Research

Textile Shakespeare argues for the vital presence of the 'textile imagination' in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as it explores the economic, cultural, and social centrality of textiles to life in early modern England. Cloth, broadly interpreted, could function as a form of knowledge, skill, and expertise, of power, status, and control; it was a means of both storing and displaying wealth. Cloth, especially in the layered forms of early modern dress, furnished ways of imagining the body and the body politic, the community, the city, the nation, and the self; it was also central to thinking about language, rhetoric, literature, and the act of writing. In chapters based around different materials (linen, leather, wool, silk) and processes (sewing, cutting, folding), Textile Shakespeare recovers this textile liveliness, giving a comprehensive and immersive account of the place of textiles in early modern life and thought, and exploring and animating Shakespeare's plays in ways that have become largely invisible. Grounded in careful and illuminating close reading, it explores the entire range of Shakespeare's works, on the page and in performance in both the early modern theatre and on the contemporary stage.

A great thinning of the skies is underway. Around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide. Our dawns and springs are quieter each year than the last. An almost unimaginable abundance has been lost. It does not have to be this way –– but we will not save what we do not love. The Book of Birds is a compendium of forty-nine bird species, from Avocet to Yellowhammer, all of which are presently declining or endangered in Britain. Inspired by the classic bird-books with which the authors grew up, this is a field guide with a difference. It asks not ‘What is that bird?’, but ‘Who is that bird?’ It shows its readers how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.

A generation was told to surrender everything for Jesus. A generation were told they were history makers and could change the world. But what happens when the music fades? In this powerful reflection, Lucy Sixsmith revisits the experience of growing up in the Soul Survivor generation. From the euphoric highs of worship tents and passionate songs to the quiet reckoning of adulthood, Sixsmith traces her journey through the charismatic culture of Soul Survivor, a movement that promised transformation, belonging, and divine purpose. With clarity, compassion, and wit, she explores the longing for purpose, the dangers of power, and the cost of unquestioning faith. When the Music Fades offers a vital reckoning with the past, and a search for grace in what remains.

John Clare’s life has often been told by casting him in various parts – rural genius, thwarted lover, environmentalist, lunatic poet. This biography revisits those familiar stories with a fresh perspective, setting Clare’s own words alongside a sharp reappraisal of his times. Drawing from his autobiographical writings, journals, letters and poetry, it presents a rich, grounded portrait of the man and the places that shaped him. Clare’s sense of identity, rooted in the land around him, was central to his voice as a poet. Through attentive readings of his verse, this book traces the creative and emotional arc of a life both ordinary and extraordinary. Clare emerges not as a tragic stereotype, but as a deeply thoughtful writer confronting change with clarity and care.

The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed? At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

The preoccupations of eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson—the inequities of gender and sexuality; race and white femininity; masculinity, sadism, and control; religion and selfhood; authorship and artistic form—continue to resonate with contemporary readers. This fresh collection reconsiders his oeuvre, expanding and significantly updating critical debate on its meaning and importance. In these lively and engaging essays, contributors examine historically overlooked works, provide new readings of his best-known novels Pamela and Clarissa, and stake a serious claim for the importance of his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison. Diverse, inventive, and provocative, these essays demonstrate the complexity, relevance, and surprising legacies of Richardson’s novels and characters—finding traces in post-conceptual poetry, detective fiction, and in the fantasies of historical romance. Revisiting Richardson reflects on a decade of scholarship while delivering innovative perspectives on an author whose work continues to be indispensable for understanding the history of the novel.

In the past, we were deeply bound to all things green and growing. We once knew the landscape and the plants around us as well as we knew ourselves. But today our relationship with plants and nature has grown distant – we have lost a sense of plants as precious. Vanishing Landscapes tells the story of how plants disappeared from our daily lives one by one. First were apples, then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes like woad, grapes for making wine, and then, eventually, the timber and reeds we used to build our houses and the wheat we grew for our bread. In their place came the first corporation, the first factory, the banking system, private property, global trade, and modern medicine. The history of these plants shows us how we became modern, but it also shows a path to recover some of what we have lost. In Vanishing Landscapes, Bonnie Lander Johnson goes in search of the old life and the people who are still connected to the land. She meets farmers in Ireland, wine makers in Yorkshire and cloth dyers in the Highlands. She cuts reeds in the watery Norfolk fens and camps overnight in a West Country orchard to gaze up at an unchanging sky. Vanishing Landscapes brings to life a world we never knew but still long for, and reminds us that it’s not too late to find a way back.

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo. In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Richard Whitford’s A Work for Householders was a runaway ‘bestseller’ in the early sixteenth-century. First published in 1530, it was the earliest printed English book to direct itself specifically to a middling sort of lay reader: ‘householders…or them that have the guiding or governance of any company’. It was published at least seven times in ten years, attracting readers by offering both spiritual guidance to the layman busily engaged with the world, and succinct practical advice on how to run a thrifty and harmonious household. It drew on the medieval tradition of the mixed life, offering sustenance to the (somewhat) spiritually ambitious layman, and in doing so sought to shore up the faith of those who might be drawn away from traditional belief by the emerging evangelical emphasis on the ordinary Christian’s importance. The text is thus an important work for understanding both lay spirituality and domestic life on the cusp of the Reformation. This edition makes this influential work available for the first time to modern readers in a readable format with extensive notes and preliminary chapters that situate the work in relation to contemporary pragmatic and religious works.

