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Whilst completing their studies, many of our PhD students publish their research in leading peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, and have opportunities to co-publish with their supervisors. On completion, many of our students transform their research into monographs with leading publishers in their field.

You can view a range of selected publications by current and past PGR students below. For more publication details, please visit our students' research profiles. A number of our students are also involved in journal editing; you can find out more on our in-house publications page.

On this page you can find the following entries:

Selected recent publications

Research co-published with supervisors

Selected monographs by past PhD students

 

Selected recent publications

 

Research co-published with supervisors

 

Selected monographs by past PhD students

2026

Haines, Alice.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2026

This book presents a new way of understanding verbal humour. Drawing on contemporary theories of language and mind, it explores and explains how the language of humour works both in a text and in a reader. Through investigation of carefully considered examples from a wide range of literary texts, the book proposes a new model that situates the cognitive phenomenon of humour within its social context and in relation to the affective response it produces. Included for consideration are works by writers of humorous fiction such as P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, Barbara Pym, Tom Holt and Lissa Evans and the discussion also extends to the performance of comic poetry and pantomime. The model presented makes it possible to explain how humour leads to amusement as well as the way in which it can be used as a social and cultural force, giving the reader a systematic way of analysing humour and its effects. The discussion builds into a thorough understanding of the principles of humour culminating in a greater appreciation of this rich, powerful and complex mode of discourse. The book offers researchers in stylistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and literary and cultural studies a practical way of analysing and understanding the construction and effects of humour.

Walker, Gregory.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2026

This book is the first monograph to cover the subject of D. H. Lawrence and censorship in its entirety. It examines Lawrence’s experiences of censorship throughout his career, from his earliest experiences of editorial intervention and bowdlerisation to the end of his life. The book draws attention to under-researched episodes in Lawrence's publishing history, including legal challenges and obscenity prosecutions, and explores how Lawrence resisted censorship through alternative publication strategies. It also considers the ways in which censorship continued to shape Lawrence’s work, reputation and reception after his death.

2025

Marley, Jodie.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

This study explores the role of female prophetic traditions in shaping William Blake’s mystical and visionary thought. Bringing together literary criticism, religious history and gender studies, it examines how Blake engaged with and reworked traditions associated with prophetic women, revealing their significance for his spiritual, political and imaginative writings.

Putland, Emma.
Bloomsbury, 2025

This book investigates how people affected by dementia respond to, negotiate and reshape dominant public narratives surrounding dementia. Drawing upon discourse analysis and contemporary dementia studies, it centres the experiences and voices of those living with dementia and those who support them. In doing so, it challenges simplified representations of dementia and highlights how people actively participate in creating more nuanced understandings of identity, agency and social participation.

2024

Harrison, Chloe.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

This book explores Margaret Atwood’s distinctive use of language and style, across a selection of her prose texts, through reader-centred, cognitive stylistic analyses. It examines how strategies of misdirection, processes of doubling, and the creation of textual ambience play an essential role in Atwood’s contemporary prose fiction style. With reference to contemporary scholarship in stylistics and literary criticism, each chapter presents a detailed linguistic analysis of a different text from Atwood’s oeuvre, from Alias Grace (1996) to Old Babes in the Wood (2023). Above all, the book studies experiences of reading Atwood’s works, situating and contextualising her signature linguistic choices in relation to real readers’ responses to her writing. The book should be of interest to readers specialising in the work of Margaret Atwood, including those with stylistics, cognitive linguistics, and literary studies backgrounds.

Parnell, Tamsin.
Bloomsbury, 2024

Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, this book investigates how national identity was constructed, negotiated and contested during the Brexit period. Through the analysis of political and media discourse, it examines changing understandings of Britishness, belonging and national identity, providing new insights into the relationship between language, politics and identity in contemporary Britain.

Vialard, Mathilde.
Routledge, 2024

Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, this book investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health through sensation fiction. Focusing on the works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, it explores representations of conditions including monomania, moral insanity, melancholia and hypochondria. By placing literary texts alongside nineteenth-century medical discourse, the book demonstrates how these novels represented mental suffering, domestic identity and social expectations, while offering fresh perspectives on Victorian mental health and wellbeing.

2022

Grice, Annalise.
Edinburgh University Press, 2022

This monograph examines how D. H. Lawrence established himself as a professional writer within the literary marketplace of the long Edwardian period. Analysing the social, commercial and cultural conditions of authorship, it explores Lawrence's relationships with publishers, editors, literary journals and influential mentors. The book reassesses how Lawrence's early works were marketed and received, offering a new perspective on the making of a major twentieth-century writer.

2020

Whickman, Paul.
Palgrave, 2020

This book argues for the importance of blasphemy in shaping the literature and readership of Percy Bysshe Shelley and of the Romantic period more broadly. Not only are perceptions of blasphemy taken to be inextricable from politics, this book also argues for blasphemous ‘irreverence’ as both inspiring and necessitating new poetic creativity. The book reveals the intersection of blasphemy, censorship and literary property throughout the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’, attesting to the effect of this connection on Shelley’s poetry more specifically. Paul Whickman notes how Shelley’s perceived blasphemy determined the nature and readership of his published works through censorship and literary piracy. Simultaneously, Whickman crucially shows that aesthetics, content and the printed form of the physical text are interconnected and that Shelley’s political and philosophical views manifest themselves in his writingally.

