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ESPaCH - School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History

The History and Language of Print Culture

Events

2009 programme:

  • 25 November, 3-5pm, Professor Alice Jenkins (University of Glasgow), ‘Conversation in the Knowledge Economy: Science, Literature and early Victorian Etiquette’ (all welcome)

Recent conferences:

About this Cluster

The History and Language of Print Culture cluster is headed up by Dr Susan Oliver. This cluster comprises seven further staff members: Professor Brian Maidment, Professor Sue Powell, Dr Janice Allan, Dr Andrew Cooper, Dr Nick Smith, Dr Glyn White, and Dr Sandro Jung. One strand of it is engaged in the history of print reception in new communities and the second the development of language within those print cultures.

Maidment is a leading international scholar on popular print media of the nineteenth century, who is also currently Associate Professor at the Ruskin Centre, University of Lancaster. His work on popular nineteenth-century print culture is of international renown. Oliver has a growing profile in the field of British and North American periodicals of the same period. Powell researches in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; she is an editorial board member of the Journal of the Early Book Society and works on the manuscript era and the newly emerging print market in England after 1476.

The language-based work of Cooper and Smith has a similarly historical focus, investigating change in standard varieties of English. Cooper's research on radical changes in language theory is rooted in the nineteenth century. Smith examines variation and recent (18th-21st century) change in British and American English, focusing on grammatical usage in a wide spectrum of popular and literary printed genres found in electronic text corpora.

Jung has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. As a Research Fellow, he is currently working on a project concerned with the interrelationship between text and image in James Thomson's The Seasons.

Staff from this cluster have recently established a formal research partnership with the University of Pescara in Italy.

Postgraduate and Research Opportunities

We welcome applications for MA and PhD study in this area of research. Prospective students are invited to contact Dr Susan Oliver (s.oliver1@salford.ac.uk).

Key Publications

These include:

  • Brian Maidment (ed.), the Victorian volume of the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
  • Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith, Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
  • Sue Powell (ed.), Three Sermons for Nova Festa (Heidelberg: University of Heidelberg Press, 2007).
  • Philip Tew and Glyn White (eds), Reading B.S. Johnson (London: Palgrave, 2007).
  • Kathryn Allan, Metaphor from Old English to Present Day English (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007).
  • Susan Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).