A triangular affair

Dr Miguel Gomes has published a chapter in which he discusses his own translation into modern Spanish of the seven early medieval poems often referred to as the Old English elegies. Miguel considers the unavoidable anachronism of addressing a later audience, the projection of an imagined reader and the (im)possibility of cross-cultural understanding, as well as the 'infiltrations' and silences of the source and the translated text. He also reflects on the nature of literary translation in the context of early medieval texts and how to face 'the third point of the triangle' in the translation process, what John Berger (2016) defined as that which lies 'behind the words of the original text before it was written …to reach, to touch the vision or experience which prompted them.' The significance of these words will be explored alongside Edwin Morgan’s understanding of what he named a 'full translation', one that 'aims to interest and at times to excite the reader of poetry without misleading anyone who has no access to the original.'

'A Triangular Affair': Oddities, Readability and Excitement in the Translation of the Old English Elegies into Spanish.' In Literature, Science and Religion: Textual Transmission and Translation in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Manel Bellmunt Serrano and Joan Mahiques Climent (Edition Reichenberger, 2020).

Political offensiveness

In a chapter co-authored with Martin Montgomery (University of Macau) and Michael Higgins (Strathclyde University) entitled 'Political offensiveness in the mediated public sphere: the performative play of alignments', Professor Angela Smith explores developing concerns about the rise of offensiveness in the political public sphere and more especially in social media. The authors argue that current iterations of purposeful political offence should be considered in the context of a number of factors.  One is the ascendency of short-form social media such as Twitter and Instagram, which disperse and fragment the discourse of political elites, enabling multi-articulated tactics of address that are subject to processes of remediation.  A second factor is the rise of “post-truth” politics (Montgomery, 2017), in which impressions of personal authenticity take the place of facts, and truth becomes less important than ‘speaking your mind’. The chapter shows that several significant cases of political offence take form and shape along an axis between ’authentic' expression (or ‘speaking your mind’) and submission to political correctness.

'Political offensiveness in the mediated public sphere: the performative play of alignments' can be found in Anne Graefer (ed) Media and the Politics of Offence. Palgrave, 2019.

Contesting Islamophobia

Dr Geoff Nash has published a chapter co-authored with Dr Nath Aldalala’a (University of Shandong, China) entitled 'Islamophobia and the War of Representations: Martin Amis's 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta'', in Contesting Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Prejudice in Media, Culture and Politics (Bloomsbury 2019).

The collection reveals the way in which Islamophobia's pervasive power is being met with responses that challenge it and the worldview on which it rests. The volume breaks new ground by outlining the characteristics of contemporary Islamophobia across a range of political, historic, and cultural public debates in Europe and the United States. Its editors are Professor Peter Morey, University of Birmingham, Dr Amina Yaqin and Dr Alaya Forte, both of the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London.

Dr Geoff Nash has recently become a Research Associate at SOAS (University of London).  

Landscapes of evil

Dr Miguel Gomes (Languages) has published a chapter entitled 'Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxon Hero’s Journey through the Labyrinth'. Miguel uses the idea of labyrinth as a symbolic landscape to explain the structure of Beowulf. He argues that the poem presents an intricate design in which elements such as alliterative patterns, repetitions, variations, recurrent themes and other additions form a maze resembling the journey that the hero himself will have to undertake. To a certain extent, this structure resembles the curvilinear and rectilinear patterns of contemporary decorative art, as seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells. Miguel claims that the labyrinth, conceived as a metaphor, a physical and a mental representation, could well be a more comprehensive alternative to previous proposals for the analysis of the poem. He supports this assertion by analysing different passages that connect with the idea of labyrinth, creating a clear tension between linearity and circularity that contributes to the greatness of the poem. Perhaps the final purpose of a labyrinth is precisely not having a purpose. The joy, mystery and greatness of the journey itself - as for Beowulf-  should be the main attraction.

Gomes, M. 2018. 'Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxon Hero’s Journey through the Labyrinth'. In María José Esteve Ramos and José Ramón Prado-Pérez (eds) Textual Reception and Cultural Debate in Medieval English Studies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Gender in 'crisis', everyday sexism and the Twittersphere

A new volume of essays entitled Crisis and the Media features a chapter by Professor Angela Smith. In it, she explores how rejections of claims for equality are represented in the technology of the twenty-first century, but at the same time embody the language of a pre-feminist world and can thus be seen to at once empower and restrict feminist discourse. In this way, the crisis in gender relations is one that emerges in the 1990s in Westernised contexts and continues to develop into the twenty-first century, contributing to the emergence of a Fourth Wave of feminist action. As such, 'crisis' is employed to explore how various small events, seemingly insignificant in isolation, have been raised to public notice through social media to enhance the emergence of Fourth Wave Feminism in the last ten years.

