Work-in-Progress
Ute Berns and Michael Bradshaw (eds), Thomas Lovell Beddoes: New Critical Essays
(proposal with Ashgate Publishing)
The reputation of the late Romantic writer Thomas Lovell Beddoes has undergone a major re-assessment in recent years, with several significant editions, many critical works and even a stage adaptation of his definitive text, Death’s Jest-Book. This project aims to bring together most of the prominent critics in an international field, and includes names such as Marjean Purinton, Fred Burwick, Diane Hoeveler and Jerome McGann. It situates Beddoes in several new and developing contexts such as theatrical history, queer theory and German revolutionary politics. Having written a monograph and edited some of the key texts, I see this collaborative project as the necessary next stage in bringing about lasting change in Beddoes’s status in the canon and conversation of Romanticism.
Michael Bradshaw (ed.), George Darley, Nepenthe and Other Poems
(proposal with Carcanet Press)
George Darley was an expatriate Irish writer of the later Romantic period, prolific in such diverse genres as lyrical and heroic dramas, narrative poetry, drama criticism, visual art criticism, science and mathematics. He was a staff writer for The London Magazine and later the Athenaeum, and was actively involved in the London literary scene of Taylor, Lamb and Carey. Despite being a prominent figure in his own time, Darley continues to be almost totally overlooked by contemporary Romanticism. Having already written some short articles on Darley, I aim to publish this selected edition of his poems, with the acclaimed vision-quest narrative Nepenthe at its centre, in order to make him readily available to readers, students and scholars.
Jess Edwards
Lockean Geographies
Having submitted the manuscript for my first monograph in the autumn term of 2004/5, I have since been working on material for a new project, which will cover the period 1680-1730 – a period roughly book-ended, for my purposes, by Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana. Like my first book, it will explore a wide range of cultural production, from maps and travel narratives to the early novel. The connecting theme will be the idea of ‘improvement’: a slippery term associated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with refinement and development but also exploitation and even corruption. I’m interested in exploring the way in which foreign paradigms preoccupy English writers of the period, attempting to imagine the possibilities and pitfalls of an economy and a society founded not on husbandry but on enterprise and artisanal skill.
Robert Graham
How To Write Fiction (And Think About It) (with sections from contributors at Liverpool John Moores
and MMU Cheshire; Palgrave, 2006)
This is a handbook for students and lecturers which examines a large number of fiction-writing skills and includes illustrative passages from contemporary fiction as well as relevant writing exercises. Central to the ethos of the book is the idea that writers are readers who write. How To Write Fiction is aimed at Creative Writing courses in higher education; the book begins with ‘the basics’ and end with more sophisticated elements of crafting a narrative. Each section is centred on three kinds of activity: examining the theory of particular short story writing skills, analysing the practice of these skills in exemplary published work, and practising the skills in fiction-writing exercises. The book stresses the importance of being able to articulate the process of writing.
Robert Graham
The A to Z of Creative Writing (with Heather Leach; Continuum, 2007)
Designed as a glossary and reference guide, The A to Z follows a ‘mini-essay’ format, including a wide range of types of entry relating to craft terminology, the creative process, form, key writers, troubleshooting, workshopping, pedagogy and scholarship, the professional world, and publishing. The entries are mainly expositional, but also include humour, anecdote and direct address. One key aspect of the volume lies in its attempt to define the state of Creative Writing as a subject of academic study in the English-speaking world.
Robert Graham
It’s A Family Show!
This is a novel about father-son issues, which uses a dual viewpoint narrative to examine the relationship between a 1960s/70s comedian, Eddie Francey, and his son Peter who, in the mid to late 1990s, is trying not to repeat the past by being an inadequate father to his own son, Mark, who is five. Belfast comedian Eddie Francey was one half of the comedy double act, Francey & McCrum, whose show was ranked third in the early 1970s TV ratings after The Morecombe & Wise Show and The Two Ronnies. He died in 1979. The novel is set in Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester, London and Chicago and moves around in time from 1962 through to 1999.
Fiona McCulloch
Geographies of Innocence: Locating the Spatial Border of Eden in Contemporary Children’s Literature
Discussing a representative selection of contemporary children’s fiction, Geographies of Innocence sets out to explore landscape and environment within children’s literature. It will be suggested that discourses of innocence are not necessarily perpetuated but, on the contrary, probed and undermined. The desire for paradise is fraught with cultural tensions, and these texts exemplify the uneasy relationship between prelapsarian space and postlapsarian language. The texts offer no singular vision that mimetically reproduces the cultural desire for childhood and nature to exist as timeless facets of an English rural idyll, but are wrought with contradictions and uncertainties which effectively question and fragment the social mirror. Each text uniquely engages in its own particular intertextual conversation with the social and literary heritage of childhood mythopoeic representation and, rather than steering away from contemporaneous concerns, they offer a commentary upon them.
