Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Children’s Fiction.

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism

Inside the labyrinth : the thematics of space in the fiction of Paola Capriolo

In Capriolo's fiction we see, above all, the centrality of place in the minds and lives of her protagonists, often linked with the idea of the labyrinth: labyrinth as endless tortuous passageways, enclosed place, puzzle, quest. The stories, built around the obsessions of their protagonists, transcend normal temporal and spatial boundaries, and reflect the labyrinth in various forms: as a physical maze; as mirror reflections, sometimes infinitely receding; as a remote, closed-off place; and as a metaphor suggesting confusion of the mind or of ideas. As well as a considerable degree of overlap within these areas, there is a pervading, underlying sense of ambiguity, and the idea of permanence and of eternal 'being'

"Every Heart North of the Tweed": Placing Canadian magazines of the 1820s and 1830s

No abstract available

“Tales and Adventures”: G.A. Henty’s Union Jack and the Competitive World of Publishing for Boys in the 1880s’

In the competitive publishing environment of the late nineteenth century, writers and magazines had to distinguish themselves carefully from potential rivals. This article examines how G.A. Henty’s quality boys’ weekly, Union Jack (1880-83), attempted to secure a niche in the juvenile publishing market by deliberately distinguishing itself from other papers as a literary, imperialist and “healthy” publication. The article explores the design and marketing techniques of the magazine, its status as a fiction paper, the high calibre of its contributors, and its aggressive rhetoric in targeting an exclusively masculine audience. It argues that while Union Jack was marketed as a niche publication, it eventually failed to distinguish itself sufficiently to survive in an extremely competitive environment

Narrating the archive and archiving narrative: the electronic book and the logic of the index

The creation of my hypermedia work Index of Love, which narrates a love story as an archive of moments, images and objects recollected, also articulated for me the potential of the book as electronic text. The book has always existed as both narrative and archive. Tables of contents and indexes allow the book to function simultaneously as linear narrative and non-linear, searchable database. The book therefore has more in common with the so-called 'new media' of the 21st century than it does with the dominant 20th century media of film, video and audiotape, whose logic and mode of distribution are resolutely linear. My thesis is that the non-linear logic of new media brings to the fore an aspect of the book - the index - whose potential for the production of narrative is only just beginning to be explored. When a reader/user accesses an electronic work, such as a website, via its menu, they simultaneously experience it as narrative and archive. The narrative journey taken is created through the menu choices made. Within the electronic book, therefore, the index (or menu) has the potential to function as more than just an analytical or navigational tool. It has the potential to become a creative, structuring device. This opens up new possibilities for the book, particularly as, in its paper based form, the book indexes factual work, but not fiction. In the electronic book, however, the index offers as rich a potential for fictional narratives as it does for factual volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR

‘She would rewrite the past’ : Briony as narrator-manipulator in Ian McEwan’s Atonement

Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement1 is mainly concerned with the protagonist Briony Tallis’s efforts to atone for a crime she committed in 1935 as a young teenager. This crime was that of bearing false witness. Briony’s mendacious testimony condemns an upright young man – Robbie Turner, son of the Tallises’ charwoman – to public ignominy and a long prison sentence for rape. Briony also separates her older sister Cecilia from Robbie, whom the young woman is secretly in love with. Both the lovers die in the Second World War, leaving behind a Briony racked with guilt, hoping to find a way to atone for the harm she has done them. After much soul-searching she decides that the best way in which she can atone for her crime is through the medium of her chosen vocation – that of fiction. Like McEwan himself, in fact, Briony Tallis is a writer. Shortly after the lovers’ deaths, she determines to write a novel which will constitute her ‘atonement’ (p. 349). Briony’s ‘atonement novel’, the reader discovers in the coda (pp. 351–72) is, in effect, the novel he holds in his hands. This paper sets out to assess Briony’s success in atoning for her crime by means of the novel Atonement. The main point it seeks to make is that, far from representing an adequate atonement for a serious crime, Atonement is yet another of this devious character’s diversionary ploys.peer-reviewe

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences