Clik here to view.
We’re Not Scared
Bear Hunt is an improbable book: wonderful, but not really a narrative of an afternoon’s outing. The children move through a variety of landscapes and seasons in a re-playing of an older nursery game...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Green Thoughts, Green Shades, Green Knights
What sort of journey does Gawain go on? I asked this when thinking about the interior and exterior journeys in children’s literature and traditional tales. Today – cold as cold, but sunny even in the...
View ArticleEnd of the Matter
Spoiler alert: this is the Matter of Britain as explored at the end of the Dark is Rising Sequence, the last few pages of Silver on the Tree. * All good things come to an end, and the narrative that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof
What is a ruin? Some initial thoughts on applying Jane Carroll’s topoanalysis to Thursbitch and Ludchurch. Whether there are night-ravens or pelicans in one’s insomnia (the psalm commentaries spend...
View ArticleHow Wild the Space?
I saw a lovely student from another University today. She’s researching Harry Potter and wanted to chat it over. We met in the Weston Library and talked about her project, a reader-response exploration...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Till We Have Faces
Three voices to follow up on my last post, and anchor it in my reading (because I really can’t stuff any more quotations into that last one): In Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, one of the young adults...
View ArticleNature Books
The AHRC Favourite Nature Books project closes its nominations at the end of November. I made a nomination in the end, but with a very heavy heart: it felt like taking one book and saying goodbye to...
View ArticleVocation I: thoughts in a bleak time.
A first thought on what makes me do what I do – or rather to voice something much deeper than curmudgeonly impatience at the world of work we face as the new year starts. It comes in response to a...
View ArticleLanguage Play
Overheard on the bus, a four-year-old explaining patiently to his mum: Only dogs are allowed to catch a cat. And cat is allowed to catch a mouse. The “play” here is at a number of levels. I really...
View ArticleClik here to view.
O Sweet Woods
…the delight of solitarinesse? I am not sure this is always the case. Dowland’s song is lovely, and does all those Elizabethan/Jacobean things about how countryside allows escape – from court, from...
View Article