Research Now: Contemporary Writing in the Disciplines is designed to help students make the transition into academic discourse. It gathers exciting current scholarship from across the disciplines in a concise collection of research-oriented academic prose. Most of the readings first appeared in academic journals, but there are other forms of research writing as well, including a book chapter by a senior scholar and a proposal by a graduate student. The selections were written by researchers from around the world working in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
The introduction gives a helpful overview of academic genres, research methods, and the path to academic publication. Each reading includes questions designed to provoke student engagement and discussion; a glossary and short guide to reading statistics are also included.
Much of the language that makes up Better Nature—the first poetry collection by writer and academic Fenn Stewart—is drawn from a diary that Walt Whitman wrote while travelling through Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.
But rather than waxing poetic about the untouched Great White North, Stewart inlays found materials (early settler archives, news stories, email spam, fundraising for environmental NGOs, and more) to present a unique view of Canada’s “pioneering” attitude towards “wilderness”—one that considers deeper issues of the settler appropriation of Indigenous lands, the notion of terra nullius, and the strategies and techniques used to produce a “better nature” (that is, one that better serves the nation).
Dr. Fenn Stewart teaches in the Department of English and the Coordinated Arts Program. Her research on Canadian literature, culture, and law is informed by critical race and Indigenous studies approaches. Fenn is currently working on her first scholarly book. Excerpts from the project have appeared in the journals ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature and Law, Culture and the Humanities; new research will soon appear in Contemporary Verse 2.
Comprehensive coverage of the history of English and of major varieties of English.
This new series occupies a middle ground between textbooks on the history of English, typically addressed to the undergraduate student, and handbooks on English historical linguistics, typically addressed to the scholar. The volumes would be suitable for use in an advanced (graduate) course as well by researchers in the field. They provide comprehensive coverage of the history of English, arranged by linguistic level and period, as well as current linguistic research into key questions and debates in English historical linguistics written by leading authorities. The first volume provides an overview of the history of English, the second to fourth volumes focus on the Old, Middle, and Early Modern English periods, and the fifth volume treats language variation from an historical perspective. More specialized topics not typically treated in textbooks (such as pragmatics, discourse, literary language, sociolinguistics) are included. Each volume is free standing and can be used on its own or in combination.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and she has been working at UBC ever since. Learn more about this editor »
Alexander Bergs teaches at the Institute for English and American Studies of the University of Osnabrück, Germany, where he is a Full Professor and Chair of English Language and Linguistics.
Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain like never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts and influences in the literatures of Britain from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries.
Siân Echard is Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include Anglo-Latin literature, Arthurian literature, John Gower, and manuscript studies and book history. Her publications include A Companion to Gower (edited, 2004), Printing the Middle Ages (2008) and The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature (edited, 2011).
Robert Rouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on medieval romance, sexuality, Arthurian literature, spatiality, and the post-medieval histories of manuscripts. His publications include The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (2005), The Medieval Quest for Arthur (with Cory Rushton, 2005) and Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain (edited, 2014).
Post-Personal Romanticism: Democratic Terror, Prosthetic Poetics, and the Comedy of Modern Ethical Life by Bo Earle offers a broad recasting of Romantic lyric’s formal innovations in terms of Hegel’s historical ethics. These innovations attempt to come to terms with the Enlightenment’s paradoxical legacy: industrial and consumerist modernity depends on the Enlightenment norm of rationally autonomous individuality even as it makes this norm ever more implausible. In turn, a key insight of the Romantics is that modernity depends most crucially upon the very elusiveness of this norm of autonomous individuality. The Romantics emphasize that modernity is constitutively a culture of fantasy, a culture self-conscious about the impossibility of its own organizing values and goals.
Based on a rich set of historical data, this book traces the development of pragmatic markers in English, from hwæt in Old English and whilom in Middle English to whatever and I’m just saying in present-day English. Laurel J. Brinton carefully maps the syntactic origins and development of these forms, and critically examines postulated unilineal pathways, such as from adverb to conjunction to discourse marker, or from main clause to parenthetical. The book sets case studies within a larger examination of the development of pragmatic markers as instances of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. The characteristics of pragmatic markers – as primarily oral, syntactically optional, sentence-external, grammatically indeterminate elements – are revised in the context of scholarship on pragmatic markers over the last thirty or more years.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and she has been working at UBC ever since.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s last play, an adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s Die Spanier in Peru first performed in 1799, was one of the most popular of the entire century. Set during the Spanish Conquest of Peru, Pizarro dramatizes English fears of invasion by Revolutionary France, but it is also surprisingly and critically engaged with Britain’s colonial exploits abroad. Pizarro is a play of firsts: the first use of music alongside action, the first collapsing set, the first production to inspire such celebratory ephemera as cartoons, portraits, postcards, even porcelain collector plates. Pizarro marks the end of eighteenth-century drama and the birth of a new theatrical culture.
This edition features a comprehensive introduction and extensive appendices documenting the play’s first successful performances and global influence. It will appeal to students and scholars of Romantic literature, theatre history, post-colonialism, and Indigenous studies.
Selena Couture is Assistant Professor of Drama at the University of Alberta.
Alexander Dick works and teaches in the fields of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic British Literatures, Critical Theory and Practice, especially post-humanism and speculative realism, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of more than twenty articles and chapters and Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790-1830 (Palgrave 2013). He is also the co-editor of two collections of essays, Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing Between Philosophy and Literature (with Christina Lupton, Pickering, 2008) and Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (with Angela Esterhammer, Toronto, 2009).
Written by an international team of leading scholars, this engaging textbook on the study of English historical linguistics is uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches and perspectives. Each chapter features textboxes, case studies, suggestions for further reading and exercises, enabling students to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and guiding them on undertaking further research. The case studies and exercises guide students in approaching and manipulating empirical data, providing them with hands-on experience of conducting linguistic research. An extensive variety of approaches, from traditional to contemporary, is treated, including generative approaches, historical sociolinguistic and pragmatic approaches, psycholinguistic perspectives, grammaticalization theory, and discourse-based approaches, as well as perspectives on standardization and language variation. Each chapter applies the concepts discussed to data from the history of English, and a glossary of key terms enables easy navigation and quick cross-referencing. An essential resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of the history of English linguistics.
Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and she has been working at UBC ever since.
The Friedman House is a modernist icon, designed by Frederic Lasserre, founder of the UBC School of Architecture, and
landscaped by Cornelia Oberlander. Faced with demolition, it was saved by purchasers who understood its architectural value
and historical significance. This book reflects on the possibility of its destruction, remarking on what has been salvaged by its
continued existence, and what could have potentially been lost.
Professor of English and co-founder of the Bachelor of Media Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author or editor of six books and more than 80 articles and reviews.
Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.
Professor of English and co-founder of the Bachelor of Media Studies Program at the University of British Columbia. He is the author or editor of six books and more than 80 articles and reviews.
Sneja Gunew is the author of