Research English At Durham

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.

Works featured include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette alongside the poetry and prose of her sisters, Emily and Anne Brontë.  The readings also reflect the creative reimaginings inspired by the  Brontës’ fiction in the literature of later women writers, such as  Sylvia Plath and Jean Rhys. The podcast mentions a short art film by Jade Monserrat, called Peat Bog, which reinvokes the spirit of the moors; a short version can be viewed below.

The readers are Professor Michael O’Neill, Dr Jennifer Terry, and Dr Sarah Wootton.

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.

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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. 

Find out more at https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/new-podcast-albion-change-rebirth-and-stagnancy-in-the-middle-english-prose-brut-chronicle

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.  

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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.

Find out more about this podcast at http://wp.me/p2iX9Z-6Nn

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.

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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.

Visit http://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/podcasts   to find out more.

The idea of vivisection –  performing surgical experiments on live animals in the name of science –  makes many people squeamish. Not surprisingly, the ethics of animal  experimentation were hotly debated in the Victorian period too. Asha  Hornsby (University College London) shows how novelists of the time  sought to understand the mentality of the vivisectionist, who needed to  maintain uncannily cool dispassion as he prodded and dismembered the  furry creature before him.

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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.

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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.

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