cultural impact of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) in England and Jeremy Bentham’s The Panopticon Writings (1791).
    • Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input

      Price-Williams, David; Davies, Matt; University of Chester (SAGE Publications, 2022-10-01)
      Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for inputbased language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children’s (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents’ use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child’s use of inflectional affixes and their lexical restrictedness was compared with their father’s equalised sample. Second, the children’s spontaneous case-marking errors were analysed in context and measured against type and token frequencies in both parents’ data and the child-directed speech (CDS) corpus. Findings in both analyses accord with constructivist theory: near adult-like knowledge of Polish inflections hiding a range of use that is more lexically restricted than in their caregivers’ speech; low error rates hiding much higher ‘pockets of ignorance’ for specific inflectional contexts; and patterns of error that correspond closely to token/type frequencies in the CDS, though with the older sibling making some errors that were not frequency-based. Potential effects of syncretism, case ambiguity and semantics are also discussed.
    • Afrofuturism in clipping.’s Splendor & Misery

      Hay, Jonathan; University of Chester (Strange Attractor Press, 2022-09-13)
      This article examines the manner by which clipping.’s 2016 album Splendor & Misery—a conceptual hip-hop space opera—freely enlists and reclaims texts from the African cultural tradition in order to manifest its Afrofuturist agenda. A countercultural movement characterised by a dynamic understanding of the narrative authority held by texts, Afrofuturism rewrites African culture in a speculative vein, granting African and Afrodiasporic peoples a culturally empowered means of writing their own future. The process by which Afrofuturism reclaims and rewrites culture is paralleled within Splendor & Misery through the literary device of mise en abyme; just as the album itself does, its central protagonist rewrites narratives of African cultures and traditions in an act of counterculture.
    • Victorian Material Culture

      Wynne, Deborah; Yates, Louisa; University of Chester; Gladstone's Library (Routledge, 2022-07-14)
      This book is one of a five-volume series, Victorian Material Culture (general editors Tatiana Kontou and Vicky Mills), designed to present primary source materials on aspects of Victorian culture. This volume (volume IV) focuses on manufactured things, including textiles (fabrics, clothing, paper, carpets etc.), metal goods (cutlery, pins, locks etc.), and household items (including ceramics, glassware, soap, candles etc.). The volume's editors, Wynne and Yates, offer detailed introductions to each section as well as an extensive introduction to the whole volume, which demonstrates the significance of manufacturing to the political, social and cultural environment of the Victorian period.
    • Hyper-compression and the Rise of the Deep Surface: Flash Fiction in “Post-transitional” South Africa

      Blair, Peter; University of Chester (Routledge, 2022-03-25)
      This chapter begins with a survey of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa, which it relates to the nation’s post-apartheid canon of short stories and short-short stories, to the international rise of flash fiction and “sudden fiction”, and to the historical particularities of South Africa’s “post-transition”. It then undertakes close readings of three flash fictions republished in the article, each less than 450 words: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime and the “‘new’ South Africa”; and Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015), which maps the psychogeography of cross-racial sex and transnational identity-formation in an evolving urban environment. The chapter argues that these exemplary flashes are “hyper-compressions”, in that they compress and develop complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. It therefore contends that flash fiction of South Africa’s post-transition should be recognized as having literary-historical significance, not just as an inherently metonymic form that reflects, and alludes to, a broader literary culture, but as a genre in its own right.
    • Book review of 'Science Fiction, Disruption and Tourism'

      Hay, Jonathan; University of Chester (Elsevier, 2022-02-25)
      Book review of 'Science Fiction, Disruption and Tourism'
    • Disruption and Disability Futures in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

      Tankard, Alex; University of Chester (Liverpool University Press, 2022-02-01)
      Marvel superhero movies celebrate the transformation of disabled people into weapons. First Avenger depicts a disabled man rebuilt by military technology into a patriotic superhero. In Winter Soldier, the Soviet cyborg’s brutal, non-consensual modification serves to emphasise Captain America’s wholesomely perfected body. At first glance, both films seem incapable of critiquing the historical ableism that made Captain America’s modification a desirable image of disability-free future in 1941 – let alone its modern manifestations. However, re-watching First Avenger after Winter Soldier reveals a far less stable endorsement of eliminating disability: now alerted to the series’ precise anxieties about bodily autonomy, one can perceive an undercurrent of disability critique running through First Avenger too – often literally in the background. The film exposes the historical ableism that shaped Steve’s consent to modification, and begins to establish his sidekick Bucky Barnes as a persistent critical voice capable of envisioning a different disability future. This essay is therefore not only about ableism in a pair of superhero movies, but also about how these ableist films contain seeds of an unexpected critique of their own disability representation.
    • Hereditary surname establishment in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds: a diachronic analysis

      Parkin, Harry; University of Chester (Paul Watkins, 2022-01-01)
      A study of the local development of hereditary surnames in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds in the 14th century, looking at how it may differ from the apparent national patterns of hereditary surname adoption, and the implications for further surname research
    • A lot of snow out of one cloud: : A Concordance Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle

      Hay, Jonathan; University of Chester (Hélice, 2021-12-09)
      Whereas prior academic studies of the Hainish Cycle have been primarily produced by means of textual analysis, I demonstrate that a concordance analysis of its six novels reveals significant, yet heretofore overlooked, ecological aspects of Le Guin’s series. As becomes apparent, snow imagery literalises the Hainish Cycle’s New Wave moves from technological, to biological and sociological concerns, emphasising the series’ significant challenge to the technophilic assumptions and eschatological foundations of the preceding Golden Age. Accordingly, this article demonstrates the primacy of the datum of snow within the narratives of the Hainish Cycle novels, and delineates its important contribution to the series’ SFnal dialectic on aggregate.
    • Neocolonial Auspices: Rethinking the Ekumen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle

      Hay, Jonathan; University of Chester (International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (Idaho University), 2021-12-01)
      Although the Ekumen in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle have frequently been read as a utopian social body, their policy of contacting native cultures frequently provokes the erasure of that same cultural multiplicity which they purport to value. Hence, the uneven cultural synthesis enacted by the Ekumen across the galaxy cannot be intended as a positive epistemology of multicultural society. Rather, throughout the Hainish Cycle, the colonial practices of the Ekumen rhetorically contrast the series’ emphasis upon the multifaceted forms of life and culture found across the unassimilated worlds of the galaxy. Accordingly, Le Guin’s series problematizes the colonial practices of the Ekumen through what we might profitably term its mundane dialectic, which consequently engenders a cogent means of neocolonial discourse.