Smith, A. 2018. 'Gender in "crisis", everyday sexism and the Twittersphere.' In Patrona, M. (ed) Crisis and the Media. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.231-260. 

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''.

Two new chapters from Geoff Nash

'Britain,' chapter 33 in Waïl Hassan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, outlines the work of Arab British writers in the context of the volume’s examination of worldwide fiction in many languages by writers of Arab ethnicity.

'A fundamental aesthetic: Said Nursi’s re-writing of the Qur’an into the idiom of modernity' appears in Bridging the Divide: Essays on Language and Literature, and Islamic Studies – A Commemorative volume to mark the 60th birthday of Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai (New Delhi: Viva books).  The piece discusses the Kurdish-Turkish Muslim revivalist Bediuzzaman Said Nursi’s project of re-writing Islam into a modern idiom.

Re-reading Spare Rib

Professor Angela Smith has edited a collection of essays about Spare Rib, one of the most iconic symbols of Second Wave Feminism, whose influence has far out-lived the span of its publication (1972-1993).  Re-Reading Spare Rib (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) examines various aspects of the magazine - based on the digitised publication by the British Library in 2015 - in order to explore the ways in which it has influenced society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the lives of individual readers. By analysing several articles from a modern, post-feminist perspective, and using cross-generational interviews of Spare Rib readers and reflective accounts of reading the publication, the significance and endurance of the publication is demonstrated. Written by academics, experienced researchers and independent scholars alike, the inter-disciplinary nature of the text results in a multi-dimensional reading of Spare Rib suitable for both an academic and general readership interested in cultural and media studies.

In addition to Angela, two other members of the School of Culture have contributed chapters: Dr Kath Kerr-Koch, and PhD student Maria Fotiadou. Other Sunderland contributions come from Professor Catherine Donovan, Professor Donna Chambers, Professor Bridget Cooper, Dr Sheila Quaid,  Dr Rob Worrall, Dr Paul-Alan Armstrong, Trish Bryans, and Helen Fraser.

Gun control and the Second Amendment

Dr Kevin Yuill (with Joe Street of Northumbria University) has edited a book entitled, The Second Amendment and Gun Control, Freedom, Fear, and the American Constitution (Routledge 2018). The collection of essays situates discussion about gun controls within contemporary debates about citizenship, culture, philosophy and foreign policy as well as in the more familiar terrain of politics and history. It features experts on the Constitution as well as chapters discussing the symbolic importance of Annie Oakley, the role of firearms in race, and filmic representations of armed Hispanic girl gangs. It asks about the morality of gun controls and of not imposing them. Published in the spirit of open debate about contentious subjects, it is finely balanced between those who favour more gun controls and those who oppose them. Dr Yuill’s chapter - 'From Virtuous Armed Citizen to "Cramped Little Risk-Fearing Man": The Meaning of Firearms in an Insecure Era' – argues that the two sides of the debate are simply alternative strategies to deal with existential insecurities. One side seeks a policy solution of removing all weapons while the other employs the individual strategy of packing a gun.

The linguistic landscape of North East England

Research on language attitudes and perceptual dialectology has shown that north-east English is one of the most widely recognized and positively evaluated varieties in Britain. There is also a rich tradition of dialect writing associated with the region, and a long history of both ‘folk’ and scholarly attention to local forms of language – for example, it is the only part of England to have a major corpus devoted to it – the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. However, one element is missing from the otherwise well-charted dialectological terrain. Dr Michael Pearce has addressed this gap in a chapter published in Perspectives on Northern Englishes (Mouton de Gruyter, 2017), which gives an account of localized forms in the ‘linguistic landscape’ (that is, the public display and representation of written language on road signs, advertisements, house names, vehicles, and so on). This first foray into an under-researched aspect of the region’s local linguistic ecology describes and contextualizes a corpus of signs compiled in 2014–15, showing how they draw extensively on a set of features which previous studies have revealed to be enregistered as part of north-east dialect. The implications of the findings are discussed and the – perhaps surprisingly – infrequent appearance of such forms in the linguistic landscape is addressed.

You can read more about Michael's research on the language of the region here.

