Haunted childhood in Charlotte Bronte's Villette

In Villette, the obvious fakeness of the phantom robs it of uncanny status, reducing it to a form of narrative decoy which deflects attention away from what are consistently described as unheimlich in the novel: children and childhood. Though Lucy Snowe's own childhood past is shrouded in mist, an Object Relations reading reveals the souvenir value she attributes, instead, to domestic furniture and fittings, themselves operating as phantoms giving shape to an otherwise formless sense of loss. Ultimately, as the novel's ending shows, this superficially consolatory mechanism simply ensnares the adult Lucy in an ongoing false self-image: the abandoned child

Garden paths and blind spots

A critical review of Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger: 'she is a commensurate storyteller whose...novels are akin to a gorgeous meal'

Assessment and learning outcomes: the evaluation of deep learning in an on-line course

Using an online learning environment, students from European countries collaborated and communicated to carry out problem based learning in occupational therapy. The effectiveness of this approach was evaluated by means of the final assessments and published learning outcomes. In particular, transcripts from peer-to-peer sessions of synchronous communication were analysed. The SOLO taxonomy was used and the development of deep learning was studied week by week. This allowed the quality of the course to be appraised and showed, to a certain extent, the impact of this online international course on the learning strategies of the students. Results indicate that deep learning can be supported by synchronous communication and online meetings between course participants.</p

“The Whispering of Generations Past”: Kate Mosse’s Languedoc Trilogy

In her fiction Kate Mosse, author of six novels and co-founder and Honorary Director of the Orange Prize for Fiction (now The Bailey's Prize), frequently focuses upon the theme of bodily violence enacted upon women. Her protagonists, often young early career scholars of the twenty-first century find themselves in contact with ghostly sister selves belonging to the Cathar communities of Medieval France. The egalitarian and progressive politics of these historic communities preached equality of the sexes in the sight of God and believed in the central role of women priests in the spreading of a Christian faith based on love and tolerance. Oppressed by the Orthodox Christian church, whose most conservative factions still refer to the Cathars as the great heresy, Mosse pays witness to the violent retribution enacted upon its followers, whose communities eventually died out as a result. In Mosse's Languedoc Trilogy, Labyrinth (2005), Sepulchre (2007) and Citadel (2012), young female travellers embark on quests of discovery that take them unwittingly into contact with the voices of these dead communities. In the process, this article argues that Mosse offers up a metaphor for the importance of maintaining an active dialogue between the voices of different generations of feminism. Despite being sometimes dismissed as popular rather than serious, this argument makes a claim for the political importance of Mosse's writing in bringing back to contemporary awareness the stories of the lost Cathar communities and the shaping effect of their stories upon nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century sisterhood. © 2014 The Author

Community building and virtual teamwork in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper aims to explore the issues that there was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from European students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer booked meetings and evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment. </p

Collaboration and teamwork: immersion and presence in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem-based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper describes, often in their own words, the experience of European occupational therapy students working together across national and cultural boundaries. Collaboration and teamwork were facilitated exclusively through an online environment, since the students never met each other physically during the OTIS pilot course. The aim of the paper is to explore the observations that here was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross-cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from the students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer-booked meetings and analysed using the qualitative constructs of ‘immersion’, ‘presence’ and ‘reflection in learning’. The findings indicate that ‘immersion’ was experienced only to a certain extent. However, both ‘presence’ and shared presence were found by the students, within their tutorial groups, to help collaboration and teamwork. Other evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. Further study is proposed to support group work in an online learning environment. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment.</p

Pushing back the limits: the fantastic as transgression in contemporary women's fiction

Moving on from Jackson's belief in fantasy as the literature of subversion, this thesis argues that by filtering Todorov's concept of the fantastic through a contemporary theoretical understanding of transgression, the stasis which has resulted from the obsessive desire to pin down a single definition of literary fantasy can be transformed into a dynamic and interactive narrative process. This dynamism then provides a particularly useful strategy for the fictional exploration of the problematic positionality of women within patriarchal society. The Introduction sets out and contextualises this theoretical framework, the particular significance of transgression to socio-political marginalisation being illustrated by reference to the work of post-Bakhtinian theorists such as Stallybrass and White. The importance of the precarious threshold positionality offered by the adoption of fantastic hesitancy on the part of the woman writer is also introduced. The three main textual sections each focuses upon four novels by contemporary women writers, taking as their themes women and the domestic, women and nightmare and women who are "larger than life" respectively. In each case the intervention of the fantastic is seen to be inseparable from the problematic relationship between prohibition and transgression, a relationship largely set up and explored through a preoccupation with enclosure. Throughout there is a presiding concern with the importance of paradox and ambivalence as a radical literary and political strategy. To this end the concluding section sets this thesis within a feminist fantasy framework, arguing that the problematic dynamism of the fantastic offers far more transformative possibilities than the "closed-system" of the feminist utopia. The originality of this thesis resides in the fact that it adds two further dimensions to existing perspectives on the fantastic. By fully integrating the concept of transgression as a narrative positionality as well as a category of content, it aims to extricate fantasy criticism from the bounds of genre theory. In addition, by combining this with a variety of feminist theoretical perspectives and by taking as its focus contemporary women's fiction, this thesis provides something still not otherwise available: a full-length feminist reading of the application of the fantastic to contemporary women's fiction

A (socially isolated) room of one's own: women writing lockdown.

Our eighteen-month project, "A [Socially Isolated] Room of One's Own: Women Writing Lockdown", is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It involves collecting, capturing, archiving and evaluating a variety of written responses by women about the first lockdown phase (March - June 2020), irrespective of whether or not those women self-define as writers. The final main output will be a virtual exhibition, "The Lockdown House", to be launched in June 2023, which will showcase many of these original responses. All forms of writing are eligible for inclusion: published fiction and poetry, song lyrics, newspaper articles, social media posts, scrapbook and diary entries. In effect, we are mitigating against the ephemerality of women's early responses to lockdown, such ephemerality being one of the problems that both Virginia Woolf and historians have associated especially with women's writing. As Deborah Withers observes in her article on how the digital age can mitigate against the historic ephemerality of women's work, "history does not and has not always happened in the same way for everyone" (Withers 2017, 681), including, of course, all women