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Recent Submissions
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Continuing the "Family Names of the UK" projectThe first two phases of the “Family Names of the United Kingdom” [FaNUK] project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, set out to explain the origin of all surnames found in Britain and Ireland that had more than 20 bearers in 1881 and/or more than 100 in 2011. The fruits of the first funded phase (2010–2014) were published as The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland (OUP, 2016). Many surnames had never been explained at all before FaNUK, and given the wealth of new or corrected explanations achieved by the project, and the huge volume of collected and/or e-accessible material now available, deeper analysis is both possible and timely. The aim of the possible further project that we describe here will be to address the theme of variation in the form of surnames. This situates the project primarily within the fields of English historical sociolinguistics and socioonomastics, while relevant to history and demography. Its scope will be unified by the idea of analysing non-canonical changes in English, specifically the following five types: variation as an unstandardized consequence of mechanical or acoustic phonetic processes typical of informal speech (such as unstressed vowel reduction); variation of a particular under-studied phonoorthographic type involving vowel length (as in Sim vs. Sime); variation endemic in unstandardized aspects of English orthography (as in Lee vs. Leigh); variation due to analogy with other names or name elements locally or nationally, and with words of the common vocabulary; and any aspects of hypercorrection and spelling-pronunciation not implicitly covered in the above. This will lead naturally to devoting attention to the phonological and orthographical techniques employed in anglicizing names arriving from abroad, thereby linking the present paper to the conference sub-theme of identity and naming.
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Mesmerism, female identity, and narratives of control in fiction 1840-1900This thesis critically analyses the representation of mesmerism in nineteenth-century fictional literature in respect to its influence on women’s minds and bodies. The thesis encompasses a sixty-year timespan to examine how the relationship between mesmerism and women reflects the patriarchal dynamics and distribution of power and authority in contemporary British, European, and American society. The project seeks to stand alongside existing research on literary mesmerism and gender dynamics, from such scholars as Ann Heilmann, Fiona Coll, and Susan Poznar, by incorporating the analysis into a broader discussion of themes such as control and consent, domesticity and marriage, women’s health, the interplay between physical and psychic identity, and nineteenth-century understandings of ideas that would inform later psychoanalytical concepts such as the id/ego/superego, and sociological concepts such as the Medusa complex. The thesis will conclude by discussing how nineteenth-century attitudes towards mesmerism and its effect on women continues to inform modern-day perceptions of the trance state.
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The Dandy in the pink waistcoat: Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Journal of a Frenchman’This essay considers Charlotte Brontë’s serialised ‘Journal of a Frenchman’ in her ‘Young Men’s Magazine’. It discusses the representation of Parisian life, showing how this missing fragment fits into the series and the wider context of Charlotte’s engagement with the French language and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the latter providing the inspiration for many aspects of the Frenchman’s account of his life.
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The Black Archive: LogopolisStructure is the essence of matter, and the essence of structure is mathematics.’ Logopolis (1981) is a mournful epic of cosmic destruction, obsolescence and collapse. This Black Archive investigates the changes before and behind the camera, explores the story’s themes of entropy and rebirth, and places it in the context of a specific moment in the history of computing.
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Reflection: A Novel, with Critical ComponentReflection is a novel which examines Margot Saunders’s life from her childhood to a time when she believes herself to be the victim of sexual assault, through her discovery that the assault never happened – it was a misconstrual of events and facts – and onward to her finding a certain peace with which to go on into the future. The novel covers the time period from 1979 to 2023, and is set in France and various locations in the UK. The critical commentary, divided into three parts, analyses firstly the conception of the novel (from disquiet at the adamance of the ‘Believe Her’ movement which left no space for misunderstanding, memory lapses or human error) and themes of feminism and social conditioning and how these have affected women and girls throughout the decades and various waves of feminist action. The second chapter sets Reflection alongside seven contemporary novels and compares and contrasts the various technical and structural methods used by the four various authors. This chapter discusses three of Ian McEwan’s works: Atonement (2001), On Chesil Beach (2007), and Lessons (2022), as well as Kate Reed Petty’s True Story (2020), The Reader (1997) by Bernhard Schlink, J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country (1976), and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992). The third and final chapter looks at the writing process: choices as to structure, voicing, and narrative techniques employed in the writing of Reflection.
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Covers Story: Hold the Front PageDr Matt Davies, senior lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester, looks through the Cheshire Life archive to see how the front page has changed in the decades since it first rolled off the presses in the 1930s (May 2024, pp.25-32). www.cheshirelifemagazine.co.uk
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Pandora's Box (2025)Founded 2003, Pandora’s Box is an annual literary periodical publishing a selection of the year’s best creative writing by students and staff at the University of Chester.
