School of English, Communication, and Philosophy

This two-year British Academy-funded project resulted in the first comprehensive bibliography of British fiction spanning the reign of William IV. This online bibliographical checklist of nearly 750 individual titles, arranged chronologically and into various categories, is based on the first-hand examination of titles by the project members, and supplies full transcriptions of titles, publishers’ imprints, printer information, format and pagination, etc.

"When it appeared in spring 1811, Mary Brunton’s first novel, Self-Control, was an overnight best-seller that surpassed both its author’s modest expectations and its origins as a lady’s genteel pastime. Self-Control combines complex psychological portraiture, religious didacticism and social comedy with a sensitive eye for regional description. While a religious novel, it blends both exciting incident and dramatic characterization with a sophisticated analysis of contemporary gender politics.

Going into four editions within one year, the unexpected success of Self-Control can be seen in its popularity both in Edinburgh and London, with contemporaries like Jane Austen part of an eager readership clamouring to number themselves among its readers. Published in Edinburgh, Brunton’s novel was a particularly Scottish success, arguably the first fully home-grown Scots novel, which anticipated the emergence of other noteworthy Scottish writers of the period, such as Christian Johnstone, Susan Ferrier and of course Walter Scott.

Appearing at transformative moment in the history of British fiction, Self-Control is a significant novel by a neglected author—an omission which the present edition seeks to redress. The volume will contain a substantial introduction to Brunton's life and works, the key themes of the novel and an essay on the text, covering the complex history of composition, publication and reception that characterized the novel. This will be supplemented by extensive editorial notes and a list of emendations and textual variants."

The labyrinthine library and textual untrustworthiness are nothing new in fiction: throughout its history, gothic literature, in particular, has been populated with libraries as problematized loci that belie their seemingly progressive principles, while the elucidatory potential of language is subverted by the gothic’s preoccupation with linguistic slippage, discovered manuscripts, inset tales, narrative fragmentation and structural contradictions. Taking some theoretical models supplied by Borges, Foucault and Eco as starting points, the essay considers the ‘bibliophobia’ of recent gothic fiction, in which the text becomes the locus of supernatural irruptions that threaten to infect the everyday world. Promising the privilege and completeness of structured knowledge, these novels paradoxically reveal the textual condition as masking disorder and monstrosity.

The aim of this exercise is to get you to think about the new media, and how they might imbricate with your own research interests and experiences. You will be asked to spend the next 30 minutes working in groups to sketch out your own pervasive/transmedia experience / encounter / game / thingy. There are a series of questions below that should help stimulate discussion.

Unlike in the US and Commonwealth jury systems, where judges give defined or undefined beyond reasonable doubt' instructions, in England and Wales the juries are normally directed by the judge that the prosecution must make them sure of the defendant's guilt before they can convict. Critics of this paraphrase of the criminal standard of proof have adduced studies which appear to show that a high proportion of mock jurors equate sure with 100% confidence. Since it is impossible to be absolutely certain about evidence presented in court, the critics claim that jurors find themselves unable to convict. This paper critiques that argument from a number of angles, showing that the`sure as impossible standard' thesis is based on a misconstrual of the criminal standard of proof, on very weak empirical evidence, and on a misconceived notion of the relation between evidence and the linguistic expression of confidence. Drawing on a wide range of fields, as well as data from the author's extensive corpora of courtroom transcripts, the paper draws a distinction between formal and functional certainty and warns against the conventional wisdom which assumes commensurability between linguistic expression and numerical measurement.

Intellectual humility, which entails openness to other views and a willingness to listen and engage with them, is crucial for facilitating civil dialogue and progress in debate between opposing sides. In the present research, we tested whether intellectual humility can be reliably detected in discourse and experimentally increased by a prior self-affirmation task. Three hundred and three participants took part in 116 audio- and video-recorded group discussions. Blind to condition, linguists coded participants' discourse to create an intellectual humility score. As expected, the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ self-rated prosocial affect (e.g. empathy). Unexpectedly, the effect on prosocial affect did not mediate the link between experimental condition and intellectual humility in debate. Self-reported intellectual humility and other personality variables were uncorrelated with expert-coded intellectual humility. Implicati...

One of the ongoing discussions and permanent challenges in the area of language and the law in the last decades is the communication problems that arise when lay people interact with the legal arena. Legal-Lay Communication: Textual Travels in the Law, edited by Chris Heffer, Frances Rock and John Conley, is an additional significant contribution to the body of work in this area. The book approaches the broad theme of legal-lay communication, but does so critically, with a particular take on textual travel. As the editors argue in the introductory chapter, the 'combination of themes makes it possible for the book to move beyond what would be possible with only one agenda' (p. 3). The book has two main aims. The first is to contribute to work where textual travel is pertinent. The second, and admittedly more immediate aim, is to improve the understanding of communication between legal professionals and the lay people with whom they interact. The book builds upon the theoretical notion of textual travel to ensure a logical sequence and grouping of related chapters throughout, while retaining the diversity of the individual perspectives on legal-lay communication of each author, from several different countries. The notion of textual travel, as well as the notions of entextualisation, decontextualisation and recontextualisation, are recurrently discussed throughout the book, and the transparency of the terms

I. Down the Rabbit-Hole "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves" 'Chi semina suoni raccoglie senso' [He who sows sounds reaps sense] The Duchess 'And the moral is: '"Birds of a brood always flock together'" 'Only mustard isn't a bird', Alice remarked.]

Metaphysical graphical structuralism is the view that at some fundamental level the world is a mathematical graph of nodes and edges. Randall Dipert advanced a graphical theory for fundamental particulars and Alexander Bird advanced one for fundamental properties. David Oderberg has argued that such theories entail the absurd inexistence of the world or the absurd cessation of all change.  I defend graphical structuralism. Attention to the interaction of metaphysical and mathematical features shows that the absurdities depend on assumptions that are not essential to the view and brings to light a surprising fact about the necessary structure of fundamental properties.