Volume 7 of Codex is now out!

The 2020 edition of the Humanities undergraduate research journal Codex is now out. Visit the site to read eight fascinating articles based on Third Year dissertations in English language and literature.

Astrid Newby Multicultural Northeastern English (MNE): Could the North East be Host to a New Centre for the Emergence of a Multiethnolect?

Julie Egan Husband versus Wife: An Exploration of the Representations of Gender and Marriage within the Satire of Juvenal, Ben Jonson and Aphra Behn

James Lowther ‘Finished with the War’: The Depiction of War and Masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Pat Barker’s Regeneration

Shelby Penman “Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?”: Intertextual Metempsychosis in James Joyce’s Ulysses and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

Louise Thompson An Exploration of Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl and Rosa as Work that Challenges Adorno’s Claim that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’

Fiona King Exploitation of a Patriarchal System in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind and Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett

John Ferry Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Book of Genesis and How Those Representations are Used to Create a System of Patriarchal Hegemony

Sarah Raistrick What Linguistic Strategies do Students and Teachers Use in Order to Create a Co-operative and Collaborative Learning Environment in the Key Stage 1 Classroom?

North east pronouns

English dialects demonstrate considerable variation in their pronominal systems, and pronouns in North East England often contrast with those found in Standard English. As this anecdote published in the Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend in 1887 illustrates, the pronominal idiosyncrasies of the region's English have long been the subject of comment, and Dr Mike Pearce gives us his take on the subject in the form of an article published in English Today, which explores how the North East pronoun system manifests itself in a large, naturalistic corpus of online writing (other aspects of the morphology and syntax of North East English are explored on Mike's research website).

Pearce, Michael. 2020. The Participatory Vernacular Web and Regional Dialect Grammar: A New Account of Pronouns in North East England. English Today.

The sexy dad and caring father

Professor Angela Smith has contributed an entry on male stereotypes to the International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. It explores how fatherhood can be articulated as both an opportunity for men to demonstrate their caring, nurturing side, while also being a site for sexual desirability, popularly referred to as the “DILF.” Angela shows how the “new man” masculinity that emerged in the 1990s came to be linked with the popularizing of female‐directed pornography around the same time, finally merging in the 21st century as the “sexy dad.” By drawing on various media texts relating to fatherhood, she shows how there is a self‐presentation of fatherhood that is largely in line with the caring, emotional “new man,” but at times wittily espousing a playful form of macho masculinity linked with gym culture. This is contrasted with the media interpretation of such fatherhood that seeks to sexualize the male body in the popular press. The discussion finds that the act of carrying or holding a child becomes a site for these two discourses to meet, both in the visual images used to illustrate stories and in the associated text.

Smith, A. 2020. Male Stereotypes: The Sexy Dad and Caring Father. In Ross, K. et al. (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.