English literature
http://hdl.handle.net/10547/613704
2024-03-15T16:11:24ZBook review: Youth culture and the post-war novel: from teddy boys to Trainspotting
http://hdl.handle.net/10547/626133
Book review: Youth culture and the post-war novel: from teddy boys to Trainspotting
Miles, Philip
Review of the book "Youth Culture and the Post-war Novel: From Teddy Boys to Trainspotting" by Ian Ross.
2023-08-10T00:00:00ZBook review: The inheritance of narrative and space: ‘Houses in Paris, Houses in Cork: Elizabeth Bowen and the Modernist Inheritance’ by Lauren Elkin in Late Modernism and Expatriation, edited by Lauren Arrington (Clemson University Press, 2022).
http://hdl.handle.net/10547/625831
Book review: The inheritance of narrative and space: ‘Houses in Paris, Houses in Cork: Elizabeth Bowen and the Modernist Inheritance’ by Lauren Elkin in Late Modernism and Expatriation, edited by Lauren Arrington (Clemson University Press, 2022).
Darwood, Nicola
Review of ‘Houses in Paris, Houses in Cork: Elizabeth Bowen and the Modernist Inheritance’ by Lauren Elkin in Late Modernism and Expatriation, edited by Lauren Arrington (Clemson University Press, 2022).
2023-10-30T00:00:00ZFinding room and a place: G.B. Stern and the politics of the family house
http://hdl.handle.net/10547/625811
Finding room and a place: G.B. Stern and the politics of the family house
Weedon, Alexis
Through this essay I explore G.B. Stern’s depiction of place though the demarcation of boundaries within houses and neighbourhoods and vying claims to ownership. I reveal how distinctions formerly marked out by class and income were eroded in the twenties and thirties as lifestyle marketing usurped social aspiration in three English novels. Through her fiction Stern explores the politics of domestic space in the unravelling of a life in Bohemian city flats, or the precarious existence of dependents squeezed into an already-full family house. Her characters are the victim of back-biting in a boarding house or the stressed-out city-dweller seeking refuge in a thick-walled cottage lacking in conveniences. At a crisis in their lives her characters migrate to the home shires or to the sea-side, or run away on the GWR train to Cornwall, or, her favourite, take refuge in the south of France and Italy. She wrote about the effect of place on identity in her characters’ lives returning again and again to the same locations in her novels as she iteratively plays with their meaning. The move never solves the difficulties of the relationship, but like shaking a kaleidoscope it changes the pattern.
Gladys Bronwen Stern (1890-1973) is little-known now but was a household name in her day. She was a prolific writer of novels and short stories for the burgeoning interwar story magazines and adapted fiction for the screen in the thirties and forties. In the fifties she appeared on the television review programme The Bookman. Her appearances at the first night of her own and her fellow writers’ plays were recorded in the picture newspapers and her whereabouts was the subject of comment by journalists. It was newsworthy when she stayed with the authors, W. Somerset Maugham, Rebecca West and Sheila Kaye-Smith and when her friends came to her Italian house. The papers reported when she passed through London on her business trips to America or took her holiday in Cornwall with playwright Noel Coward and published pictures of her at the Riviera with the actress Gertie Lawrence and her young pals.
2024-05-03T00:00:00ZGamification and digital fiction
http://hdl.handle.net/10547/625808
Gamification and digital fiction
Jarvis, Timothy; Weedon, Alexis
The commonplace view that reading a book is a silent and solitary pastime, with the occasional listening audience, such as child having a bedtime story read to them, has been challenged during the 20th century as more interactive modes of reading have come to the fore. Rather than being the recipient of a morally improving and didactic story, child readers have come to be viewed as participants, their imaginations stirred and complicit with the storyteller, dictating the mode of telling and even the direction of the story. It is true that books with fold-outs, pockets, moveable characters, pop-ups, a range of textures and sounds, and games and puzzles have long been made for the children’s market. But the revolution in publishing technologies of the past thirty years as a result of digital convergence has made us even more aware of the prevalence of participatory practices in reading. To the haptic features of older interactive books, digital technologies have added balance and directionality, location, voice recording and recognition, and smart elements from mathematics to algorithms to game mechanics. But has not been a straightforward transition: material and digital forms of gamification in children’s fiction have evolved together as authors, publishers, and developers have capitalised on the affordances of technology. In this chapter we look at the shift from material to digital interaction in children’s books, and the history of branching narratives and development of interactive fiction (IF).
2024-05-03T00:00:00Z