Purpose: This paper focuses on the affordances of and issues surrounding the teaching of George Orwell's novel "1984" (1949) as a set text for General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) English and English Literature in an examination-obsessed and heavily surveilled school system. It considers this by focussing on the classroom…

Teaching literature through new techniques and judging its relevance in terms of students' perceptions in an under-researched and significant area of study. This study aims to explore students' response to new teaching methodologies being used in a literature classroom, as part of an international research project. This international project was a…

This article describes an empirical study of the ways in which one group of adaptors transformed the plays of William Shakespeare into the medium of the comic book for use in school classrooms. It explores the choices, dilemmas, processes and responsibilities they experienced in doing so. These adaptors had to tackle the burden of…

For over two decades, there has been a progressive emergence of Shakespeare-focussed, performance-based programmes intended for use as criminal rehabilitation in the USA. Prison based criminal retribution, though historically prevalent, remains controversial. Although it is still used as a common method for rehabilitation, evidence demonstrates…

In a country in which, even after the economic crash, there are plenty of resources to go around, people need to think hard about why inequality persists so much more strongly in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The cause, the author wants to suggest, is a set of deep-rooted, hidden and unacknowledged beliefs, each unjustified yet passed off…

There have been various published histories of Australasian universities but none as rich as the two most recent relating to the universities of Sydney (1991) and Melbourne (2003). The latter, in particular, was the catalyst for this exploratory study. How was it that at a time when many major British cities lacked a university institution, towns…