2019

Castiglione, Davide.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

This book theoretically defines and linguistically analyses the popular notion that poetry is ‘difficult’ - hard to read, hard to understand, hard to engage with. It is the first work to offer a stylistic and cognitive model that sheds new light on the mechanisms of difficulty, as well as on its range of potential effects. Its eight chapters are organised into two thematic parts. The first traces the history of difficulty, surveys its main scholarly traditions, addresses related themes – from elitism to obscurity, from abstraction to intentionality – and introduces a wide array of analytical tools from literary theory and cognitive psychology. These tools are then consistently applied in the second part, which includes several extended analyses of poems by canonical modernists such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, alongside those of postmodernist innovators such as Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein, among others. This innovative work will provide fresh insights and approaches for scholars of stylistics, literary studies, cognitive poetics and psychology.

Mason, Jess.
John Benjamins, 2019

The books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure, expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality, both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research, highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually, rather than how it can be identified, described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism, neuroscience, linguistics and sociology, this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach, presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.

2018

Lapadula, Brent.
McFarland, 2018
The concept of the individual or the self, central in so many modern-day contexts, has not been investigated in depth in the Anglo-Saxon period. Focusing on Old English poetry, the author argues that a singular, Anglo-Saxon sense of self may be found by analyzing their surviving verse. The concept of the individual, with an identity outside of her community, is clearly evident during this period, and the widely accepted view that the individual as we understand it did not really exist until the Renaissance does not stand up to scrutiny.

Nuttall, Louise.
Bloomsbury, 2018
Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar.

Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

2017

Gregory, Rebecca.
Five Leaves Publications, 2017

Viking Nottinghamshire describes the county as it was throughout the Viking Age, through the various stages of Scandinavian settlement. It uses a range of historical evidence, including documents, place-names, artefacts and sculpture, to explore the impact and contribution the Scandinavian settlers made to the character and history of Nottinghamshire.

The book examines this era of history in a fresh light, reflecting trends in modern scholarship, focusing on cultural interaction and integration rather than a story of invasion, rape and pillage.

Mastropierro, Lorenzo.
Bloomsbury, 2017

This book explores the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies. It shows how corpus methods can be used to compare literary texts to their translations, through the analysis of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. The comparison focuses on stylistic features related to the major themes of Heart of Darkness. By combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, Mastropierro discusses how alterations to the original's stylistic features can affect the interpretation of the themes in translation. The discussion illuminates the manipulative effects that translating can have on the reception of a text, showing how textual alterations can trigger different readings. This book advances the multidisciplinary dialogue between corpus linguistics and translation studies and is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the application of corpus approaches to stylistics and translation.

Rundquist, Eric.
John Benjamins, 2017

Free Indirect Style (FIS) is a linguistic technique that defies the logic of human subjectivity by enabling readers to directly observe the subjective experiences of third-person characters. This book consolidates the existing literary-linguistic scholarship on FIS into a theory that is based around one of its most important effects: consciousness representation. Modernist narratives exhibit intensified formal experimentation and a heightened concern with characters’ conscious experience, and this provides an ideal context for exploring FIS and its implications for character consciousness. This book focuses on three novels that are central to the Modernist canon: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It applies the revised theory of FIS in close semantic analyses of the language in these narratives and combines stylistics with literary criticism, linking interpretations with linguistic features in distinct manifestations of the style.

2016

Anderton, Joe.
Bloomsbury, 2016

In the shadow of the Holocaust, Samuel Beckett captures humanity in ruins through his debased beings and a decomposing mode of writing that strives to 'fail better'. But what might it mean to be a 'creature' or 'creaturely' in Beckett's world? In the first full-length study of the concept of the creature in Beckett's prose and drama, this book traces the suspended lives and melancholic existences of Beckett's ignorant and impotent creatures to assess the extent to which political value marks the divide between human and inhuman.

Gupta, Kat.
Bloomsbury, 2016

Focussing on The Times, this monograph uses corpus linguistics to examine how suffrage campaigners' different ideologies were conflated in the newspaper over a crucial time period for the movement - 1908 to 1914, leading up to the Representation of the People Act in 1918. Looking particularly at representations of suffrage campaigners' support of or opposition to military action, Gupta uses a range of methodological approaches drawn from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and CDA. These include: collocation analysis, examination of consistent significant collocates and van Leeuwen's taxonomy of social actors. The book offers an innovative insight into contemporary public understanding of the suffrage campaign with implications for researchers examining large, complex protest movements.

Ward, Jason.
Brill, 2016

This book looks beyond fidelity to emphasize how each adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s short stories functions as a creative response to a text, foregrounding the significance of its fluidity, transtextuality, and genre. The adaptations analysed range from the first to the most recent and draw attention to the fluidity of textual sources, the significance of generic conventions and space in film, the generic potentialities latent within Lawrence’s tales, and the evolving nature of adaptation. By engaging with recent advances in adaptation theory to discuss the evolving critical reception of the author’s work and the role of the reader, this book provides a fresh, forward-looking approach to Lawrence studies.

2015

McCluskey, Alan.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

In this work, Alan McCluskey explores materialism, in its many conceptual forms, in the contemporary cosmopolitan novel. The author applies a 'cosmopolitan materialist' lens to the novels of Caryl Phillips, J. M. Coetzee, and Philip Roth: three contemporary authors who hail from different parts of the world and produce highly dissimilar

 

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