Matthew Taunton

The street shows were supported by Jack Lindsay's daughter Helen, directed by Simon Floyd of the Common Lot, and m'colleague Steve Waters was dramaturg. The film was directed by Bartek Dziadosz of the Derek Jarman Lab - I hope you enjoy!

YouTube video by Jarman Lab Declamations!

Declamations! is a short documentary that developed out of my @britishacademy.bsky.social mid-career fellowship on the politics of choral speaking. It documents a series of performances in Norwich, written by UEA students, inspired by Jack Lindsay's 1930s Mass Declamations. youtu.be/IY085tFQ7SM?...

Looks brilliant- can’t wait to read!

The replies to this are interesting about the power (and perils) of bluesky for writers (including academics). We write in a moment of media fragmentation, lacking clear rules about what to do (on- and offline), to engage readers in the topics that interest us. Many wise, encouraging thoughts here!

Really a bad mistake to pitch education at 'jobs of the future' which you will almost certainly get wrong. What education gives is maturity, judgement, cognitive skills, trainability, flexibility - almost whatever the subject. For this reason 85% of grad job adverts don't specify a subject.

Proof of Chapter 18: 'Devolution, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Independence' by Nick Hubble. Text reads The Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 adopted the strategy of the Popular Front as an anti-fascist organisational technique combining a united front of working-class organisations with a wider popular alliance including socialists, social democrats, liberal and even moderate conservatives. In practice, such alliances were organised at a national level and resulted in 1936 in the election of Popular Front governments in both France and Spain. As Elinor Taylor has shown, Popular Front politics in Britain gave rise in the second half of the 1930s to an extraordinary set of realist novels, which ‘functioned as a site of negotiation for the imaginative making of a politics’. In many ways, the most exemplary of these novels was Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937), written by a Welsh Communist miner, who was actually present as a delegate at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern for Georgi Dimitrov’s speech announcing the national focus of the Popular Front, in close collaboration with Communist intellectual Douglas Garman for the party publisher, Lawrence & Wishart. The novel is not just an epic tale of strikes and collective political action but, in the words of Jones himself, ‘a class book in the fullest sense of the word’ which deals with ‘every phase of human existence from within the community’. Randall Swingler, writing about Cwmardy and its sequel We Live in the Daily Worker, suggested that together they could be read as ‘a sort of parable of the whole development of the working class in England’. While Taylor notes Swingler’s ‘elision of “England” and “Britain”’, she supports his argument that the novel’s investment in popular life allows it to provide ‘a glorious affirmation of the people who made this book’. But the question of the exact national identity of these people remains unsettled.

Screenshot from Cambridge University Press announcing a new book, 'The People' and British Literature: Belonging, Exclusion and Democracy, edited by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matt Taunton, due out in December 2025.

As previous image but with list of contributors: Benjamin Kohlmann, Matthew Taunton, Andrew Galloway, Andrea Haslanger, Ella Dzelzainis, Natasha Periyan, J. Dillon Brown, John West, Jon Mee, Charlotte Jones, Elinor Taylor, Helen Fulton, Peter Womack, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Santanu Das, Steven Connor, Ian Haywood, Sarah Cole, Joseph Brooker, Nick Hubble, Mark Steven, João Florêncio, Regenia Gagnier

Proofs of my chapter 'Devolution, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Independence' from Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, eds, 'The People' and British Literature: Belonging, Exclusion and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, December 2025. #ProofingTime #AcademicSky #Cymru
#Scotland

Ah sounds great! Looking forward to that- hope you have a good break first though. Cheers 🍻

Enjoy your well-deserved pint… but also what’s the book proposal Luke? (If we’re allowed to know at this stage!)

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC NEW SERIES Book History for the Future SERIES EDITORS: Lisa Gitelman, New York University, USA Tom Mole, Durham University, UK Sarah Werner, Independent Researcher, USA Book History for the Future aims to define the cutting edge for a new generation of book historians, as book history enters a new chapter of its evolution. Books sit at a densely trafficked intersection of social relations, status negotiations, emotional investments, material possibilities, desires, aspirations, and dreams. They require an intellectual approach grounded in attention to physical artefacts and material conditions while also engaged in theoretical reflection, attentive to historical contexts while attuned to contemporary resonances. This series publishes books that eschew academic parochialism in favour of adventurous engagements with new theoretical developments, innovative methodologies, digital tools, and global contexts.

