Too late for a ghost story?
Excellently creepy seventeenth-century ghost-song. Enjoy!
Advent Calendar Day 16: Quiz!
Earlier in Advent, the fragrant Jem Bloomfield described this month’s project as my “literary Advent Calendar”, coincidentally slightly before I started posting clips of 70s sitcoms and much-loved puppet shows. To reinforce the high moral tone, therefore, I offer you a lovely Christmas books quiz from the Guardian website. Christmas, games and quizzes obviously go…
Poor Oxford!
“Poor Oxford! Will she, I wonder, ever be made successfully the background for a play, or for a novel?” — Max Beerbohm, 4th October, 1902 (Around Theatres, p. 224).
CFP: Victorian Network
Call for Papers: Sex, Courtship and Marriage in Victorian Literature and Culture Victorian Network is an MLA-indexed (from 2012) online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies. The sixth issue of Victorian Network, guest edited by Dr Greta Depledge (Royal Holloway), is dedicated to a reassessment of nineteenth-century constructions…
Research 2.0
Oxford is enjoying the long vac. This is the academic summer holiday; the period running from the end of 8th week Trinity (usually in late June), to October and Freshers’ Week. It is also the period to which proper academics refer as “time for getting some real work done”. I’m doing my best. I’ve handed…
Sarah Daniels: Plays 1
Ages ago, the nice people at methuen drama very kindly offered to send me a free book (I forget why, but thank you very much and please, more of the same). In an excess of irresponsibility, I decided NOT to choose anything vaguely useful to my course, and to instead pick, at random, the work…
Thesis Wordles
Inspired by a conversation I had with Alex, when handing in our writing samples last Thursday, here are the results of some playing around with Wordle. My latest submission:My latest thesis outline: And, finally, that AHRC proposal!
Call To Register: Oxford English Graduate Conference “The Famed and The Forgotten”
Registration is now open for The Famed and The Forgotten, taking place on 10th June in Oxford University’s English Faculty. 45 student speakers from Oxford and around the UK will be delivering papers on the concepts of ‘famed’ and ‘forgotten’, interrogated in the broadest possible terms across genres and periods encompassing Old English to the…
Read more Call To Register: Oxford English Graduate Conference “The Famed and The Forgotten”
5 of the best: favourite fictional writers
John Mullan’s article on ten of the best fictional poets made me smile. I’ve often speculated on why so many writers write about writers. Sometimes, it’s part of a wishful (or wistful) self-insertion into the text. The first example I ever noticed was Darrell Rivers in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series. Darrell is pretty obviously…
NaNoWriMo, murder and the Wallace affair…
This is, I guess, an appropriate post for the run-up to Hallowe’en! Warning: gory/disturbing stuff beneath the cut (my first attempt at using one on WordPress, hope it works!) A couple of days ago, I signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. For the uninitiated, this is a worldwide online project where participants each…
