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Literature and Location

Romanticism and the Lakes The Ruskin Programme Crossing Borders Moving Manchester Colonialism and Post-Colonialism The Early Modern Period Early Quakers

Studies on Literature and Location in the Department of English and Creative Writing focus on what may appear to be two contradictory aspects of literary production and reception. On the one hand, literature is always located, geographically, historically, psychologically. On the other hand, the location of literature is often plural, mobile, ambiguous or hybrid. Indeed, if literature has always communicated a sense of place and historical moment, it has always also moved across boundaries in time and space.

The Department leads the world in the study of the literature of the Lake District, hosting both the Wordsworth Centre and the Ruskin Programme (which administers the great Ruskin Library).

The Creative Writing Programme is a dynamic force in the promotion of contemporary world literature. Its Crossing Borders initiative links emerging writers in Africa with British mentors and promotes intercontinental communication. It now publishes an on-line magazine as well.

The Moving Manchester Project explores creative writing from Greater Manchester that has been informed and influenced by the experience of migration. It is a research project that focuses on work in English published since 1960 - narratives that have unsettled and transformed representations of Manchester life. The project, funded by the AHRC, aims to bring these writings (including fiction, poetry, autobiography, drama and screenplay) to wider public and scholarly attention..

Scholars working in small teams and independently in the Department have been developing a wide range of projects investigating the locations of literature and the literature of location.

Dr Graham Mort and Dr Lindsey Moore are organising ‘Trans-Scriptions’ 2005-6, two seminar events featuring postcolonial critics and intercultural creative writers. The intention is to foreground a canon of new British literatures which has emerged since the 1940s and continues to represent one of the most dynamic aspects of British writing and writings of Britishness.
In postcolonial studies, Dr Lindsey Moore works on contemporary Arab women’s writing in English, French and in translation from Arabic and has a wider interest in postcolonial and diaspora writing and theory.
Dr Robert Appelbaum has been involved in a collaborative project on early modern colonialism, resulting in the jointly edited collection (with historian John Wood Sweet) on Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World.

In the early modern period, three department members are developing an active programme in the exploration of location. The Shakespeare Programme has included amongst its central areas of research the playwright's connections with north-west England (the focus of an international conference held in 1999). Professor Alison Findlay has recently completed a monograph, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Click here for more on Professor Findlay's most recent research on literature and location, which has been dedicated to expanding ideas of Renaissance drama to include non-commercial venues beyond the London stage.
Professor Findlay and Dr Hilary Hinds have been directing a British Academy funded project on Early Quakers in the Northwest. A seminal result of this research has been Dr Hinds’ essay in Literature and History on ‘Spaces: The Politics of Place and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Sectarian Writing.’

Professor John Schad's recent book Someone Called Derrida. An Oxford Mystery (2007) is an experiment in location criticism that re-reads the life and, indeed, death of Jacques Derrida via the University and city of Oxford. The book explores the accidents of meaning produded by place and its history. John plans more such work.

Medieval & Renaissance

Nineteenth Century

Twentieth Century

Contemporary