Exciting news, Bluesky! I’m editing a new book series for Bloomsbury with Tom Mole and Lisa Gitelman: Book History for the Future! Do you focus on material textual artifacts and innovative methodologies? We’re actively soliciting proposals, so give us a shout! www.bloomsbury.com/media/cecjzl...

🚨 Job alert! 🚨 The Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex is looking to hire both a fixed-term Lecturer in Literature and a fixed-term Lecturer in Theatre Studies. For full details about each post, see the link below. vacancies.essex.ac.uk/tlive_webrec...

Calling all Sylvia Townsend Warner fans and scholars: there is a Prize, and there will be a Conference. See here!
townsendwarner.com/the-society/...

Love a good mid-summer cover reveal!

Excellent representation of @standrewsenglish.bsky.social in this book with essays by my supervisor James Purdon and @dranindyar.bsky.social 😍 Go give it some love!

new book series: Literature and Politics!

first title from Amanda Anderson and Simon During coming soon; pipeline bustling; consider it for your next project

global.oup.com/academic/con...

Harsh

And here’s the programme for the symposium at UEA on Friday. Book your place here: store.uea.ac.uk/conferences-...

Norwich! Book your place for this Thursday's Lorna Sage Memorial Lecture, 5.30pm, @writerscentre.bsky.social, hosted by the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social. Helen Small's lecture is called 'Changing Humanities'.

store.uea.ac.uk/conferences-...

Ah did not see that! Looks amazing…

It’s been a while, old friend. And as it turns out, perfect indexing music!

Awful news- a brilliant scholar and a lovely man 💔

The Modernist Review #56: New Work in Modernist Studies Part Two 13 June 2025 Following on from our previous issue, we are pleased to present a second collection of articles stemming from last year’s New Work in Modernist Studies postgraduate conference. These p…

Great to see these articles published in The Modernist Review, all fruits of the #NWiMS conference at UEA last December. Looks like a fascinating issue! @modernistudies.bsky.social modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2025/06/13/t...

It’s like a warm breeze…

I’m sure it would work either way round… but A Life of One’s Own is one of the most extraordinary books I’ve read- strongly recommend!

Call for Contributors: Foreclosure, a Special Issue of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism British cultural production has a long history of foreclosure. Understood as a premature abandonment, or an abortive failure, of radical political projects, foreclosure has an imaginative and mater…

🚨🚨Call for contributors to next year's issue of Key Words, a special issue on 'Foreclosure,' guest edited by Chloe Ashbridge and Owain Burrell🚨🚨 Deadline for abstracts is July 18th, 2025. Read more here: raymondwilliams.co.uk/2025/06/09/c... Please share widely.

BBC graphic titled 'Shakedowns in Hyperspace' by Naomi Wood, featuring three astronauts walking on a rocky, moon-like surface, with a large planet in the background.

Looking for stories that are out of this world? 🚀

This week on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime you can hear 'Shakedowns in Hyperspace' –five short stories, written by Dr Naomi Wood, Associate Professor in Creative Writing.

Catch any episodes you’ve missed on the BBC Sounds website: bbc.in/4kfqR84

An image of some text saying Would it not be more ‘on brand’ To use our favoured ampersand? If that won’t work for SEO The ampersand will have to go.

When your editorial work can only be expressed in rhyming couplets…

Critical Quarterly: Vol 63, No 4 Critical Quarterly is a literary reviews journal recognized globally for its unique combination of literary criticism, cultural studies, poetry, and fiction.

A good time to revisit 'Marion Milner: Modernism, Politics, Psychoanalysis', a special issue of CQ that Akshi co-edited with Eve Dickson in 2021.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678705...

In Defence of Leisure The celebrated psychoanalyst Marion Milner invented new ways of thinking about leisure. A hundred years on, Akshi Singh follows her methods, with life-changing consequences.'Illuminating and thought-p...

I'm excited to read 'In Defence of Leisure' by Akshi Singh, which is out now with Penguin. Marion Milner fans, take note!

www.penguin.co.uk/books/459266...