RSS 1.0English
The English Department’s three research areas are: English literature, Creative writing, and English language & linguistics. The English Department continues to develop its research activities in exciting ways, through publications, online projects and collaborative ventures. All members of our academic staff are engaged in research and publishing: over the past few years we have produced scholarly books, novels and poetry collections, journal articles, book chapters, and online publications. Some of us are editors of journals and magazines and we are regularly consulted by a range of publishers and editors as expert reviewers. Staff and postgraduates also organise academic conferences, public lecture programmes, workshops, study days and literary events. Academic staff are currently involved in a number of research projects and our work has resulted in a wide range of publications.
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
-
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.
-
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.
-
Introduction (Science Fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene)Introductory chapter to Science fiction and Posthumanism in the Anthropocene
-
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.
-
Brontë Studies special issue: Charlotte Brontë and Material CultureThis is a Special Issue devoted to the Brontës and material culture.
-
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.
-
Nothing to Worry About: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]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?
-
Lined Up Like Scars: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]Sassy and incisive, tender yet scalpel-sharp, the ten short tales in Lined Up Like Scars cut to the quick of modern life, dissecting the dysfunctional dynamics of an American family with a tragic secret at its heart. Meg Tuite traces girlhood, young womanhood, and the jealous loyalties of sisterhood through a series of magpie moments that are often darkly funny featuring inedible meatloaf, sloughed skin, mysterious boy-bodies, insurgent underwear, speed-dating with attitude, the street-stomping antics of a wannabe band, and an unnerving collector of American Girl dolls. But the comic coping strategies of children (licking walls, ingesting gym socks, humping stuffed animals) have chronic counterparts in those of adults (alcoholism, prescription drugs). And in the final story, an ageing father reveals a truth that his daughters will forever conceal behind Facebook facades.
-
Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 12.1 (April 2024)Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.
-
Stronger Faster Shorter: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]A cricket team’s youthful scorer has ‘lovely white knees’ and ‘delicate’ ears, but something inside him is wrong. A lad called Dewhurst likes to ‘bow down before the cows’. Frank has become allergic to his pigeons. At a university open day, a prospective student plays toilet tennis. A cub reporter for a local newspaper meets Cheese Horn and Wolftoucher at a CB Radio gathering. On a bus, there’s Sean, who has a mysterious ‘island-chain of burns stretching over face, scalp and neck’. Swann’s flashes are humorous, tender, and profound. One of his characters would say that the collection is ‘pearling’ and ‘ace’.
-
Travelling Solo: Flash Fictions [Kindle Edition]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.
-
Family Names: Origins, History, Anthropology and SociologyJointly guest-edited Special Issue of the online periodical Genealogy on the topic of Family Names and Naming. Submissions fall into five broad areas: projects and methods in family name research; systematic aspects of family names and naming; linguistic aspects of family names and naming; praxis in relation to family naming; and studies relating to individual family names (in which the focus should be on the name itself rather than on wider genealogical matters).
-
The Nineteenth-Century Female Sex Worker in Britain and France: The Representation of Stereotypes in Visual and Literary CulturesThis 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.
-
Editorial and Contents - Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 12.1 (April 2024)Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.
-
Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, 12.1 (April 2024)Founded 2008, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is a biannual literary periodical publishing flash fictions of up to 360 words.
-
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and appropriationAbstract available in hard copy
-
Looking into distance: feminine narrative strategies and the male gaze in female narrated prose fiction, 1680-1780Abstract available in hard copy
-
Phonemic accuracy in the spelling of dyslexic and normally achieving children: similarities and differencesAbstract available in hard copy
-
Phonological and orthographic processing of Chinese characters in China, Hong Kong and TaiwanAbstract available in hard copy