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Saturday (poem)Poem.
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Tales of the peasantry and famineThis chapter considers the representation of the Irish peasant in nineteenth-century fiction: in the moral tales of Mary Leadbeater, national tales by Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the rise of Catholic novelists such as Gerald Griffin and the Banims, and those who emerge from the peasantry themselves, such as William Carleton; and the way representation is affected by social and political events such as agrarian outrages, the Famine, and the Land League.
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(Il)legal Bodies: Activism, Climate Fictions, Climate CullingWhen the non-violent environmental protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR) was created in late 2018, I was completing a Masters in Research in Science Fiction Literature. Although initially nervous, I understood the urgent need to non-violently protest the lack of governmental action on the climate and ecological crisis (as it has since become known). In November 2018, I took a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods with me to London, where I was joined by thousands of fellow activists on the streets around the Houses of Parliament and Downing Street, many dressed as animals, with banners and flags protesting the sixth mass extinction and ongoing anthropogenic climate-related genocides across the globe.
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“I come as his right hand”: Imagining pirate disability, prosthesis, and interdependence in Black SailsOstensibly a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island, Starz TV series Black Sails (2014-17) imagines a fleeting moment of possibility for anti-slavery and queer revolution in the Golden Age of Piracy. In the final episode, this possibility is extinguished by Long John Silver betraying the pirate and Maroon alliance, and Atlantic history veers back to its grim course of imperial conquest. Srividhya Swaminathan argues that Black Sails offers a “pastiche of a period in history that still inflects contemporary understanding of empire”. Black Sails’ pastiche reimagines pirates as a unique historical community in terms that also speak critically to contemporary neoliberal discourses of disability, which designate irreparably disabled people as a parasitic, dependent class distinct from the supposed norm of productive, independent adults. In the same year Black Sails appeared, David T. Mitchell explained that “devalued populations” are consigned to “zones of expendability”, marked out “for death (letting die) on behalf of sustaining other, more valued populations in lives of surfeit comfort”. By contrast, Black Sails’ creative engagement with histories of Golden-Age piracy suggests a radically different model: a crew that shares labour and profit as a composite body of cooperative “hands”, refusing to separate maimed from whole, transforms the meaning of dependency and disability itself.
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Interwar Women: The Psychogeographic Nature of Detection in Golden Age Detective FictionThis thesis theorises female detection psychogeographically. Through an examination into the very mechanics of spatiality, the overall argument unearths an inherently psychogeographic nature of detection within specific figures of female detectives within Golden Age Detective Fiction. A psychogeographic perspective unearths the influential nature of space, and its impact on the construction of gendered and social identity. Moreover, specifically female detectives as psychogeographers voice the shifting social and cultural position of women during the period. Engaging with the cultural, social and political influences of the time, the thesis analyses the spatially imbued nature of space, and the ways in which it effects the spatial, temporal and cultural performance of femininity throughout the period of 1918 to 1954. Examining individual decades, the thesis analyses the transformations of imposed femininity, and the ways in which hegemonic gendered behaviour embedded in physical space, influence and impose the formation and enactment of identity. Within these reformed notions of the feminine, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers’s female detectives directly exploit and manipulate the process of spatial influence. This process of feminine manipulation of imposed identity is encapsulated through the process of subversive detection methods embedded in psychogeographic means of expression. Overall, the literature voices a shift in female psychogeography as well as voicing the transformation in a woman’s place in society and culture during the first half of the twentieth century through the metaphor of detection.
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Deconstructing the dominant pregnancy script: A feminist analysis of pregnancy and parenting in contemporary British and American fiction, film, and on social mediaIn 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.
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Introduction (Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene)Introductory chapter to Science fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene
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Binti (Nnedi Okorafor, 2015) - Africanfuturism and the MeduseIn 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.
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Brontë Studies special issue: Charlotte Brontë and Material CultureThis is a Special Issue devoted to the Brontës and material culture.
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The World at the End of the Garden: A Novella-in-Flash [Kindle Edition]An English textile artist accompanies her husband to live in Tucson, Arizona for a year. Her world shrinks to a gated community of strangers and the view of the arroyo at the bottom of the garden. Escaping from a regime of fertility treatments and miscarriages, she learns to tolerate the heat and the snakes. With the help of Samuel, a mysterious boy who lives across the arroyo, she explores the landscape, learns its history and falls in love with Tucson’s flowers and seasonal rains. As the year passes, she pioneers a new direction for her art and, finally, accepts that she will never be a mother. The World at the End of the Garden is a novella-in-flash about the discovery of self, the meaning of home, and the place of humans on the planet.
