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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.
This collection is licenced under a Creative Commons licence. The collection may be reproduced for non-commerical use and without modification, providing that copyright is acknowledged.
Recent Submissions
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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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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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The Kenneth Williams Diaries [flash fiction]Flash fiction
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The Kenneth Williams Letters [flash fiction]Flash fiction
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Series Editor's Preface - Character Studies SeriesCharacter Studies promotes sophisticated literary analysis through the concept of character. It demonstrates the necessity of linking character analysis to texts'; themes, issues and ideas, and encourages students to embrace the complexity of literary characters and the texts in which they appear. The series thus fosters close critical reading and evidence-based discussion, as well as an engagement with historical context, and with literary criticism and theory.
