Review of 'Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner' by Rebecca Kate Hahn

Rebecca Hahn’s book on Warner, remarkably, is the first monograph on the writings of this prolific, brilliant and underrated English author. Moreover, Warner’s short stories are a neglected area within a neglected oeuvre; her novels have had much more critical attention than her short fiction. Side-Stepping Normativity, then, is a strikingly original and fresh publication. For those who don’t know Warner’s stories Hahn’s book will be an excellent critical introduction, while existing readers will find fresh and insightful readings into a dozen stories. Taken together they give a persuasive account of the impressiveness and scope of Warner’s achievements in this form. The book opens up many avenues for discussion and will be of considerable value to future study of Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Possibilities of Freedom: The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2019

This article considers why Warner’s writing has been undervalued, in particular taking issue with the argument that her works are too radically disparate to be discussed as an oeuvre. It argues that one path through her writings – a ‘handle to get hold of the bundle’ in William Empson’s phrase – is the idea of ‘the possibilities of freedom’, a topic broad enough to address a good deal in Warner’s writings but specific enough to bring some focus. ‘The possibilities of freedom’ – as against ‘freedom’ alone – points both ways, both to what is possible and conversely to the limits of the possible. The essay follows this theme and some of its variations through the six decades and several genres of Warner’s writing life, discussing in particular ‘The Young Sailor’, Lolly Willowes, Opus 7, ‘To Come So Far’ and ‘Oxenhope’. It concludes that we should see her as in no way a quiet, removed stylist but instead as a figure of vigorous cultural engagements, an intellectual contemporary of writings such as Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918), Sartre’s Les chemins de la liberté (1945–49) and Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘What is Freedom?’ (1961)

Romantic and Victorian Poetry

The essay argues that Bishop sees poems as a series of possibilities to be revisited gratefully, shrewdly, critically, neither agonistically as precursors to battle or displace, nor polemically in the spirit of a literary politics championing a school or movement. It canvasses her relation to a range of nineteenth-century poets, focusing first from the Romantic period on Blake, to whose visionary poetics she adds a skeptical element, and Wordsworth. The essay finds Wordsworthian elements in her use of the word “something,” her intuition that crucial moments combine negativity and revelation, and her central insistence on the provisionality of vision. It then suggests that Bishop was prompted creatively by two Victorian genres: first, the dramatic monologue, with speakers liberated from accuracy and articulate in their egotism; second, nonsense poetry, with its minor-key version of transcendent magic and its frequent link of the “awful but cheerful.” The other abiding Victorian influence was Hopkins, along with Wordsworth and Baudelaire an exemplar dynamically observing his own process of observation

Edward Lear's Travels in Nonsense and Europe

Vivien Noakes’s biography of Lear is subtitled ‘The Life of a Wanderer’. This essay explores the comic and the romantic dimensions of wandering in Lear’s nonsense poetry and also in his life as a landscape painter. Both in life and nonsense travel offers him an escape from stasis, an imagination of romance, the prospect of new worlds with fewer limits, different rules, unexpected encounters. On the other hand the world of nonsense is in the end a world of impossibility and absurdity, and the traveller’s restlessness may become compulsive and deny the balancing human desire for settled quiet and stability. The essay explores Lear’s alphabets, limericks and longer poems. It ends by suggesting cross-generic links between Lear’s nonsense and his zoological illustrations, and between his nonsense and the four travel journals he published between 1846 and 1870

Coleridge, Sara

An encylopaedia article on the life and writings of Sara Coleridge (1802-1852), for an online work of reference and scholarshi

Distribution of Non-Persistent Endocrine Disruptors in Two Different Regions of the Human Brain

Non-persistent endocrine disrupting chemicals (npEDCs) can affect multiple organs and systems in the body. Whether npEDCs can accumulate in the human brain is largely unknown. The major aim of this pilot study was to examine the presence of environmental phenols and parabens in two distinct brain regions: the hypothalamus and white-matter tissue. In addition, a potential association between these npEDCs concentrations and obesity was investigated. Post-mortem brain material was obtained from 24 individuals, made up of 12 obese and 12 normal-weight subjects (defined as body mass index (BMI) > 30 and BMI < 25 kg/m2, respectively). Nine phenols and seven parabens were measured by isotope dilution TurboFlow-LC-MS/MS. In the hypothalamus, seven suspect npEDCs (bisphenol A, triclosan, triclocarban and methyl-, ethyl-, n-propyl-, and benzyl paraben) were detected, while five npEDCs (bisphenol A, benzophenone-3, triclocarban, methyl-, and n-propyl paraben) were found in the white-matter brain tissue. We observed higher levels of methylparaben (MeP) in the hypothalamic tissue of obese subjects as compared to controls (p = 0.008). Our findings indicate that some suspected npEDCs are able to cross the blood–brain barrier. Whether the presence of npEDCs can adversely affect brain function and to which extent the detected concentrations are physiologically relevant needs to be further investigated.Jana V. van Vliet-Ostaptchouk is supported by a Diabetes Funds Junior Fellowship from the Dutch Diabetes Research Foundation (project no. 2013.81.1673). This work was supported by the National Consortium for Healthy Ageing (NCHA) (NCHA NGI Grant 050-060-810), and the European Union’s Seventh Framework program (FP7/2007-2013) through the BioSHaRE-EU (Biobank Standardization and Harmonization for Research Excellence in the European Union) project, grant agreement 261433, and by the Danish Center on Endocrine Disrupters and the International Center for Research and Research Training in Endocrine Disruption of Male Reproduction and Child Health (EDMaRC)