Theory, Criticism, and Culture

EASTER TERM 2024

 

The first meeting of this term's Theory, Criticism, and Culture Seminar will take place next Monday, 29th April, at 5.00 p.m. in the English Faculty Board Room.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Timothy Anderson, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of East Anglia, who will give a paper entitled 'Pennings, Clippings, Breathings: Pastoral and Plain English in the Writings of William Barnes' (abstract below).

All are welcome; refreshments will be served. Any queries, please write to Ross Wilson (rmw24@cam.ac.uk).

Abstract: My paper will address the contradictions of ‘plain English’ in the work of William Barnes (1801-86). Barnes wrote his best poems in Dorsetshire dialect, addressing rural life and hardship through the speech of typical rural characters. His linguistic and political writings, meanwhile, devised a new vocabulary which Barnes called 'Teutonic English'. Consonants became ‘pennings’ and ‘clippings’. Vowels became ‘breathings’. My paper will show how this agrarian gloss may shape how we read Barnes’s pastoral verse, especially his alliterative poems of 1846. I will argue that alliteration (or breath-pennings, in Barnes’s language) amounts to an ‘ordinary ornament’ in Barnes’s verse. This will suggest wider conflicts in nineteenth-century ideas of pastoral, as well as enduring unease about the political energies of plain or common English.