Words To That Effect

By Conor ReidSociety & Culture Documentary Arts Books History

Words To That Effect episodes

November 26, 2019 38: Children's Picture Books
Unlike modernist poetry or Shakespearean drama, when it comes to children's literature, everyone has an opinion. Most of us are exposed to kids' books in some shape or form and, crucially, 100% of us have been children.

For an academic working with children's literature, this can have its rewards and its frustrations. "Yes! I love that classic childhood book too!". But also: "Sorry, I don't know why your child doesn't like this one particular book"

This week I'm joined by Dr Jane Carroll to chat about the children's picture book. How do text and image work together to create books that can spark wonder and imagination, that young children can completely lose themselves in? What's happening in children's fiction today, and what's the best children's picture book of all time?

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For full show notes head to wttepodcast.com

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26 min
November 12, 2019 37: The Golden Age of Piracy
Pirates have been around for a very long time. In fact, as far as the historical record seems to show, they have been around for as long as there have been property and boats.

What is it that attracts us to pirates and why have we got such a well-developed set of pirate tropes? We all have the same picture when we think of pirates: peg legs and eyepatches, parrots and pirate accents, walking the plank, buried treasure, the jolly roger.

Prof Manushag Powell joins me to discuss the Golden Age of Piracy, pirate literature, and the history behind the pirates of popular culture.

For shownotes, links, transcripts, and more head to wttepodcast.com

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25 min
October 29, 2019 36: Blood, Death, and Varney the Vampire
There is no pop culture monster more written about, more critiqued and analysed, more portrayed and adapted and reimagined, than the vampire.

So this episode is not about most vampires. There are no discussions of Dracula or Nosferatu, no True Blood or Twilight or Buffy, no Anne Rice or Stephen King, no Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee.

Instead, there is a single vampire, one you may well never have heard of. A vampire that, in Victorian times, was far more popular than even Charles Dickens at the height of his fame. A vampire that established many of the tropes of later vampire mythology and fiction.

His name is Sir Francis Varney.

Varney the Vampire.

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For full show notes head to wttepodcast.com

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29 min
October 15, 2019 35: Jekyll & Hyde
For most people today, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been reduced to a fairly straightforward allegory of the potential dark side within us all.

But if you read Robert Louis Stevenson’s original tale, a short 80-odd page novella, you immediately realise there is so much to this masterpiece of 19th century fiction. There are so many reasons the story has become embedded in popular culture. It has everything: dreams and reality, psychology and medicine, good and evil, degeneracy and criminality, sexuality and self-identity, blackmail, murder, addiction, religion. Have I missed anything?

For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com

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25 min
October 08, 2019 Season 4 Preview
Season 4 returns on Tuesday 15th October. Have a listen to what's in store!

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3 min
June 04, 2019 34: The Art of the Short Story
There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “What makes a truly great short story?” “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?”

But before any of this, there’s a question that’s not that easy to answer at all:

What is a short story?

This week I’m joined by Dr Paul March-Russell, Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent, and author of The Short Story: An Introduction and Colin Walsh, an award-winning short story writer from Galway, Ireland.

We discuss whether you can really define what a short story is, some great examples of the form, and what short stories can do that other forms of literature simply can’t.

For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com

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35 min
May 21, 2019 33: The Noun of Nouns (The Rise of Modern Fantasy)
What do you think of, when you think of the genre of fantasy?
Whether it’s fiction, TV, cinema, or games, are there certain elements you need to have for something to be considered fantasy?
Well, you might say fantasy is medieval, or at least set in a time of swords and sorcery.
Or that fantasy has to be epic in scale; there are always grand and noble characters.
Or maybe fantasy has to be set in an imaginary world.
Or, at the very least, there should be some magic.
But, as I explore on this episode. Some, or all, or none of these might be present in a work of fantasy. There's more to fantasy than you might expect.
This week I chat to Dr Gerard Hynes to try to get the core of fantasy. We explore Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and the pop culture behemoth that is fantasy right now. We also look at a hugely diverse array of fantasy that goes far beyond what many people imagine when they think of the genre.
For more details, links, and transcripts head to wttepodcast.com
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23 min
May 07, 2019 32: Golden Age Detective Fiction
An English country estate. A detective pacing the room, explaining how they have solved the crime, revealing the solution to a puzzle and the clues which were there all along.
It’s so easy to parody this scene because it’s so familiar.
It’s Reverend Green in the billiard room with the candlestick.
It’s a shocking murder in a cosy English village or the country estate of a well-off family…where everyone is as suspect.
It’s the locked room mystery, where the puzzle is always the centre of the story.
So, where do all these familiar ideas come from exactly?
What do we mean when we talk about Golden Age Detective Fiction?
And are our assumptions about the tropes and rules of this fiction really all the accurate?
For full transcripts, links, pictures, and more head to the wttepodcast.com
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36 min
April 23, 2019 31: Steampunk, Pt 2 (Even Greater London)
One way of thinking about steampunk is to divide it into two parts – the steam and the punk.
The steam is the Victorian element: the fascination and engagement with the 19th century – whether satirizing or poking fun at Victorian conventions and ideas, dealing with problematic aspects of empire and colonialism, celebrating the people and places, or utterly rethinking the science and technology of the era.
The punk, on the other hand, is very much about building collaborative communities in resistance to contemporary capitalist consumer culture and technology. It’s about maker culture and a DIY aesthetic, about fan groups, conventions and meetups. There’s a strong connection, as we’ll see, with other non-mainstream areas of performance culture: cosplay, circus arts, street performance, burlesque.
And all of these different areas come together in the rapidly growing number of guests I’ve spoken to about this topic.
For full details, links, transcripts and more head to wttepodcast.com

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34 min
April 08, 2019 30: Steampunk, Pt1 (Fetch Me My Fighting Trousers)
Note: This episode is Part 1 of a double episode on steampunk.
There are cultures, and subcultures, and sub, sub, sub
cultures.
There’s science fiction, there’s alternative history,
there’s steampunk.
There’s hip hop and there’s chaphop.
There’s an anachronistic Victorian gentleman wearing a pith helmet with an orangutan butler, dissing a fellow chaphop artist for parodying, rather than engaging with, the genre.
What, you may quite reasonably ask, is going on?
Well, over this episode, and the next – because this is part one of a double episode - I’m going to take a really, really deep dive into the world of steampunk.
Steampunk is a lot of things: an aesthetic, a genre, a
fashion, a lifestyle. And to really understand it, and to see how influential it is on mainstream popular culture and a whole host of different areas, you need to look at it from several different angles.
Which is why I have some very exciting guests lined up across these two episodes. In this instalment I’ll be talking to two very different professors:
Dr Rachel Bowser is Associate Professor of English at Georgia Gwinnett College, in the U.S. and has written extensively about steampunk.
Professor Elemental is the Victorian gentleman whose music you’ve just heard, the chap in the chaphop. He’s a hiphop musician, performer, and voice-over artist, and he provides a another, very different angle in looking at the world of steampunk.
This podcast tries to answer the question: what, exactly, is steampunk and how has it become so popular?
For links, pictures, transcripts, and more head to wttepodcast.com/steampunk

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32 min

About Words To That Effect

From the publisher's feed

Words To That Effect: Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture. WTTE is a narrative storytelling show, hosted and produced by Conor Reid, that explores the intriguing places where fiction,…