Research English At Durham

For diplomats coming to the court of Charles I, it was more than a case  of knocking at the door and being shown in. In this Late Summer Lectures  podcast, Kimberley Foy uses the experience of visiting ambassadors to  show how attending the court of Charles I involved a carefully  choreographed set of moves, through particular spaces.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Kathleen Foy from  Durham University explains how James Shirley’s 1639 tragedy The Politician reflected the court and politics of Charles I.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Dr Amanda Blake  Davis of the University of Sheffield takes us on a flight through birds  and embodiment in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Alex Hobday  (University of Cambridge) examines how eighteenth-century culture sought to answer that eternal question: what is happiness, and how can we achieve it?

Two of the Department’s published poets, Gareth Reeves and his PhD student John Clegg, explore how their writing of poetry relates to  their research. 

They explain how they began writing poetry rather than writing about poetry, and discuss how writing poetry gives them unique insights into  the forms and methods employed in the work of other poets.

A century and a half since his birth, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats is one  of the best-loved in the English language, known for his lyric poems  such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innishfree’ or for romantic poems like ‘He  Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’ Throughout his literary career,  though, Yeats wrote in a range of styles and on diverse subjects. His  poems reflect his Irish nationalism, reinvent traditional genres, draw  inspiration from Irish myth and legend, and push into innovative  symbolism. Stephen Regan and Michael O’Neill take us on a journey  through the varied landscape of Yeats’s verse.

Celebrate the literature and legacy of the Brontë sisters in this  podcast, recorded around the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth,  which features readings from and commentaries on their ground-breaking,  powerful, and influential novels and poems.

We humans are creatures of the  land, who usually observe the sea from above its surface. Beneath the  surface, though, the sea looks, sounds and feels like a distinct and  unique environment.  The poet Sarah Hymas invites us beneath the waves,  to perceive the sea and the interrelationship between sea and land,  between it and us, in deep and immersive ways.

Albion. Today that word conjures impressions of a lost, utopian version  of Britain – but the story of Albion as it was originally told in the  middle ages is anything but beautiful. According to the early Brut  chronicle, Albion was first discovered by a group of sisters who then  propagated with the wandering devils they found there, spawning a race  of giants. This was the strange land then conquered by Brutus, who gives  his name to modern Britain. 

Madeleine Smart of the University of  Liverpool continues the story in this podcast, which was recorded during  the series Late Summer Lectures organised by the Department of English Studies at Durham University. 

A king sits by the fire in a peasant’s cottage, brooding on the problems  of his kingdom. Suddenly the smell of burning fills the air. The cakes  left there by his host have been ruined. The king, of course, is Alfred  the Great. But this apocryphal story is just one of many not entirely  true tales that have surrounded this Anglo Saxon monarch through the  ages. David Barrow of the University of York suggests that these stories  tell us less about the king himself, and more about the ideas and  constructions of Englishness in the societies that have told them. 

This  podcast was recorded during the series Late Summer Lectures in 2017,  organised by the Department of English Studies at Durham University.  

Do you get annoyed when people  rustle their crisp packets or check their mobile phones in the theatre?  If so you’re probably not alone – but you might be surprised to learn  that the convention that audiences should be quiet is a relatively new  one. It's also a norm that may exclude spectators who can't help but  fidget and make noise. Hannah Simpson (University of Oxford) invites us  to think carefully about how the etiquette of the theatre might be made  more inclusive, with benefits for everyone.

The idea of genetic engineering  may conjure visions of futuristic horror, such as mutant human beings  with peculiar powers. But some novels and stories, particularly within  utopian literature, imagine more positive trends in human development,  whether driven by science or natural evolution over time. In this  podcast, Sarah Lohmann considers the complexity of approaches to  evolution and eugenics in utopian fiction, and suggests that the genre  itself has evolved in its depiction of these issues over time.

In 1592 the face of theatre  changed forever. From the death of Julius Caesar and its wide political  ramifications, to the love between Antony and Cleopatra played out on an  epic scale, tragic drama had traditionally been associated with the  lives of noble characters drawn from a ruling elite. But the anonymous  play The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham enabled playwrights to  conceive of the stage as the setting for more intimate, family dramas.  Iman Sheeha, of the University of Warwick, treads the boards of the new  domestic tragedies around the turn of the sixteenth century.

This  talk was recorded as part of the series Late Summer Lectures in 2017,  organised by the Department of English Studies at Durham University.

The word ‘romance’ conjures images  of men and women meeting one another and falling helplessly in love.  But if we trace the literature of ‘romance’ back to its roots in the  medieval period, we encounter many stories where chivalric knights and  ladies refuse or fail to conform to convention. Hannah Piercy takes us  on a tour through some of this historic writing of the heart – though  she starts with an example that is much closer to home.

Durham University’s Palace Green  Library is home to many medieval manuscripts, but among the most  precious is one of just three surviving collections of poetry written by  the hand of one Thomas Hoccleve – fourteenth-century civil servant,  letter writer, and poet. Laurie Atkinson puts some of Hoccleve’s  literary output under the reading lamp, as he argues that this  disremembered figure deserves to seen in his own right rather than  hidden in the shadow of his immediate poetic predecessor, Geoffrey  Chaucer.

Imagine yourself immersed in a  beautiful landscape, and being moved by the view before your eyes. To  remember the experience, perhaps you might take a photograph. But while a  photograph can snap a single moment, a still image doesn’t really  reflect the way your original experience unfolded through time. Can  writing achieve something different? Both William Wordsworth and James  Joyce were interested in the problem of how to represent the continuous  stream of conscious experience. Adam James Cuthbert trains his eye on  the poetry and fiction that they produced, and suggests that their  literary efforts can be understood through an analogy with the camera.

Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life. 

What differentiates American writers from their English literary counterparts? And even looking within America rather than across the Atlantic, since America is a diverse and huge nation comprising many different forms of speech, how can one writer ever hope to represent the ‘American’ language or a quintessential American self? 

There can be few things in life more tragic than the death of a child. Not surprisingly, when this is represented in literature, the deathbed scene will surely be poignant, empathetic and emotionally memorable. But as Morven Cook and Oliver Hancock discuss in conversation together, nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century texts are very different in their approach, moving away from representations of the child as the angel of innocence to a more realistically human portrayal.

“Vivam!” “I will live.” The final  word of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, proclaiming the poet’s hope that he will  continue to be known through his great work. It’s a prediction that of  course turns out to be true, as we’re still reading and influenced by  the Metamorphoses 2000 years after it was written. In this podcast,  Simona Martorana helps us to appreciate why the cast of mythical  characters that inhabit the Metamorphoses still survive in our  imagination and culture today.

When we say that a theatre  performance ‘brought the house down’, we usually don’t mean that  literally. But in the case of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, or as it’s  sometimes known, All is True, the phrase really does apply. In a  performance in 1613 a stray spark from a cannon ignited a fire that  burned the Globe Theatre to the ground. In fact, throughout its  chequered history of performance, this play has suffered or enjoyed a  variety of different climaxes. All of which makes Laura Jayne Wright  (University of Oxford) wonder: just what is the real ending of a work  of drama?

Think of a medieval romance, and  you might imagine brave courtly knights dashing to the rescue of women  held captive by monstrous beasts and dragons. But think again. Olivia  Colquitt introduces us to the 14th-century Mélusine story, in which the  beautiful woman is not all that she seems and it is the man who ends up  in need of a rescuer.

"Marley's ghost bothered him  exceedingly.  Every time he resolved within himself, after mature  enquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a  strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same  problem to be worked all through, 'Was it a dream or not?." Scrooge's  internal debate accurately reflects the mid-Victorian dichotomy on  Spiritualism, mesmerism and the supernatural. Claire Horton, of  Loughborough University, explains how in Dickens’s time the ability to  see ghosts was linked to mesmerism, a practice that fired the  imagination of the Victorians.

The debate surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union  exposed, among other things, a suspicion of ‘experts.’ How did  intellectuals become alienated figures? And how might citizens and  academics come together in order to better understand the attitudes and  experiences of the other? English lecturer Simon Grimble reflects on why  despite being in the position of an 'intellectual' he failed to engage  with the democratic process and discussion.

On June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris,  Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed  to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the  carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left  teetering at the top. The following year, Dickens would publish his most  haunting ghost story, ‘The Signalman’. Claire Ashworth shows how this  inspired tale is a representation of repressed trauma, that both looks  back to Dickens’ own experiences but also anticipates the work of later  psychological theorists.

In reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to  travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of  the past, often encountering them  in that strange meeting room  represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine  Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from  classical Greece to contemporary Ireland.

Are philosophy and literature two distinct disciplines, divided by a common language? Emphatically not, according to Michael Mack and Barry Stocker, editors of the new The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. In this podcast, we caught up with Michael and Barry to learn how the power of the imagination, literary uses of language, and an interest in ethics link the two approaches together.