Postgraduate publications
Whilst completing their studies, many of our PhD students publish their research in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and have opportunities to co-publish with their supervisors. On completion, many of our students transform their research into monographs with leading publishers in their field.
You can view a range of selected publications by current and past PGR students below. For more publication details, please visit our students' research profiles. A number of our students are also involved in journal editing; you can find out more on our in-house publications page.
Selected recent publications
Ashbridge, C. (2020). ‘It aye like London, you know’: The Brexit Novel and the Cultural Politics of Devolution. Open Library of Humanities, 6 (1): 15. doi: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.463
Bailey, A. (2019). “Girl-on-girl culture”: Constructing normative identities in a corpus of sex advice for queer women. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 8 (2): 195-220. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.18013.bai
Black, T. (2017). The Iconography of Kingship: Masques, Antimasques, and Pastorals. Midlands Historical Review, 1. http://www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/the-iconography-of-kingship-masques-antimasques-and-pastorals/
Downey, E., & Wilcockson, A. (2020). ‘Lays of the Octopods (The Last of the Octopods)’: An Unpublished Poem by Edward Lear. Notes and Queries. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjz207
Edwards, G. (2020). Small Stories, Local Places: A Place-Oriented Approach to Rural Crises, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 8 (1): 65-82. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2020-0006
Galmiche, D. (2017). Shame and SLA. Apples: Journal of Applied Language Studies, 11 (2): 25-53. doi: 10.17011/apples/urn.201708233538
Harrington, L. (2018) “Helping you to pay us”: Rapport management in debt collection call centre encounters. Journal of Politeness Research. 14 (2): 193–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/pr-2018-0013
Jones, K. (2020). 'Something Sensational and New': Katherine Mansfield's Engagement with the Literary Marketplace in London, 1908-9. In: Aimée Gasston, Gerri Kimber, Janet Wilson (eds.), Katherine Mansfield: New Directions. Bloomsbury.
Magin, E. (2016-17). Runes, Runic Writing and Runic Inscriptions as Primary Sources for Town Development in Medieval Bergen, Norway. Retrospective Methods Network Newsletter. 12-13.
Neurohr, B. and Stewart-Shaw, L. (eds.) (2019) Experiencing Fictional Worlds. John Benjamins.
Putland, E. (2020). Reading relationships, worlds and reality: a multimodal analysis of Lego City and Lego Friends home pages. Gender and Language, 14 (1): 73-98. doi: 10.1558/genl.37861
Research co-published with supervisors
Bailey, A., Dening, T., Harvey, K. (2019). Battles and breakthroughs: representations of dementia in the British press. Ageing & Society, 1-15. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X19001120
Boo, P. and Conklin, K. (2015). The impact of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) on reading by nonnative speakers. Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research, 4 (1): 111-129.
Conklin, K., Alotaibi, S., Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2020). What eye-tracking tells us about reading-only and reading-while-listening in a first and second language. Second Language Research. Online First. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658320921496
Grisot, G., Conklin K., Sotirova, V. (2020). Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Readers’ responses to experimental techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. Language and Literature. Online First. doi: 10.1177/0963947020924202
Kyriacou, M., Conklin, K., Thompson, D. (2019). Passivizability of Idioms: Has the Wrong Tree Been Barked Up? Language and Speech, 63 (2): 404–435. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830919847691
Northbrook, J. and Conklin, K. (2018). Is what you put in what you get out? – Textbook-derived lexical bundle processing in beginner English learners. Applied Linguistics. 40 (5): 816–833. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy027
Northbrook, J. and Conklin, K. (2018). “What are you talking about?” – An analysis of lexical bundles in Japanese junior high school textbooks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 23 (3): 311-334. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16024.nor
Selected monographs by past PhD students
Bloomsbury, 2016
In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019
This book theoretically defines and linguistically analyses the popular notion that poetry is ‘difficult’ - hard to read, hard to understand, hard to engage with. It is the first work to offer a stylistic and cognitive model that sheds new light on the mechanisms of difficulty, as well as on its range of potential effects. Its eight chapters are organised into two thematic parts. The first traces the history of difficulty, surveys its main scholarly traditions, addresses related themes – from elitism to obscurity, from abstraction to intentionality – and introduces a wide array of analytical tools from literary theory and cognitive psychology. These tools are then consistently applied in the second part, which includes several extended analyses of poems by canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, alongside those of postmodernist innovators such as Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, among others. This innovative work will provide fresh insights and approaches for scholars of stylistics, literary studies, cognitive poetics and psychology.
