'Response and Responsibility: Theories of the Implied Reader in Children's Literature Criticism'

Reader Response Theory remains popular within Children's Literature Criticism. It seems to offer a sensible resolution to the question of whether meaning derives from text or reader. Through a close reading of one example of this criticism, I suggest that its dualisms are constantly collapsing into appeals to singular authority. at various stages the text or the reader is wholly responsible for meaning. I further suggest that the criticism bypasses the question of interpretation through claiming knowledge of a child reader whose opinions and reactions can be unproblematically accessed. We do not have to worry about reading texts, because we can, apparently, know the child's response to them with certainty. Anything other than this claim to certainty is taken to be a failure of responsibility, a wallowing in the subjective, obscure and perverse. My intention is to reinstate reading as the responsibility of criticism.

Law and the power of feminism: how marriage lost its power to oppress women

In Feminism and the Power of Law Carol Smart argued that feminists should use non-legal strategies rather than looking to law to bring about women’s liberation. This article seeks to demonstrate that, as far as marriage is concerned, she was right. Statistics and contemporary commentary show how marriage, once the ultimate and only acceptable status for women, has declined in social significance to such an extent that today it is a mere lifestyle choice. This is due to many factors, including the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, improved education and job opportunities for women, and divorce law reform, but the catalyst for change was the feminist critique that called for the abandonment (rather than the reform) of the institution and made the unmarried state possible for women. I conclude that this loss of significance has been more beneficial to British women in terms of the possibility of ‘liberation’ than appeals for legal change and recognition, and that we should continue to be wary of looking to law to solve women’s problems.

A multidisciplinary literature review of low and zero carbon technologies into new housing

The UK Government is committed to all new homes being zero-carbon from 2016. The use of low and zero carbon (LZC) technologies is recognised by housing developers as being a key part of the solution to deliver against this zero-carbon target. The paper takes as its starting point that the selection of new technologies by firms is not a phenomenon which takes place within a rigid sphere of technical rationality (for example, Rip and Kemp, 1998). Rather, technology forms and diffusion trajectories are driven and shaped by myriad socio-technical structures, interests and logics. A literature review is offered to contribute to a more critical and systemic foundation for understanding the socio-technical features of the selection of LZC technologies in new housing. The problem is investigated through a multidisciplinary lens consisting of two perspectives: technological and institutional. The synthesis of the perspectives crystallises the need to understand that the selection of LZC technologies by housing developers is not solely dependent on technical or economic efficiency, but on the emergent ‘fit’ between the intrinsic properties of the technologies, institutional logics and the interests and beliefs of various actors in the housing development process.

'Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires': Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature

This article discusses a series of texts by or about travellers to Safavid Persia in the early seventeenth century, and in particular the literature surrounding the Sherley brothers. It looks at the ways in which, in order to encourage support for the voyages they described, English travel writers emphasised the potential for closer Anglo-Persian relations. In doing so, such narratives took advantage of a developing awareness of sectarian division within Islam in order to differentiate Persia from the Ottoman Empire. The article then examines how The Travailes of the Three English Brothers (1607) by Day, Rowley and Wilkins, built on the possibilities suggested by the travel writings, and specifically their recognition of Islamic sectarian division, to develop an idealised model of how relations between Persia and England might function. More broadly, these texts demonstrate travellers’ interest in looking for potential correlation between Christian and Muslim identities during this period.

Film as literature, or the Truffaldian Malaise

This chapter looks at L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (1977) as a privileged instance of the self-effacing, obliquely disruptive, reflexive aesthetics that characterizes Truffaut’s cinema, by means of an intermedial approach. Although an original story, written by Truffaut in collaboration with Suzanne Schiffman and Michel Fermaud, the film’s subject is the writing of a book containing the protagonist’s story. More importantly, its mode of address presents this story as literature, through a complex network of flashbacks and voiceover narrations that comment on and make sense of the fragmentary present-tense action scenes. As well as a film, this method resulted in an actual novel, or cinéroman, this time authored exclusively by the director under the same title of L’Homme qui aimait les femmes, thus giving material form to the literary aim of the cinematic enterprise: a book.

Dementia and cancer: a review of the literature and current practice

Age is a risk factor for dementia, and also for most cancers. Surprisingly, rates of cancer appear to be lower in individuals with dementia and vice versa. Genetic mechanisms could underpin this inverse relationship and are outlined, but underdiagnosis must also be taken into account. Individuals with cancer and dementia pose unique challenges to healthcare professionals owing to the potential for impaired decision-making capacity, poor communication and difficulties following medication regimes. Mild cognitive impairment and ‘chemo brain’ should be differentiated from progressive neurodegeneration.