Angelica Michelis
Eating Theory: A Theory of Eating
(Manchester University Press 2007)
Over the last decade the language of food and eating has been awarded much critical attention from psychology, sociology and cultural and literary studies, resulting in what could be called a veritable field of ‘alimentary studies’ in cultural and literary theory. Intrinsically interdisciplinary, many of the publications in this area react to the increased interest in food, eating and culinary consumption and simultaneously create a specific ‘menu’ which suggests how these issues should be discussed and explored from an epistemological and cultural perspective. Eating Theory: A Theory of Eating will examine theoretical and literary texts as mapped by the intricate ways in which we ingest/digest/expel food. So rather than examining how food and the way we eat it (or don’t eat it!) are defined by culture, I will be more interested in the ways culture, writing and theory can be viewed as acts of incarnation, as always already embodied in flesh. The main structure of the book consists of two parts. Whereas the first is more concerned with theoretical matters, the second part will revisit ideas, suggestions and findings of Part One in order to re-digest/re-ingest them when combining them with other genres such as poetry, gothic fiction, cross-cultural novels by women writers, the crime novel and cookery books.
Anna Powell
Deleuze, Altered States amd Film
Inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s assertion that ‘ the brain is the screen’, my new monograph investigates the Deleuzian idea that cinema both expresses and induces thought. Like film, the brain is itself a self-reflexive moving image of time, space and motion. Drawing on Deleuze’s film/philosophy, Deleuze, Altered States and Film maps cinematic alterity, or ‘otherness’. It asserts that film alters our perceptions, extending and transforming mundane levels of consciousness as we feel sensation and conceptualise via our nerve endings. It maps the film experience as an altered state of consciousness via popular cult films like Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko as well as art house classics, such as Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass. It also argues that Deleuze’s aesthetics of altered consciousness are influenced by experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and counter–cultural writers such as Carlos Castaneda. It approaches film as an experiential process, not just a stimulus to philosophical thought.
Berthold Schoene
Plural Identities in Contemporary British Fiction and Film
(Palgrave 2006)
Based around the analysis of a select number of representative literary and cinematic texts published since the early 1990s, Plural Identities is concerned with ‘identity politics’ and the increasing diversification of identity in contemporary British culture. Although ‘identity’ has been a heatedly debated issue in cultural studies for many years now, most studies tend to focus on just one particular aspect or area of enquiry. In contrast, what makes Plural Identities distinctive is the way in which it encompasses, and discovers thematic and theoretical links between, four different sets of concerns: (1) nationhood/’race’/ethnicity; (2) sexuality/gender; (3) subculture (and the role of drugs in various youth cultures especially) and (4) masculinity ‘in crisis’.
Berthold Schoene
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature
(Edinburgh University Press 2007)
The Companion provides a literary history of the present examining new developments in Scottish literature since the country’s successful referendum on national self-rule in 1997. Published to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the new Scottish Parliament in 2007, the Companion heralds a new era in Scottish writing, literary criticism and cultural theory. Introducing 45 essays under four main headings – ‘Contexts’, ‘Genres’, ‘Authors’ and ‘Topics’ – the Companion covers the entire spectrum of current interests and topical concerns in the field of Scottish literary studies. Issues under discussion include sexuality and gender, nationhood and globalisation, the New Europe and cosmopolitan citizenship, postcoloniality, as well as questions of multiculturalism, ethnicity and race. The work of solidly established authors is examined alongside that of relative newcomers who have entered the scene over the past ten years, or currently emerging writers, who are still in the process of getting noticed as a new avantgarde in contemporary Scottish writing. Touching also on literature’s relationship with other contemporary media – such as film, television and the internet – the Companion is rounded off by a section on ‘Possible Futures’, in which contemporary creative writers respond to the critical perspectives presented in the volume.
John Sears
Reading George Szirtes (proposal currently under consideration at Bloodaxe)
George Szirtes has published 12 volumes of poetry since 1979, and won the 2004 T. S. Eliot Memorial Prize with his most recent, Reel (Bloodaxe 2004). He is also a significant translator of Hungarian fiction and poetry, and an essayist, broadcaster and reviewer. This book offers a critical introduction to and appraisal of his poetic output, organised chronologically and responding to contextual and critical dimensions including Szirtes’s relations to English and Hungarian literary traditions, and his early development in relation to the ‘Hitchin’ school and English poetry after the ‘Movement’. The key themes of Szirtes’s poetry – exile, representation, subjectivity and language, the self in history and geography, and the relations between poetry, memory and history – will constitute the thematic structure of the book. The project will include essays and papers already published or delivered in England and Hungary.
John Sears
Dying Words – Figuring Death in Contemporary Fiction (proposal in preparation).
This project will examine the ways in which encounters with and experiences of mortality constitute a significant theme in recent fiction. Through readings of selected works by writers from Maggie Gee to J. M. Coetzee, it explores the trope of death as a figure of cultural concerns with the imminence of mortality (post 9/11) and as an expression in fictional forms of aspects of experience extensively addressed in contemporary theory by Blanchot, Gadamer, Nancy and others, which in turn offers models for the exploration of these concerns. Ongoing publications relating to this project include essays on Sebald, Maggie Gee and Iain Sinclair.
John Sears
Night Writing – Maurice Blanchot and Contemporary Literary Criticism (proposal in preparation).
This project will collect essays by established and emerging scholars addressing the significance of Maurice Blanchot’s writings (now largely available in English) for contemporary literary-theoretical and critical practice.
