Using adaptation theory and my own novel, "Shield Maiden," published in 2023 by Hachette, I examine how history of the English language (HEL) scholarship intersects with creative writing and writing craft. I've identified a large gap in our knowledge and understanding of how HEL can give us perspective and access to ancient texts and…

This paper considers Daljit Nagra's engagement with concepts of canon and tradition in "British Museum" (2017). Throughout the collection, Nagra provides readers with a multifaceted insight into the ways in which a plurality of 'cultures' and 'traditions' -- literary, historical, political, religious -- inform contemporary notions of…

In considering how to bring joy back to education and the curriculum in England, I argue that it is also necessary to bring the joy of teaching back to classroom practitioners. A fundamental contribution to this may be leadership typologies employed by schools' senior leadership. As an experienced secondary English teacher, over the last 20 years…

This paper displays the ideological positioning as found in Rudyard Kipling's poem If. It is a poem published in 1910. It presents the embedded ideologies and shows how the poet used the available linguistic resources to achieve his goal. The models of analysis adopted are Critical Stylistics as proposed by Lesley Jeffries (2010) and Stylistic…

Thomas Stearns Eliot, who is believed to be one of the most important poets of his time in the English and American Poetry, as well as today, left many poems in most of which he criticized and even rejected the Western Puritanist society and the principles of Romanticism. In this brief study, one of T.S. Eliot's major poems, 'Gerontion' will be…

In this essay, I share reflections on what it meant to teach my book of poetry in an introductory English literature class. The book took inspiration from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his studies on encountering the other person. Engaging with this text (both the poetry and the philosophy), I consider some of the nuances of a…

Despite opposition to 'queering the text' by established Shakespeare critics, this essay sets out to ponder the possibility of teaching Shakespeare in a queer context. The essay begins by examining the social and sexual conditions of the early modern period, making the observation that there were a wide variety of sexualities, moral attitudes, and…

This article argues for the importance and relevance of postcolonial studies in achieving the goal of cosmopolitanism through Literature education. Having significantly redrawn the overall contours of literary study in the twentieth century, postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary critical tradition provides us with a conceptual vocabulary,…

New directions in language learning and teaching are evident today. Students bring transnational, multicultural, multilingual, and digitally mediated experiences and identities into classrooms still sometimes too much modelled on outdated one-language-one-culture-one nation ideologies. Literature's value in these new circumstances is to challenge…

The present paper is supposed to compare and contrast three of these masterpieces written the Renaissance period. The epyllions under study are Christopher Marlowe's "Hero and Leander," Thomas Lodge's "Scylla's Metamorphosis" and Francis Beaumont's "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus." Bush believes that "the influence…

While British Romantic literature provides ample evidence of the pleasures of knowledge, it also reveals strong counter-evidence of its power to inflict a sense of intellectual impairment and diminution. This Romantic ambivalence sprang from a complex of ideas and anxieties about the potentially corrosive effects of certain kinds of education and…

This article examines the relationship between the discipline of 'English Literature' and the contemporary multilingual classroom. It argues that, although our field has often been cast as a kind of corrective to the 'problem' of language diversity by helping to teach language norms, literature can -- and should -- be made a preeminent space for…

This article takes as its focus Lefebvre's trialectic of conceived, perceived and lived spaces as a lens through which to scrutinise the 2013 English Literature Curriculum, and to explore the extent to which creative spaces might exist within that curriculum. The article analyses how the curriculum is envisaged by policymakers and how it might be…

Drawing on a strand of findings from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, this article examines contemporary understandings of poetry performance in teaching contexts. Positioning these understandings in relation to past practices, we…

This article looks at how four British-based poets born in the Caribbean exploit the rich language repertoire available to them in their work for children and young people. Following initial consideration of questions of definition and terminology, poetry collections by James Berry, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Valerie Bloom are discussed, with a…