Monstrous masculinities

Dr Alison Younger has contributed a chapter to an Edinburgh University Press publication edited by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt. The volume, entitled The Victorian Male Body examines some of the main expressions and practices of Victorian masculinity and its embodied physicality. Alison's chapter - which explores dandyism and the gothic body - is called 'Monstrous Masculinities from the Macaroni to the Masher: Reading the Gothic 'Gentleman''.

Sunderland Literature Festival 2017

Once again, several members of the School of Culture will be taking part in the Sunderland Libraries Literature Festival (download the full programme here). These events feature our staff/students:

Colin Younger (Senior Lecturer): Expressive Writing as Therapy, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 10th October 3-4.30pm

This workshop will explore expressive writing approaches to support mental health well-being as part of Mental Health Day.

Dr Alison Younger (Senior Lecturer): Folklore and Fable in the North East, Houghton Library, 16th October 2-3pm
This session will explore the extraordinary folklore and fables of North East England.

Short Story Competition Launch, Waterstones, The Bridges, 16th October 5pm
In association with Waterstones, the University of Sunderland will launch a Short Story Competition.

Dr Geoff Nash (Senior Lecturer): The Gothic Terrorist: from Robespierre to Jihadi John City, Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 18th October 5-6.30pm
Gothic, terrorism, and the terrorist are rarely linked - why is this? Geoff Nash addresses the question by tracing a Gothic dimension to images of terror coming out of the political violence of the French Revolution, analysing the appearance of the anarchist terrorist in late nineteenth century fiction, and discerning in stories and journalism about contemporary terrorists and terrorist groups the hated/desired figure of the Gothic outsider.

Colin Younger (Senior Lecturer): The Hero’s Journey: How to Write a Best Seller, Washington Town Centre Library, 21st October 11-12.30pm

The Hero’s Journey is a concept at the heart of many stories and by following the structure you too will be able to write your own best seller.

Dr Sarah Dobbs (Senior Lecturer): Prosegression, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 28th October 1-3pm
This session explores and pushes the boundaries of prose fiction, giving all writers new and exciting structures to work from. After the session, feel free to submit work from the workshop for consideration for a new journal in prose fiction - Prosegression, which is coming soon. Peer reviewers include flash fiction experts David Gaffney, Tania Hersham and the world’s first professor in short fiction, Professor Ailsa Cox.

Spectral Visions Press Book Launch, Holmeside Coffee, Holmeside, 31st October 6pm
Spectral Visions Press is an innovative publishing house located at the University of Sunderland. It specialises in publishing outstanding works of creative writing, niche pieces, and writing concerned with, and inspired by, Gothic literature and Gothic studies. To include ‘Tyne And Wear’d’ and ‘A Bestiary of Monsters.’ Pay bar available.

Philippa Abbott (Doctoral student): The Struggle of the Female Victorian Underclass, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 1st November 5-6.30pm
‘The Angel in the House’ was the ideal to which many Victorian women were expected to aspire. However for those at the lowest end of the social scale, this ideal was unattainable as with no money they could not feed their family and had to go out to work. Mrs Sheppard (from William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard 1839) contradicts some of the assumptions made by Victorian society and highlights the struggles that women of the lower and underclasses battled with on a daily basis.

Steve Watts (Head of School of Culture): John Buchan, Richard Hannay and The 39 Steps, City Library@ Museum & Winter Gardens, 2nd November 10-11.30am
An exploration of the extraordinary life of John Buchan with an introduction to his most enduring character, the irrepressible Richard ‘Dick’ Hannay, acknowledged as the forerunner and inspiration for 007 James Bond through this classic novel.

Dr Peter Hayes (Senior Lecturer): Scott Joplin: The Triumph of the Tragedy of his Opera, City Library @ Museum & Winter Gardens, 3rd November 2-4pm
Scott Joplin is famous for his piano ragtime. However, Joplin also aspired to be an opera composer and wrote two operas, one of which, Treemonisha, still survives. Treemonisha folded after a single performance in New York, and its failure is said to have contributed to Joplin’s early death. A surprising connection between Sunderland and Scott Joplin will be revealed and explained in a combined lecture on Joplin’s life and performance of some of his works.

Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival 2016

Several members of the School of Culture will be taking part in the Sunderland Literature and Creative Writing Festival this autumn. Click on the links below to find out who will be doing what and where. The festival starts on September 30th (the full schedule is here).

Spectral Visions book launch

Against the Grayne: Learning about your Reiver ancestry

Witchcraft and wizardry in Wearside

Northern Gothic: Jane Harvey's The Castle at Tynemouth (1806)

Eternity in an hour: William Blake and popular music

Gothic Wearside

World books to read before you die

Apples and Snakes performance poetry

Flash Fiction in a flash: how to write it and how to get it published

Reading philosophy to lose weight

The terrorist novel from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent to Hamid Mohsen's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Of Peter and Jemima: An introduction to the extraordinary life of Beatrix Potter

'Not quite a Geordie': The ethnonyms of North East England

Wizards, goblins and forbidden love: Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel

'My own, my native land'

University of Sunderland and Waterstones short story competition

A fatal North East marriage: Mad Lord Byron and the Princess of Parallelograms

Halloween guided fantasy

A terrible beauty is bought

The journal Irish Studies Review is shortly to publish a special commemorative 1916 edition entitled ‘Commemorating Connolly’. Amongst the seven invited papers for the issue is an article by Dr Alison Younger entitled 'A terrible beauty is bought: 1916, commemoration and commodification'. Mindful of Benedict Anderson’s emphasis in Imagined Communities on the power of print culture – and print-capitalism – to shape and share national ideas and identities, her article offers a comparative analysis of the commemorations in Ireland of 1798 and 1916 by looking at commemorative ephemera: kitschy memorabilia, themed merchandise, newspaper cuttings and advertisements, handbills and inventively branded commodities, as important cultural texts which purveyed ideological values and meanings at the time of their production. It suggests that the consumer sphere allows us to shed light on the commemorative discourses these ephemeral objects produce, retelling and retailing the risings in question. Texts often regarded as throwaway or lowbrow vied for their share in the ideological marketplace to form part of the heritage of 1798 and 1916, the centenary of the one feeding into the ferment of the other. The reception and representation of the pivotal figures of Wolfe Tone and James Connolly is discussed through the prism of Thomas Richards’ conception of commodity culture, and attention is paid to counter-commemorative strands as well as positive rhetorics of remembrance.

Haunted landscapes

Colin Younger and Alison Younger have collaborated on a chapter which will appear in an edited collection called Haunted Landscapes: Super-Nature and the Environment (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). The volume, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing, examines the concept of landscape as a multitude of places and spaces haunted by spectres, memory, trauma and nostalgia in literature, art and film from Victorian times to the present. Colin and Alison's chapter is called 'The Supernatural Borders: on Reivers, Revenants and Redcaps'.

Margaret Skinnider and Constance Markievicz

Scotland and the Easter Rising (Luath Press, 2016) features a chapter by Dr Alison Younger about two female revolutionary nationalists. Entitled 'Scotland is my home, but Ireland is my Country: Margaret Skinnider and Constance Markievicz', Alison's essay appears alongside the work of authors and academics such as James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Owen Dudley-Edwards. The collection mixes fiction, memoir, poetry and essays to explore  Irish-Scottish relations in the context of the 1916 Easter Rising and its intersections with other movements, from Women’s Suffrage to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. You can read The Scotsman's review of this volume here.

Alison Younger at Cafe Culture

Café Culture is a series of free events for thinkers which aim to generate discussion, debate and a convivial atmosphere. Held in central Newcastle upon Tyne, they seek to provide a space for people to think, share ideas and to have a lively and inclusive discussion. On December 1st 2014 Dr Alison Younger gave a talk entitled 'Our Monsters: Ourselves' in which she explored the ways monsters reflect the cultural anxieties of the times in which they were spawned. Listen to the podcast here.

