EXTENDED DEADLINE: 15 JANUARY 2021

Critical Concepts and Readings: English Literature GCSE.

Editors: Dr Kate Watson and Dr Sally O’Gorman

This original collection invites teachers and academics to contribute a book chapter on a GCSE text, applying a theory and considering a new and innovative aspect of the literary text.

The study of GCSE literature enables students to develop their knowledge of a vast literary heritage that spans over two centuries of societal, psychological and philosophical reactions.  GCSE English Literature encourages students to read widely for pleasure, preparing for their engagement with literature at a higher level of interpretation.

Students of this millennium continually engage with the metafiction of artificiality or literariness of texts with an expectation that they will understand and adhere to methodological conventions in their own interpretations.  This collection of indispensable interpretations on GCSE narratives is a departure from traditional readings offering under-researched, multifaceted concepts that relate to today’s multicultural reader ensuring students can make closer conceptual links between the past and the present.

Contributors would also be expected to include a brief advisory section at the end of the chapter detailing ways to engage students through both online and classroom modes of teaching.

We invite proposals for 6000-word book chapters.  Topics can include the following:

An Inspector Calls

Lord of the Flies

Blood Brothers

Never Let Me Go

Animal Farm

The History Boys

A Taste of Honey

Pigeon English

DNA

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

A Raisin in the Sun

The Woman in Black

The Empress

Romeo and Juliet

Macbeth

Much Ado About Nothing

The Tempest

The Merchant of Venice

Julius Caesar

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

A Christmas Carol

The Sign of Four

Great Expectations

Jane Eyre

Frankenstein

Pride and Prejudice

Concepts that can be applied to your reading:

Intertextuality/ Metafiction and self or inter-referentiality

Postcolonial criticism

Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Freud/Jung/Lacan etc.)

Eco criticism

Feminist criticism

Allegory

Allusion

Archetype

Binary opposition

Canon

Carnival (Bakhtin)

Desire

Conventions

Semiotics

Structuralism (e.g. Barthes) and Poststructuralism

Ideology

Irony

Metaphor

Metonymy

Motif

The Death of the Author

Queer theory

Marxist criticism

Narratology

New Criticism

New Historicism and Cultural Materialism

Reader-response criticism

Narrative structure

Realism

Dramatic structure

Ouspensky

Brecht (epic theatre)

Performative interpretations

Dramatic irony

Editors: Dr Kate Watson and Dr Sally O’Gorman

We welcome proposals from secondary school English practitioners and university academics. Please email your 200-word proposal, four key words and short biographical note including your school/university affiliation to watsonk2@outlook.com and sallyogorman@hotmail.com no later than 15th January 2021. Comments and queries should be directed to the same addresses.