NRG is pleased to welcome Dr Sam Goodman who has just started a new post at BU teaching linguistics and literature. You can find out more about Sam and our other members in the STAFF section on this site.
Meanwhile, NRG members have been keeping busy over the summer.
Hywel Dix submitted a paper entitled ‘Fictions of Self-Retrospect: signature, autobiography and fin de carrière’ to the Journal C21 Literature: Journal of 21st Century Writings. He has had a proposal accepted to contribute a chapter about the recent fiction of Sarah Hall and Alan M. Kent to an edited collection about representations of tattoos in literature, arguing that recent portrayals of tattoos and tattooing in fiction have undergone a recent shift, from the socially subversive to a greater incorporation within the artistic and economic mainstream that ironically strips them of their earlier subversive potential. His chapter ‘Devolution and Cultural Catch-Up: Decoupling England and its writers from English Literature’ was published in July in The Literature of an Independent England (Palgrave Macmillan). For more information about this book, please visit our report of the NRG hosted talk by Claire Westall, the co-editor of the volume.
Nick Bamford is shortly departing for Thailand where he will present his paper ‘From Madame Butterfly to Miss Saigon – political and practical uses and abuses of a story’ to the JM Comm conference. The paper considers how the Madame Butterfly story came about and how it has been used, and arguably abused by subsequent writers, composers and producers to suit their political or commercial interests.
Julia Round has completed her monograph The Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach and submitted the manuscript to McFarland, with publication set for 20 January 2014. She co-organised the Fourth Annual Joint Conference of Comics, Graphic Novels and Bande Dessinee, in conjunction with colleagues at Dundee, Glasgow and Manchester Metropolitan Universities, which was held at Glasgow University in June, and presented a paper (Gothic and comics: excess, embodiment and artifice) at this event. Along with Bronwen Thomas she began work on the AHRC-funded ‘Digital Reading Network’. So far they have launched the website and group email list, and held the first workshop with members of the steering group at the beginning of September here at Bournemouth University.
Bronwen Thomas presented a paper on ‘Reading Fictional Dialogue’ at the International Society for the Study of Narrative Conference in Manchester in July. She was also invited to present at a symposium on Digital Literary Geographies at Lancaster. Bronwen is currently writing a book called Narrative: the Basics for Routledge. Real Lives, Celebrity Stories: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Narrative is currently in press and should be published in January 2014. It features essays by many BU colleagues and NRG members.
More soon, including news of forthcoming events and speakers.