Spectral Visions III on YouTube

You can get a sense of what went on at the recent Spectral Visions III conference by visiting this YouTube channel. Highlights include Dr Alison Younger on 'Gothic Fairy Tales' and Colin Younger on 'Creating Gothic Characters'.

Border Crossings

A collection of essays edited by Colin Younger (English) has just been published. Border Crossings: Narration, Nation and Imagination in Scots and Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge Scholars, 2013) examines the ways in which the borderlands, boundaries and frontiers of the 'British Isles' are crucibles for diverse cultures and multiple alternative histories. The book offers a fresh perspective on the liminality of these porous and contested terrains and the peoples therein.

The essays in the collection show that these borders do not have to be geographical, but can extend to any cultural, psychic or social terrain which exists beyond or between accepted categories, power structures, nations or states.

Border Crossings draws together a number of key researchers in their respective fields and enables a dialogue between different disciplines and scholars. The work of three current and one past member of the Faculty of Education and Society at Sunderland appears in the book. The editor Colin Younger contributes the introduction and an essay on the border ballads; Alison O'Malley-Younger's chapters are on Burke and Hare, and - in conjunction with Professor John Strachan of Bath Spa University - William Maginn, the Irish journalist and writer. Peter Rushton - who is Professor of Historical Sociology at Sunderland - explores narratives of banishment, exile and return in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Burke and Hare

The execution of William Burke

(Source: Wikipedia)

Dr Alison Younger has published an essay on the notorious Edinburgh grave-robbers and murderers William Burke and William Hare. Alison examines how a tale of two murderers (and essentially two cities) was sensationalised and Gothicised, and the murderers themselves abjected and made monstrous as symptomatic representations of a web of contemporary fears surrounding race, class and the commodification and atomisation of the body (both living and dead). The essay, entitled 'Morbid Anatomy: De'Crypting the Monstrous: Burke and Hare', appears in Border Crossings, a collection of essays edited by Colin Younger (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). The volume also contains a chapter co-written by Alison and Professor John Strachan (Bath Spa University) on the Irish journalist and writer William Maginn.

Spectral Visions II online

Keynote lectures from the Spectral Visions II conference can be viewed below.

Dr Alison Younger (Sunderland University) on 'Gothic Monstrosities'

Professor John Strachan (Bath Spa University) on 'Gothic and Surrealism'

Two essays on Romantic Ireland

Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger has published two essays in Romantic Ireland: From Tone to Gonne; Fresh Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Bringing together an international line-up of established and emerging scholars, the collection (edited by Paddy Lyons, John Miller and Willy Maley) takes Irish Studies in new directions, by exploring the work of less well-known but hugely significant writers whose work has been neglected or overlooked, as well as the major figures of the period, from Edgeworth and Moore to Yeats and Synge. Alison's essays are entitled '"Lowering the Tone": Wolfe Tone in 1898 - commemoration and commodification', and '"Posing Paddy for Empire": Dion Boucicault Staging the Oirish'.

       Wolfe Tone 1763-1798                   Dion Boucicault 1820-1890

The Business of Pleasure

Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger has published an essay entitled 'The Business of Pleasure: modernity, marketing, and music hall in fin-de-siècle Ireland'. The chapter appears in Ireland in/and Europe: Cross-Currents and Exchanges, edited by Werner Huber, Sandra Mayer and Julia Novak (WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012).

Beacon external funding workshop

John                           Alison                               Angela

The Cultural and Regional Studies Beacon is holding a workshop on the topic of external grant applications on Wednesday, 12th December, 1-3pm in Priestman 015.

