What’s On: North East Literature and Book Events in July 2019

Summer seems to have arrived at last - good news for readers who love to lounge on the beach with a book, though it does mean that many of our region's regular book events are winding down for the season. Nevertheless, there are still some activities happening in Durham, Newcastle, Teesside, Sunderland and around the...

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New Podcast: The Pleasures and Challenges of Contemporary Literature

Stream here or download via your favourite podcast player. Meet Arya Thampuran and Katie Harling-Lee, two PhD researchers who have particular interests in contemporary fiction, and who have set up a new network to draw you into the conversation as well. In this podcast, we chatted with Arya and Katie about their own research, the...

‘Now Flying over the Hell-mouth’: The Gap Between St Guðlac and Nordic Volcano Imagery

If you search for hell in your satnav you probably won't get very far, but in the Anglo-Saxon literary imagination, hell appears to have been located around the North Sea. Michael Baker directs readers in a new article in our Postgraduate English journal.  This investigation into the effects of landscape and place on apocalyptic literature...

Durham Miners and Wartime Propaganda

This weekend is Durham Miner's Gala, the annual celebration of the region's coal mining heritage. Ahead of the march, Dr Guy Woodward, researcher on the Political Warfare Executive project, has been digging in the archives to discover how Durham miners were depicted in wartime propaganda. While it is well known that the North East's miners...

Why Wordsworth’s Excursion deserves to be included among his finest poems

The Excursion (1814) is not Wordsworth's most famous work, yet it has recently become a renewed subject of interest for scholars. Drawing on her recently published research in Postgraduate English, Pauline Hortolland explains why this unusual poem should be returned to the centre of Wordsworth’s writing and his relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The foremost...

Muriel Spark’s Mythologisers

In an age of 'fake news', we know that stories that begin as myths and fabrications can end up becoming taken as fact and truth. But 'fake news' precedes the age of Donald Trump and social media - and indeed warnings about its dangerous effects can be found throughout post-war literature. Muriel Spark's fiction offers...