In the global North, there is a dominant pregnancy script (DPS) where the expectation is that the pregnant body, and people’s parenting styles, should fit a universal category. What this means is that Black, transgender, non-conforming pregnancies (for example, surrogate pregnancy), and other marginalised bodies are missing from narratives in fiction, film and on social media platforms. To challenge this, my thesis conceptualises a new, feminist pregnancy script (FPS) that advocates for pregnant people, mothers, or parents, to, as motherhood scholar Andrea O’Reilly puts it, have agency, autonomy, authenticity and authority in their choices. Crucially, the FPS is inclusive and supportive of pregnancy, mothering, or parenting that does not adhere to the ‘rules’ of the DPS. The paradoxical and demanding expectations of the DPS mean that many representations of pregnancy and parenting experiences in fiction, film and on social media are not equal, diverse, or inclusive, and neither empower pregnant people and parents, nor encourage choice. The DPS and its multivalent cultural manifestations revere the ‘good’ mother – someone who is white, heterosexual, married and in a nuclear family; this same ‘good mother’ is altruistic, patient, loving, selfless, devoted and cheerful. However, representations of pregnancy and parenting also have the potential to resist and challenge such embedded, dominant norms. It is through digital texts in particular that audiences can interpret, interact with and revoke heteropatriarchal inscriptions of ‘correct’ pregnancy and parenting experiences. By uncovering and subsequently deconstructing the DPS through textual analysis, my thesis proposes a feminist reimagining. The FPS challenges social systems where pregnancy and parenting must be done in a ‘correct’ way to be accepted, and it underlines how attitudes in the global North reflect structures where neoliberalism and global capitalism benefit only a privileged few. It is time for change.

In the uncharted territory of space, humans ourselves become alien. This understanding is central to Nnedi Okorafor’s Nebula and Hugo award-winning novella Binti (2015) and its sequels Home (2017) and The Night Masquerade (2018). Through the interactions between humans and the trilogy’s “alien” Meduse, Okorafor’s text makes unfamiliar and radically expands the familiar territory of race. Typically, aliens in science fiction are rigidly defined as either enemies or friends of humanity. Yet, the Meduse transcend this simplistic dualism, and therefore comprise a central component of Binti’s Africanfuturist meditation on race.

Book review

All are welcome at the ‘common table’ to enjoy the ‘table talk’. How does Coffee Shop Sunday (CSS) (Coventry and Nuneaton Methodist Circuit Project) reflect that alongside pointing people to Jesus? CSS began a worship service in a Coventry Costa Coffee Shop in December 2019, this was severely disrupted with covid-19 restrictions and their concept of ‘meeting God in an ordinary place’ moved online. The internet through Facebook and Zoom became the ordinary place they met God. Since March 2020, the online work has grown from initially meeting four days a week to daily activities with participants from five continents. Two of the principles of CSS are encouragement and fellowship. The paper will explore (1) How the internet became the ‘ordinary’ place to meet God for people from different denominations and cultures. (2) How fellowship is experienced, using Russell’s ‘round table ecclesiology’ model where those present participate in a way which reflects their own journey of ‘faith and struggle’. (3) How does CSS point other people to Jesus through its activities. Barth emphasises that churches or a Christian’s activities should not focus on themselves but ‘point to Jesus’. By reviewing CSS activities, I will demonstrate that they point others to Jesus.

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.