Five Leaves Publications, 2017
Viking Nottinghamshire describes the county as it was throughout the Viking Age, through the various stages of Scandinavian settlement. It uses a range of historical evidence, including documents, place-names, artefacts and sculpture, to explore the impact and contribution the Scandinavian settlers made to the character and history of Nottinghamshire.
The book examines this era of history in a fresh light, reflecting trends in modern scholarship, focusing on cultural interaction and integration rather than a story of invasion, rape and pillage.
Bloomsbury, 2016
Focussing on The Times, this monograph uses corpus linguistics to examine how suffrage campaigners' different ideologies were conflated in the newspaper over a crucial time period for the movement - 1908 to 1914, leading up to the Representation of the People Act in 1918. Looking particularly at representations of suffrage campaigners' support of or opposition to military action, Gupta uses a range of methodological approaches drawn from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and CDA. These include: collocation analysis, examination of consistent significant collocates and van Leeuwen's taxonomy of social actors. The book offers an innovative insight into contemporary public understanding of the suffrage campaign with implications for researchers examining large, complex protest movements.
McFarland, 2018.
The concept of the individual or the self, central in so many modern-day contexts, has not been investigated in depth in the Anglo-Saxon period. Focusing on Old English poetry, the author argues that a singular, Anglo-Saxon sense of self may be found by analyzing their surviving verse. The concept of the individual, with an identity outside of her community, is clearly evident during this period, and the widely accepted view that the individual as we understand it did not really exist until the Renaissance does not stand up to scrutiny.
Bloomsbury, 2017
This book explores the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies. It shows how corpus methods can be used to compare literary texts to their translations, through the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. The comparison focuses on stylistic features related to the major themes of Heart of Darkness. By combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, Mastropierro discusses how alterations to the original's stylistic features can affect the interpretation of the themes in translation. The discussion illuminates the manipulative effects that translating can have on the reception of a text, showing how textual alterations can trigger different readings. This book advances the multidisciplinary dialogue between corpus linguistics and translation studies and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the application of corpus approaches to stylistics and translation.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015
In this work, Alan McCluskey explores materialism, in its many conceptual forms, in the contemporary cosmopolitan novel. The author applies a 'cosmopolitan materialist' lens to the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Philip Roth: three contemporary authors who hail from different parts of the world and produce highly dissimilar novels.
Bloomsbury, 2018
Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar.
Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.
John Benjamins, 2017
Free Indirect Style (FIS) is a linguistic technique that defies the logic of human subjectivity by enabling readers to directly observe the subjective experiences of third-person characters. This book consolidates the existing literary-linguistic scholarship on FIS into a theory that is based around one of its most important effects: consciousness representation. Modernist narratives exhibit intensified formal experimentation and a heightened concern with characters’ conscious experience, and this provides an ideal context for exploring FIS and its implications for character consciousness. This book focuses on three novels that are central to the Modernist canon: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It applies the revised theory of FIS in close semantic analyses of the language in these narratives and combines stylistics with literary criticism, linking interpretations with linguistic features in distinct manifestations of the style.
Brill, 2016
This book looks beyond fidelity to emphasize how each adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s short stories functions as a creative response to a text, foregrounding the significance of its fluidity, transtextuality, and genre. The adaptations analysed range from the first to the most recent and draw attention to the fluidity of textual sources, the significance of generic conventions and space in film, the generic potentialities latent within Lawrence’s tales, and the evolving nature of adaptation. By engaging with recent advances in adaptation theory to discuss the evolving critical reception of the author’s work and the role of the reader, this book provides a fresh, forward-looking approach to Lawrence studies.
Palgrave, 2020
This book argues for the importance of blasphemy in shaping the literature and readership of Percy Bysshe Shelley and of the Romantic period more broadly. Not only are perceptions of blasphemy taken to be inextricable from politics, this book also argues for blasphemous ‘irreverence’ as both inspiring and necessitating new poetic creativity. The book reveals the intersection of blasphemy, censorship and literary property throughout the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, attesting to the effect of this connection on Shelley’s poetry more specifically. Paul Whickman notes how Shelley’s perceived blasphemy determined the nature and readership of his published works through censorship and literary piracy. Simultaneously, Whickman crucially shows that aesthetics, content and the printed form of the physical text are interconnected and that Shelley’s political and philosophical views manifest themselves in his writing both formally and thematically.
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