This is a Special Issue devoted to the Brontës and material culture.

Welcome to the strange, fertile world of Vanessa Gebbie’s imagination in this collection of irreal flash fictions, in which little makes sense and yet everything does. A sea lion learns to fly. A man wakes to find his head is triangular. Babies talk. Sextants grow inside a man’s chest. Bella’s iron tablets work rather too well. And Daphne grows bonsai in a plethora of odd places. After all, the world keeps turning, and people occasionally do strange things but then, that’s life, and life is nothing to worry about ... Or is it?

Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.

In an East Anglian seaside town, a woman recognises her lost son at a supermarket checkout. Outside on the marine parade, a van driver dreams of rescuing a young woman from the seedy tourist trade. Meanwhile, a few miles away, a redundant City banker has retreated to the coast in an effort to reinvent himself. In these thirty flash fictions, paths cross, people meet and part, and always there are consequences, often misremembered or misunderstood. Funny, caustic and poignant by turns, the stories remind us that we each find our own way through the muddle of life.

The book explores the representation of rural spaces in contemporary French literature.

This thesis examines the subversion of stereotypes by the nineteenth-century female sex worker in Britain and France in visual and literary cultures. It uncovers the methods working-class women employed to escape the legal, medical, and cultural restrictions which arose from the Régime des Moeurs, Solicitation Laws, Contagious Diseases Acts, and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill. I explore how sex workers could evade detection and criminalisation by evading stereotypes regarding their clothing, body, and behaviour. I argue the women’s carefully considered identity became an unforeseen and overlooked source of contagion for a society that sought to criminalize and ostracize the sex worker as a conduit of vice and venereal disease. Section 1 explores how sex workers manipulated clothing to transgress social boundaries and avoid police detection. I investigate how and why sex workers were able to manipulate clothing to reclaim personal agency. The section evaluates how sex worker stereotypes became morally contagious toward the rest of society. Section 2 focuses on the sex worker’s body to determine how the women were able to avoid corporeal stereotypes surrounding their weight, skin, cosmetics, perfume, and hair. I examine how the body could be manipulated to meet physical ideals of femininity created by the middle and upper class. However, I also identify the limits of stereotype subversion particularly concerning the fate of the fictional sex worker and her untimely demise. Section 3 investigates the stereotypes surrounding sex workers’ behaviour focusing on their manners, habits, and titles. It reveals how sex workers were constantly performing whether they altered their habits, recited middle- and upper-class mannerisms, or improved their etiquette and education. I primarily focus on male representations of the female sex worker in British and French literature; British texts include Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Unclassed (1884), and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893). French texts include Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), Nana (1880), and The Ladies’ Paradise (1883), Joris Karl Huysmans’s Marthe (1876), and Alexandre Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias (1848). I also reference several short stories and novels by French and British authors, draw from contextual resources including courtesan memoirs, newspaper reports, medical essays and social commentaries, and artwork to demonstrate the prevalence of sex worker stereotypes. The thesis concludes by determining the extent to which sex workers could reclaim personal agency by subverting stereotypes.

This thesis explores the formation of women preachers in the Church of England. My research was carried out with a particular group of women preachers, lay and ordained, who attended a conference in 2018 called Women’s Voices. The data generated suggests that theological education and ministerial formation fail women in two ways. First, ministerial training excludes, minoritizes and silences those who are perceived as ‘other’ than a White, male norm. Among other minoritized voices, women’s voices are absent from classrooms, reading lists and theological critique. Second, I argue that for women, the absence of these voices results in them entering ministry ill-informed about preaching about Bible women or from their own experiences, and ill-prepared for the sexism and misogyny they will encounter. Based on my exploration of these failures, I make some specific proposals about how preachers might be taught, how women ordinands and trainees might be prepared for the ministry they are to embark on, and how Theological Education Institutions might facilitate the flourishing of marginalised groups. I propose that preaching classes should not only include information about developments in preaching, but also practical sessions in which students explore how to preach from their own experiences and understandings. In line with the women who took part in my research, I propose that spaces be made available where women can support each other. My participants perceived a cycle in which women received support and acceptance from each other, realised that they were being silenced and released each other to resist oppression. I suggest that such spaces be opened up in the classroom so that women are better prepared for ministries that will be marked by sexist reactions to their presence and their preaching. In making proposals that I see as life-giving and disruptive of the status quo, I draw on the Hebrew prophet Miriam who was a leader of Israel alongside her brother Moses. She both led women to freedom and challenged male domination. As a result of her challenge to Moses, “does God not also speak through us?” she is afflicted with leprosy and banished from the camp. I believe that Miriam’s experience echoes that of many women in the church who are silenced when they challenge male domination. My research opens up other areas of inquiry I have not had space to pursue, particularly how women’s intersectional experiences might impact their ministerial experiences. My findings among a particular group of women preachers contribute to curriculum development work and to the ways in which women ministers are formed.

The role of news media in the dissemination of archaeological research isbeginning to receive some attention, but this is inadequate when consideringthe scale of the news media as a tool for public archaeology and mass-distribution of archaeological research in digital news sites. Archaeologyneeds to urgently address this oversight and begin to construct appropriateand sustainable working relationships with the news media, founded ona critical evaluation of current strategies, to regulate the information that isdisseminated through this medium. This paper takes a British perspective,though the themes and necessary improvements have global significance.I suggest that we begin to appreciate the role of the archaeologist in theconstruction of knowledge through the mass media by embracing ‘archaeo-media’- a neologism here proposed to explore the intersections and interac-tions between archaeology and news media.

Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.

Abstract available in hard copy