Perceptual dialectology website goes live

Dr Mike Pearce has collected together his research on the perceptual dialectology of North East England and made it accessible on a new website. As well as links to his academic articles, the site contains online maps which reveal 'folk' beliefs about language variation across the region.

Kath Kerr-Koch romances fascism

Dr Kathleen Kerr-Koch's Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley is to be published by Bloomsbury in spring 2013. In her monograph Kath takes a wide-ranging approach to the analysis of allegory as it is treated by three controversial writers whose works flank the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the middle and late periods of what we call modernity—Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In the course of her study she argues that intellectual responsibility can only be safeguarded if criticism is mobilised both as a poetic and as a critically enlightened endeavour.

New Orientalisms for old

Dr Geoff Nash's essay entitled 'New Orientalisms for old: articulations of the East in Raymond Schwab, Edward Said and two nineteenth century French Orientalists' has just been published in Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land and Voyage  (Routledge, 2012). The chapter assesses Edward Said's treatment of Arthur Gobineau's and Ernest Renan's Orientalism - especially the former's reputation as a racist. It concludes that Gobineau was more sympathetic to Middle Eastern peoples than Said or his other critics take him to have been.