The workshop will be led by Professor John Strachan (Bath Spa University), Dr Alison Younger (English) and Dr Angela Smith (English). It is aimed at Beacon members with all levels of external grant bidding experience. John and Alison will start by talking about their experience of bidding. John will also give a short presentation on the new AHRC regulations for Research Fellowships and Alison will offer an insight into philanthropic funders. The second part of the workshop will be led by Angela and will consist of sharing ideas, strategies, enthusiasm and innovation. It would be useful if everyone brought ideas with them regarding bids that have already been submitted or are about to be, developed ideas that are about to be turned into bids, and ideas that are less specific but could be turned into bids.

The aim of the workshop is to provide an informal environment that is both supportive and enjoyable. It is hoped that this might be developed into a more round table get-together for Beacon members to enhance a research environment where our ideas for fundings bids, publications, conferences and general innovation can be shared and supported.

Please email Sarah Hackett (sarah.hackett-1@sunderland.ac.uk) to confirm your attendance. Mince pies will be provided!

NEICN papers

1864 Mitchell map of Ireland and Scotland

Three members of staff and two PhD students from the Department of Culture will be giving papers at the Tenth Annual NEICN conference which takes place from the 9th to the 11th of November at the City Campus of the University of Sunderland. Dr David Fallon's paper is entitled '"No country for old men": reflections on Yeats's early Platonism'. Colin Younger will be speaking on 'Representations of the Border Reivers as outlaw heroes in the riding ballads' while Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger's paper is called 'Doing their bit for Ireland: Markievicz and Skinnider'. Phd students Jamie Spears and Robert Finnegan will be giving papers on the Rosicrucians and Yeats, and Arthur O’ Shaughnessy and Decadence respectively. Further details about the conference can be found here.

Alison O'Malley-Younger's Celtic Connections

Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger has co-edited, with Professor Willy Maley from the University of Glasgow, a collection of essays entitled Celtic Connections: Irish-Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture (Peter Lang, 2013). The volume offers a sustained and up-to-date analysis of the cultural connections between these two neighbour nations, too often overwhelmed by their larger neighbour, England. As well as co-editing the volume, Alison has contributed an essay: 'Doctors and devils: diagnosing racial degeneracy in Stevenson's Gothic fiction'. The collection also contains a chapter by Lauren Clark entitled 'Second cities of Empire: Celtic consumerism exhibited.' Lauren was recently awarded her PhD from the Department of Culture.

Alison O'Malley-Younger on commodity spectacle

Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger's chapter entitled ''A Parliament of Monsters': Commodity Spectacle in Nineteenth-century Irish Popular Entertainment' appears in Ireland in Drama, Film and Popular Culture (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012) edited by Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak and Margarete Rubik.

Dr Lauren Clark

Lauren Clark (MA Glasgow) has been awarded a PhD from the Department of Culture. Her thesis, entitled  "Modest Proposals: Irish Children, Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature, 1860-1921" is a study of the role of the Victorian Irish child in an emergent Irish consumer and advertising culture. Informed by Irish and French Literature and Irish social history, the thesis, which was supervised by Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger (Sunderland) and Professor John Strachan (Northumbria) was one of the key outputs of a three year Leverhulme funded research project "Consumer Culture, Advertising and Literature in Ireland 1848-1921." 

Spectral Visions one-day conference

The MA English team at Sunderland is hosting a day conference on 26th June designed to 'lift the veil' on the enduringly popular genre of 'Gothic'.

Keynote speakers include Professor Willy Maley (University of Glasgow) on 'the Dark Side of Macbeth'; Professor John Strachan (University of Northumbria) on Surrealism and Gothic, and Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger (University of Sunderland) on the Gothic Monstrosity.

Workshops delivered by the MA English team include: Dr Susan Mandala on 'the Neanderthal in Fiction'; Dr Alex Pheby on 'Gothic Fantasies - Guided Writing', Dr David Fallon on Wuthering Heights, Dr Alison O'Malley-Younger on 'Late Victorian Gothic', and Mr Colin Younger on 'Northern Ghost Stories and 'Boggle' Tales'. There will also be presentations by current MA students, and an opportunity to speak to them about the course.

Conference organizers in Gothic garb