The PEN literary gala has been overshadowed by controversy.
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Articles on English literature
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The Victorian author has a lot more to offer than you might think. Find out where to get started.
Centuries before the internet, Shakespeare became a global phenomenon.
Terry Pratchett and Jorge Luis Borges may have been the prophets of the future library.
Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, was an ardent defender of children’s literature, believing the works of Beatrix Potter to be equal to “the greatest English prose writers that have…
The Shakespeare First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays and the sole source for half of them (including Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, All’s Well, As You Like It, and The Tempest…
Reading for pleasure as a child has been powerfully linked in research to the development of vocabulary and maths skills up to the age of 16. But does reading still have a part to play in the breadth of…
For the second year running, the Edinburgh International Book Festival returns with Stripped 2014; a strand dedicated exclusively to comics and graphic novels. It has even commissioned its own graphic…
Somewhere, in the depths of your memory, you can probably still recall a quote or two from Shakespeare. Everybody in the UK studies the Bard at school – whether they go on to love him or hate him. As leading…
The gorgeous, ethereal photographic portrait shot of Virginia Woolf taken in 1902 by George Beresford has become the iconic image of her, ubiquitous on mugs, mouse-mats and tea-towels. This image certainly…
According to Jacques Derrida, “nothing can be invented on the subject of Joyce”. Speaking in 1984, he had in mind the sheer comprehensive power of Joyce’s writing: from the capacity of Ulysses to draw…
In Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, the fictional character Whisky Sisodia comments that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo…
You may write me down in history With your bitter twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. So begins one of Maya Angelou’s poems, written in 1978. One of her most…
Fans of J R R Tolkien must wonder why there is any controversy associated with the recent publication of his 1926 translation of Beowulf. For them anything new from Tolkien is welcome. But imagine if Tolkien’s…
The exam board OCR recently announced a new English Language and Literature A Level that they intend to offer from 2015. The proposed syllabus boasts that “the range of texts to be studied is to be the…
In Other People’s Countries, a memoir of his Belgian childhood, Patrick McGuinness writes: “I sometimes think it’s getting worse, this past business, that it’s rising up in me like damp creeping up a wall…
We’ve been celebrating Shakespeare’s 450th birthday week with fun, festivals, exhibitions, a cake competition – and the launch of an improbably epic tour of Hamlet from the Globe in London “to every country…
Novelist, short story writer, journalist, film critic, writer of screen plays, Gabriel García Márquez was a man of many facets and extraordinary skill. He achieved that rare feat for a Latin American writer…
The extent of Shakespeare’s legacy 450 years on from his birth is incalculable. But this, of course, does not stop some from trying. To many the crown of Britain’s cultural output, Shakespeare is integral…
Mavis Gallant, the Canadian doyenne of the short story, died aged 91 in Paris on February 18th. This marked the end of a writing career that spanned more that five decades and two continents. Gallant is…
Top contributors
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Lecturer in English Literature, University of Oxford
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Reading
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Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National University
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Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature, Co-Director, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
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Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University
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Professor of English and National Teaching Fellow, Birmingham City University
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Adjunct Associate in English, Flinders University
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Professor of Sociology, University College London., UCL
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth
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Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University
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Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sheffield
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Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow
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Lecturer in English Literature, 1350-1660, University of Sussex
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PhD student, University of Warwick