Pragmatic stylistics and dramatic dialogue

Dr Susan Mandala (Reader in Pragmatic Stylistics, TESOL) has published a chapter in Dialogue across Media, an edited collection published by John Benjamins (Mildorf and Thomas (eds.) 2017). In her chapter 'Pragmatic stylistics and dramatic dialogue', Susan views dramatic dialogue as a form of exchange that can be read on the page just as legitimately as it can be experienced on stage. Employing a pragmatic stylistic analysis linking the text on the page to her interpretation, she offers a re-reading of Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. While for Burton (1980) Ben was 'the dominating and superior interactant,' and Gus 'the dominated and inferior one' (70), Susan argues that it is Gus who can be considered the dominating character and shows in the concluding discussion why this recalibration of power is significant for a wider understanding of the play.

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'.

The Book of Khalid

Dr Geoff Nash has contributed an essay to a new critical edition of Ameen Rihani's 1911 novel The Book of Khalid (2016, Syracus University Press, edited with an Introduction by Todd Fine). Geoff discusses the novel in relation to Ameen Rihani, Kahlil Gibran and the migrant scene in New York and Boston in the first decades of the twentieth century, foregrounding the contemporary vogue for Arab/Oriental writers and discussing in particular their championing by influential American women.

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.

Blake, Albion and the French Revolution

Blake's Albion

An essay by Dr David Fallon has been published in Home and Nation in British Literature from the English to the French Revolutions, a Cambridge University Press collection edited by A.D. Cousins and Geoffrey Payne. In 'Homelands: Blake, Albion, and the French Revolution', David shows the significance in Blake's writing of the Enlightenment discourse of national manners and the emerging notions of nationalism and the militarised nation-state that arose during the British wars with revolutionary France. Blake's poetry reveals a complex relationship to nationalism as he attempts to articulate a form of distinctly British patriotism without endorsing the 'official' martial British nationalism of the time. He argues that Blake, like a number of radical contemporaries, regarded the violence of the French Revolution and the aggressive response of Britain arising from deeply engrained national cultures.

Riots in Thatcher's Britain

Easington Colliery 1984. Photo by Keith Pattison

Dr Peter Hayes has published a chapter entitled 'Riots in Thatcher's Britain' in Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He takes a fresh look at three violent confrontations during Margaret Thatcher's period as Prime Minister: the inner city riots, the Miners' Strike and The Poll Tax Riot.  The chapter suggests that Thatcher's response to the inner city riots was not one of mere condemnation as she recognised that racist policing and unemployment were contributory factors. It explains how the decision not to hold a strike ballot caused some of the violence in the Miners' Strike, and contributed to its failure. Finally it considers how the Poll Tax Riot reflected the broader unpopularity of the tax.  This was not only because the poll tax was seen as being unfair but also because local governments had deliberately set the new charge at a high rate.

The morality of informers

Dr Laura O'Brien has published an essay entitled “La moralité des mouchards: Chenu, de la Hodde et la guerre des pamphlets” [The morality of informers: Chenu, de la Hodde and the war of pamphlets]. Her work, which appears in Morales en révolutions: France, 1789-1940 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, April 2015) discusses the multifaceted ideas of ‘morality’ in a series of extremely critical contemporary ‘histories’ of the French revolution of 1848, written in 1849 and 1850 by two former police informers and intended to damage the legacy of both the revolution and 1848’s revolutionaries.

The sensational mind of William Blake

William Blake by John Flaxman (c. 1804)
Source: Wikipedia

'The Sensational Mind of William Blake' is the title of an essay by Dr David Fallon which appears in Réfléchir [sur] la Sensation. Volume 2: Littérature et Création dans la Monde Britannique (2014, Éditions des archives contemporaines). David explores the role of sensation in Blake's depiction of the mind's development and growth, arguing that the Blakean philosophy of mind has a much closer and nuanced relationship to Enlightenment modes of thought than has previously been recognised.  

John Locke

John Locke by 

Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oil on canvas. Britain, 1697.

Source: Wikimedia Commons 

The English liberal philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was one of the most influential thinkers to have promoted the view that governments should uphold democracy, tolerance and human rights (rather than promulgate patriarchal, aristocratic, and narrowly religious principles). He is the subject of an encyclopedia entry by Dr Peter Hayes in the recently published Encyclopedia of Modern Political Thought (Sage, 2013).

Geoff Nash on Ameen Rihani

Ameen Rihani
(Source: Wikipedia)

The Lebanese-American writer Ameen Rihani (1876-1940) - widely regarded as the father of the Arab novel in English - is the subject of a recently published essay by Dr Geoff Nash, who argues that Rihani was a modern figure who manoeuvred his way between the gaps of fixed western and Arab identities.

Geoff's chapter is called 'Beyond Orientalism: Khalid, the Secular City, and the Transcultural Self' and it appears in The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American Literature and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).