I’m not sure that I can do justice to Maria DiBattista’s Novel Characters: A Genealogy (2010) in this hot Mediterranean afternoon and after a mind-numbing two-week spell of marking. The case, however, is that I can’t stop thinking of her distinction between self and identity (or, rather, Self and Identity) and I’d like to add […]
The title of my post today is intended to be ambiguous: I mean to say that it is thanks to the love of his wife Mary that Percy Shelley is celebrated as a major poet, and that both he and all poetry readers must thank her for her efforts. As she wrote, ‘He died, and […]
It has become commonplace to see Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) through the lens of his drug addiction, which is why it is perhaps quite wrong to begin this post in this way. His case, however, must be contextualized and his addiction treated as an ailment similar to that currently killing 130 Americans every day and […]
I shared with my ‘English Romantic Literature’ class the video showing Jon Cheryl perform his musical version of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFexFkJwrAo) and also Michael Griffin’s song ‘London’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAkEyFbGjTc) based on Blake’s eponymous poem. We agreed that both songs are cool and that, by definition, an author whose work can be enjoyed in this […]
Tomorrow I’ll be introducing my class in ‘English Romantic Literature’ to the pleasure of discovering William Blake (1757-1827). I haven’t taught this course in fifteen years and, so, I needed to re-discover Blake myself, re-learn the basics I must transmit. Within limits, careful as usual not to let myself be carried away and use for […]
The volume that interests me today is a novel: No Mean City (1935), ‘the classic novel of the Glasgow slum underworld’ as the cover of the Corgi edition announces. Apparently, this novel has its origins in the short stories written by Gorbals unemployed baker Alexander McArthur. They were polished for publication by journalist H. Kingsley […]
I have just read two excellent volumes on organized crime in the UK, one by Alan Wright (Organised Crime: Concepts, Cases, Controls, 2006) and the other by Dick Hobbs (Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK, 2013). Reading the last novel by Ian Rankin in the long John Rebus series, In a House of […]
Last week I gave a lecture in Bilbao within a cycle devoted to publicising women’s work as scientists. My lecture was called “Women Scientists that Tell Stories: New Humanist SF Written by Women” which sounds worse in English than it does in Spanish (“Científicas que narran historias: Nueva ciencia ficción humanista escrita por mujeres”). You […]
I had a truly weird experience yesterday attending Irvine Welsh’s presentation of his novel Un polvo en condiciones, Francisco González’s translation of A Decent Ride (Anagrama, 2015). This is the tenth novel in Welsh’s long list, which also includes four short story collections and also plays. I decided to attend because I was meeting a […]
I have suggested to one of my prospective doctoral students to consider studying the configuration of secondary characters (in Harry Potter) for his dissertation and, so, I have embarked on a small bibliographical search to see what is available generally speaking on characters. This post is a record of my failure to find much of […]