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To the parodyists Sellar and Yeatman, the Norman Conquest of 1066 was one of only two noteworthy dates in English history. The date has loomed large in literary histories too, where it has been considered a ‘solid bookend’, between Beowulf and Old English literature on the one hand, and Chaucer, his precursors and his imitators […]
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I’ve made my name mostly as a Woody Guthrie scholar. Around the time of the Guthrie centenary in 2012, I became increasingly aware of references to Guthrie as ‘the father of American protest music’ and ‘the first singer-songwriter’ etc. That implied something that Woody himself would surely have denied: that he hadn’t an extensive inherited […]
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With the pandemic still looming above us, thoughts of passing away may have crossed your mind repeatedly over the last while. Those thoughts, revolving around a kernel of inert fear, most likely did not take hold for very long but were brushed aside and stifled with everyday urgent matters. Our culture, after all, tends to […]
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Philadelphia, Rosenbach Museum and Library, MS 439/16, f. 74r (detail): John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes. Image courtesy of The Rosenbach, Philadelphia.
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On 14 May Boris Johnson announced that preparations have been made to ship 50 ‘illegal’ immigrants from the UK to Rwanda, a country to which they have no connection. This is a cruel and baffling piece of policy, but it is not without precedent. In the late eighteenth century, Black loyalists who had fought for […]
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Peter Brook’s The Empty Space famously begins, I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.[1] Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, […]
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Though best known for its unusual, first-person-plural narrator (a group of office-workers speaking as “we”), Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) also includes a single third-person chapter, which focuses on the workers’ otherwise “unapproachable” boss, Lynn Mason. Later we learn this interlude is part of a novel-within-the novel written by another character, […]
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As a scholar of the literature of climate change, I am often asked, “Can books save the planet?”. Well, not literally, no. But I do believe that fictional narratives in which characters respond to climate crises act as thought experiments—or, indeed, as ‘feeling experiments’—for the reader’s potential response. I believe that fictional, poetic, or dramatic […]
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