Search results
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
In 1960–62, a large number of white autochthonous parents in Southall became very concerned that the sudden influx of largely non-Anglophone Indian immigrant children in local schools would hold back their children’s education. It was primarily to placate such fears that ‘dispersal’ (or ‘bussing’) was introduced in areas such as Southall and Bradford, as well as to promote the integration of mostly Asian children. It consisted in sending busloads of immigrant children to predominantly white suburban schools, in an effort to ‘spread the burden’. This form of social engineering went on until the early 1980s. This book, by mobilising local and national archival material as well as interviews with formerly bussed pupils in the 1960s and 1970s, reveals the extent to which dispersal was a flawed policy, mostly because thousands of Asian pupils were faced with racist bullying on the playgrounds of Ealing, Bradford, etc. It also investigates the debate around dispersal and the integration of immigrant children, e.g. by analysing the way some Local Education Authorities (Birmingham, London) refused to introduce bussing. It studies the various forms that dispersal took in the dozen or so LEAs where it operated. Finally, it studies local mobilisations against dispersal by ethnic associations and individuals. It provides an analysis of debates around ‘ghetto schools’, ‘integration’, ‘separation’, ‘segregation’ where quite often the US serves as a cognitive map to make sense of the English situation.
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
immortality, death, and morality. I explore the ways in which the writer-director applies his thesis on the importance of death to the horror genre, and examine how this subverts an understanding of death as the dark element to be feared. I go on to analyse how del Toro, through Cronos, establishes an auteurist identity, which will be developed with experience and access to larger budgets. I argue for the centrality of early horror filmmakers James Whale and Terence Fisher, and their interpretations of Dracula and Frankenstein. Finally, I consider traits which are common to
through the last part of the 1950s, into the 1960s and then on to the 1970s, British horror was one of the most commercially successful areas of British cinema. 2 As Wyndham indicates, easily the most prolific of horror producers was the relatively small company called Hammer Films, from which there emerged from 1956 onwards a series of gothic horrors, most notably those featuring Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, which were to become famous throughout much of the
: Tod Browning's Dracula ( 1931 ), followed by James Whale's Frankenstein ( 1931 ), both for Universal, and Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ( 1931 ) for Paramount Pictures. Of course, there were films made earlier that have come to be identified as examples of silent horror, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame , Phantom of the Opera , The Unknown , The Man Who Laughs , The Cat and the Canary . This is, however, a retrospective categorisation through a recognition of the tropes of horror as they have subsequently been established. In the silent
the evil nature of the killers, unequivocal judgements were difficult to make. Perhaps the act, and the circumstances that surrounded it, were symptoms of the critical nature of the times. Much later, reviewing the case and its reverberations, Blake Morrison commented: ‘it is the age of the Bad Boys. And we’re the Frankensteins who made them. From the spring of 1993 can be dated this new horror, of
. In fact, I go so far as to suggest that Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are at the inception of a nascent mutation of the Gothic, what I term the Canadian ecoGothic. The chapter explores in particular the monsters in the texts – Jimmy/Snowman, the monstrous human survivor who cares for the Crakers; the humanoid Crakers, manufactured by the real Frankenstein of the text
the emergence of legal personality and the development of its powers. The UN is neither a ‘super-state’ nor simply a ‘talking shop’, but does it have sufficient autonomy to become a type of ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, whereby the creature becomes more powerful than its creator? 32 Klabbers provocatively raises this spectre at the front of his textbook, 33 but a detailed assessment of the metaphor is given by Guzman: States sometimes create their own form of artificial life, the international organization (IO). Dr Frankenstein created his monster in an attempt
disfigurement in Home Fires (2015–2016); medical experimentation and monstrosity in Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) and Frankenstein Chronicles (2015–2017); nursing as a vehicle of female emancipation in The Crimson Field (2014) and Morocco: Love in Times of War (2017); and all of the above and many more in Downton Abbey (2010–2015), whose most famous plotlines, from Lady Sybil’s death in childbirth to the war