‘Grisley “L” business’: Re-valuing female masculinity and butch subjectivity in Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch

According to the lesbian cultural critic Emma Healey, the figure of the butch lesbian not only carries ‘the weight of nearly one hundred years of stereotyping on her shoulders’, but also suffers homophobic ‘scorn and ridicule’ from heterosexist culture as well as ‘internalised lesbophobia’ within lesbian communities. As Gayle Rubin indicates, the term ‘butch’ is ‘the lesbian vernacular for women who are more comfortable with masculine gender codes, styles or identities than with feminine ones’ and ‘encompasses a variety of ways of and motivations for using masculine gender codes and preferences’. Butchness exists, therefore, as Jack Halberstam points out, on a varied continuum of female masculinities that signify ‘differently gendered bodies’ and female subjectivities

“A poet, a solitary”: Emily Brontë — Queerness, quietness, and solitude

Emily Brontë is often remembered for her extreme reserve and was clearly an atypical woman for her time. Although she was a figure who struggled within the conventional social fabric, rarely does empathy find a place in writings about her. This paper revisits some of the popular and dominant conceptions of Emily’s reserve and seeks to find a more productive—even compassionate—way of understanding her preference for solitude. Emily’s writings—especially her poems, provide such an opportunity to do so. While recognizing the negative and undoubtedly painful expressions of emotion in Emily’s oeuvre, the analysis argues that more positive insights into Emily’s desire for solitude can equally be found in her writing. Accordingly, drawing on queer theoretical sources, the paper posits a revised reading of this “difficult” Brontë that seeks to open alternative possibilities for understanding Emily’s introverted nature

A Wilde scoundrel: Villainy and “Lad Culture” in the filmic afterlives of Dorian Gray

Neo-Victorian Villains offers a varied and stimulating range of essays on the afterlives of Victorian villains in popular culture, exploring their representation and adaptation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction

In two minds: executive functioning versus theory of mind in behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia

Background: The relationship of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) deficits in neurodegeneration is still debated. There is contradicting evidence as to whether these cognitive processes are overlapping or distinct, which has clear clinical relevance for the evaluation of their associated clinical symptoms. Aim: To investigate the relationship of EF and ToM deficits via a data-driven approach in a large sample of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Methods: Data of 46 patients with bvFTD were employed in a hierarchical cluster analysis to determine the similarity of variance between different EF measures (verbal abstraction, verbal initiation, motor programming, sensitivity to interference, inhibitory control, visual abstraction, flexibility, working memory/attention) and ToM (faux pas). Results: Overall results showed that EF measures were clustered separately from the ToM measure. A post hoc analysis revealed a more complex picture where selected ToM subcomponents (empathy; intention) showed a relationship to specific EF measures (verbal abstraction; working memory/attention), whereas the remaining EF and ToM subcomponents were separate. Conclusions: Taken together, these findings suggest that EF and ToM are distinct components; however, ToM empathy and intention subcomponents might share some functions with specific EF processes. This has important implications for guiding diagnostic assessment of these deficits in clinical conditions

The Little Stranger –A study of the heteropatriarchal male and the dynamics of masculine domination

The Little Stranger –A study of the heteropatriarchal male and the dynamics of masculine dominatio

“Smash the social machine”: Neo-Victorianism and postfeminism in Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

This article reads Emma Donoghue’s neo-Victorian novel The Sealed Letter (2008) as a postfeminist text that demonstrates the complex ways in which feminist concerns of the nineteenth century persist in the twenty-first-century present. I argue that Donoghue’s reimagining of the Codrington trial from 1864 offers a reflexive postfeminist critique of the way in which female gender and sexual norms are culturally produced and maintained. In doing so, I propose that The Sealed Letter exemplifies the means through which Victorian ideas of women, gender, and sexuality prevail, while Donoghue’s rewriting of the case draws important parallels with instances of sexism and misogyny in contemporary culture. In reworking the Codrington affair, the novel illustrates long-standing feminist concerns such the sexual double standard and homophobia that are the renewed subject of postfeminist criticism in the new millenniu

"Little things": Writing the sexual revolution

"Little things": Writing the sexual revolutio

‘Awaiting the death blow’: gendered violence and Miss Havisham’s afterlives

The 20th and 21st centuries have continued the quest, so aptly described by G. K. Chesterton in 1906, to ‘find’ Charles Dickens and recapture the characteristically Dickensian. From research attempting to classify and categorise the nature of his popularity to a century of film adaptations, Dickens’s legacy encompasses an array of conventional and innovative forms.Dickens After Dickens includes chapters from rising and leading scholars in the field, offering creative and varied discussion of the continued and evolving influence of Dickens and the nature of his legacy across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Its chapters show the surprising resonances that Dickens has had and continues to have, arguing that the author’s impact can be seen in mainstream cultural phenomena such as HBO’s TV series The Wire and Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, as well as in diverse areas such as Norwegian literature, video games and neo-Victorian fiction. It discusses Dickens as a biographical figure, an intertextual moment, and a medium through which to explore contemporary concerns around gender and representation.The new research represented in this book brings together a range of methodologies, approaches and sources, offering an accessible and engaging re-evaluation that will be of interest to scholars of Dickens, Victorian fiction, adaptation, and cultural history, and to teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ways in which we continue to read and be influenced by the author’s work.</div

Fronto-striatal contributions to cognition and behaviour: Investigations in neurodegeneration

Alterations to fronto-striatal neural circuitry are the hallmark of many neurodegenerative conditions, giving rise to significant cognitive and behavioural symptoms. This thesis explores fronto-striatal atrophic change in two such conditions, Parkinson’s disease (PD) and behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). This is a critical area of interest in PD where the role of atrophy in non-motor symptoms, as opposed to dopamine-mediated functional changes, is only beginning to be uncovered. In contrast, cognitive and behavioural decline in bvFTD has long been associated with cortical atrophy, but the contribution of striatal atrophic change is less established. Fronto-striatal atrophy in the conditions is investigated for its role in an array of cognitive and behavioural symptoms. In each study reported, patients have undergone either caregiver questionnaires, neuropsychological testing or novel experimental tasks, to assess 1) neuropsychiatric symptoms (Chapter 2, Publications I and II); 2) learning deficits (Chapter 3, Publication III); and 3) social decision-making (Chapter 4, Publication IV). Behavioural measures are related to fronto-striatal atrophy via voxel-based morphometry, a technique for neuroimaging analysis that enables quantification of local grey matter volume. This analysis was approached firstly at the group level to determine the extent of fronto-striatal grey matter loss in patients with respect to age-matched controls, before being correlated with specific cognitive/behavioural scores. Broadly, the results show that either distinct, or combined, regional fronto-striatal atrophy was related to cognition and behaviour in PD and bvFTD. More specially, these findings highlight a role for fronto-striatal atrophy in both the cognitive and everyday manifestations of neuropsychiatric dysfunction in PD, and in specific learning deficits. These findings have important implications for understanding the pathophysiology of those symptoms in PD, and represent a critical consideration in the future development of therapeutic interventions. In bvFTD these novel findings reveal a role for the striatum in complex cognition and behaviour, emphasising this as an important region for characterising symptoms in the disease, which may assist in diagnosis. Together, the findings provide important insights into the cognitive and behavioural symptoms in neurodegenerative disease, which at present remain incompletely understood and difficult to treat