Culture is inextricable from politics. This includes the politics of who we are, as teachers, intellectuals, writers, cultural workers, and students, and what we want to bring to and take from the site of instruction. It also includes the politics of who we want to be, as citizens, professionals, and active contributors to our communities and to the world in general, and what we can be, realistically, in the particular contexts in which we live. Teaching Politically addresses some of the political constraints that shape our pedagogical spaces, especially in the teaching of literature. The book brings together a global group of academics, activists, public intellectuals, poets, and novelists to examine the way politics manifest pedagogically, and how a commitment to educating manifests politically, in and beyond the classroom. At the heart of the discussion is how political and professional paradigms chafe against, intersect with, or otherwise become inseparable from each other in any vocation that attempts to educate: from writing, journalism, and public speaking to art, activism, and medicine. Contributors: Dimitris Christopoulos, Dimitri Dimoulis, Khaled Fahmy, Rishi Goyal, May Hawas, Bonnie Honig, Mona Kareem, Benjamin Mangrum, Nora Parr, Bruce Robbins, Ahdaf Soueif, Omid Tofighian, Elahe Zivardar

From the medieval bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses. Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, north Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places, offering the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world.

Sacrifice and Modern War Writing presents the most extensive study to date of twentieth- and twenty-first-century war writing. Examining works by over 110 authors, Alex Houen surveys how war writing explores sacrifice in relation to major modern and contemporary conflicts, from the First World War to the War on Terror. Various conceptions of sacrifice are examined, including Christian, Jewish, Islamic, and secular. The discussion ranges across literary portrayals of multiple sacrificial practices, including ancient rituals of child sacrifice, martyrdom, scapegoating, and suicide bombing. Houen builds an innovative interdisciplinary approach to how war, sacrifice, and their representations interrelate, and a wide range of Anglophone literature is discussed, including novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, manifestoes, elegies, ballads, and lyric poetry.

This book aims to shed light on the field of contemporary literature by offering a definitive theory of the constellational novel. By the constellational novel, I mean novels that have an associative, essayistic, digressive, and densely patterned prose form. These novels are recognizable by the presence of a first-person narrator committed to drawing affinities and making connections among disparate things. Beginning with Marcel Proust, my argument focuses on novels published over roughly the last two decades (between 2001 and 2020) by writers such as W. G. Sebald, Lisa Robertson, Teju Cole, Jacqueline Rose, and Olga Tokarczuk. Strikingly, it is often assumed that the attunement of their narrators to an unfolding web of potential interconnections holds an ethical promise of new ways of relating to oneself, others, and the world. I consider this implication of ethics and associative form to be peculiar and, in some important respects, unprecedented in the history of the novel. How is recognizing connections between things ethical, exactly? Could it not simply be the working of a resourceful or possibly even deranged intelligence, one that obsessively sees patterns everywhere? Why should the value of literature hinge on such an idiosyncratic process? And what does finding affinities have to do with the more familiar categories of novelistic form, like character and narrative? Taking inspiration from the work of Walter Benjamin, this book analyzes the distinctive ethics of affinity offered by these novels, and thus seeks to clarify one of the most intriguing and consequential developments in the contemporary novel.

This collection of essays is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on the woman known as Pocahontas. Contributions from established leaders in the field offer innovative perspectives on the life of Matoaka/Pocahontas, especially on the creation and perpetuation of her cultural image in the seventeenth century and beyond—and on how new archival research, interdisciplinary methodologies, and contemporary creative practice challenge that image. The chronological scope of this collection, compiled in honor of the late Monacan poet and historian Karenne Wood, illustrates the ongoing legacies of colonialism as they relate to recurring representations of and by Native American women.

In the years after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers created a cultural front of opposition to Zionism in the Communist magazine al-Jadid. Thinkers such as Hana Ibrahim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Sami Michael, Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola and Shimon Ballas formed a new literary aesthetics; they drew on internationalist, anti-colonial and Arab left cultures to challenge the Zionist narrative with stories of their communities. In Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, Hana Morgenstern brings this forgotten literary world and its radical commitments to collaboration to life for the first time, tracing its influences on decades of subversive writing, translation and print. She follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of what she terms cultural co-resistance. Engaging in close historical and literary readings informed by a decade of archival and field work, the book demonstrates how co-resistance shapes and innovates oppositional literature and social imaginaries practised jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the region. Published alongside this volume is the companion anthology A People’s Literature of Israel/Palestine: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which presents the Arabic-language fiction, essays and poetry of this early anticolonial circle in English translation for the first time. The two books together document and interpret cultural co-resistance, situating it within the wider traditions of internationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism.