The English Miscellany

Lord Byron (1788-1824) In 1812 Byron's 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' sold its run of 500 copies in three days. Byron wrote 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous. Larger edition of 3000 copies were printed and quickly sold out. Byron's publisher  offer to pay him 1000 guineas for The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos. In 1814 The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) Perhaps best known today for writing THE stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand! Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the

The path to publication is arduous! "Publication is a self-invasion of privacy." - - -  Marshall McLuhan You can't publish unless you've written something ... 1. Ban thoughts of failure or rejection; by starting to write you are improving on the blank page of terror 2. Write a rough draft quickly; the quality of the writing should be worked on later 3. Familiarise yourself with an appropriate academic phrasebank 4. Learn to use a range of connectives in order to make your ideas flow 5. Avoid writing marathons - they seldom produce quality outcomes 6. Learn to use short stretches of highly focused writing time 7. Check that your have displaced all potential distractions 8. Identify SMART targets for your short periods of writing: Specific – target a specific area for improvement. Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress. Assignable – specify who will do it. Realistic – state what results can realistically

Introduction Definitions of the Abject The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth The excrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement, vomit The uncanny; the corpse A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” (Kristeva)  "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject". (Kristeva) Outline of the Strengths and weaknesses of the Kristeva's model of the Abject Strengths Appeals to universal sense of disgust when faced with body fluids and waste products Explains popular cultural narrative of horro

Is the obsession with logic and rationality a limitation imposed on the free flow of writing by the hegemony of patriarchal men? Is it possible to interrogate order and structure in writing has a masculinised project of control; to think of it as a phallocentric, a logocentric project? On first inspection, it is an odd notion that writing is a pre-determined product of the shape of our bodies. But the anatomical difference between the female and the male body has been considered a sufficient criterion throughout most of recorded time -   and across the majority of societies - to constitute a major difference between the sexes. It is a short step from the recognition of difference to the creation of a system of unequal treatment and discrimination. The idea that writing as a cultural production participates in this project, perhaps even perpetuates it, is clearly not far-fetched. This critical feminist approach claims that the body is written into our daily discourse. In

Most writers and intrigued by the idea that they might be more productive. Some writers want to become prolific. Some writers, such as Shakespeare, were able to churn out two or more major works every year; others, such as Charles Dickens or Walter Scott, astonish us by the sheer quantity of their work. I was surprised to discover recently that my writing notebook lists plans for 23 books. Clearly some of these projects are little more than a title and an outline. So the problem is not having ideas, it’s more a question of having the time, the discipline and the confidence to see them through to completion as published works. In short, I am now trying to increase my productivity by researching some of the recurring ideas typically adopted by successful writers. While doing some research recently on translations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata , I cam across the impressive productivity of JackLindsay , who produced 170 creative and non-fiction works during his long career.

When s tudent reader s s truggle with poetry, it' s often the relation s hip between s ound and s en s e that pre s ent s a high degree of difficulty. It' s very ea s y to be overcome by pitter-patter rhythm s and arcane name s for metrical technique s and poetic form s . But picking s ound pattern s may help to open up a variety of interpretation s . Thi s mean s s hifting from the identification of a local effect to the elaboration of more complex and nuanced s emantic po ss ibilitie s . The fir s t s onic ta s k for the critical reader involve s the s potting of s imilar s ound s s uch a s alliteration. A higher level of creative reading require s s en s itivity in order to link the s e s ound clu s ter s to the poem' s que s tion s , and it s an s wer s . A great poem hold s together, in tight compre ss ion, the different element s of form and technique, tone s and s tyle, form and content. Critical writing - the expo s ition and appre

The publication of a new edition of Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) presents a timely opportunity to explore a classic expression of the theory and practice of tragic drama. This is also an opportunity for new readers to encounter a distinctive appreciation of Shakespeare’s work in the context of more recent literary and cultural theories. In the process, the obstacles to a clear understanding of what Bradley thought are explored, and we seek to explain why many critics were often hostile to his writings on Shakespeare. We then proceed to an interrogation of Bradley’s philosophy of tragedy in the context the wider project of the development of English Studies as an educational discipline since the end of the nineteenth century. This frame of analysis will also be informed by recent post-colonial theories which will be positioned within the context of literary study understood as a distinctive project of enlightened humane education. [...] One of the predicamen