Please join us at 2.30pm on Wednesday 3rd December both in-person and online for our final English Research Seminar of Trimester 1. Please contact Prof. Caroline Magennis for more details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seventeenth Century Sermon Studies, but Make It Transatlantic\u00a0(Lauren Holmes)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The field of sermon studies is an interdisciplinary one. It examines the structure, content, delivery, and impact of sermons in a variety of forms. Finding its origins in homiletics, otherwise known as the art of preaching or writing sermons, the field studies the sermon within the social, cultural, and religious contexts of its production. Engaging with sermons as primary sources is widely considered across disciplines as a significant means of understanding past sociopolitical, cultural, and theological developments. Yet, though the field encapsulates such disciplines interested in the transatlantic or the global as theology, history, literature, and cultural studies, studies of the sermon\u2019s transatlantic significance are few; this is particularly true of the study of sermons which predate the eighteenth century. Correspondingly, attempts to explain the transatlantic intellectual and literary cultures of the mid- to late-seventeenth centuries have suffered from a diminished understanding of how preaching cultures shaped their development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Landscape as Sites of Contestation: A Study in Creative Practice \u00a0(Alicia Rouverol)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mikhail M. Bakhtin\u2019s concept of the chronotope raises vital questions about the integration of time and space as it is explored in literary landscapes. In\u202fThe Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays<\/em>, in which Bakhtin defines a chronotope as \u2018time space\u2019, he acknowledges the \u2018intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships\u2019 as \u2018artistically represented in literature\u2019 (1981, p. 84). I am interested in this concept as I have recently developed a short story collection that explores spatial and time relationships through a series of stories that consider place \/ setting as sites for contestation. In Granite Rock <\/em>(Bridge House Publishing, forthcoming 2026), I examine the role of place as sites of contestation in settings across time ranging from Boston (2007) to Florida (1990s), the island of Corsica (1970s) to the island of Antigua in the West Indies (1980s). My approach to these stories seeks to complexify discussions of landscape proposed by Raymond Williams in\u202fThe Country and The City<\/em>, the Welsh cultural theorist who suggested that landscapes of the country may be associated \u2018with the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue\u2019 (1973, p. 1).\u202fIn recent writing, I explore aridity as a metaphor for economic attrition and the effects of neoliberalism in my novel, Dry River<\/em> (Bridge House Publishing, 2023), set in the more rural landscapes of Northern California, subverting Williams\u2019 charge. My story collection, in which engagement and collision across cultures (often in rural settings), reveals a landscape that is at once native and ancient, foreign and hostile. This presentation will feature short excerpts from the collection (and thus a practice-based approach) alongside a theorising of how landscape reveals not only regional concerns and issues but reflects our broader understandings of how characters located in such sites of contestation represent a more nuanced understanding of how landscape \u2018works\u2019 in literature.\u202f\u202f<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Please join us at 2.30pm on Wednesday 3rd December both in-person and online for our final English Research Seminar of Trimester 1. Please contact Prof. Caroline Magennis for more details. Seventeenth Century Sermon Studies, but Make It Transatlantic\u00a0(Lauren Holmes) The field of sermon studies is an interdisciplinary one. It examines the structure, content, delivery, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":3237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-events","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n