School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Start date: 2020 × End date: 2022 × Author: Knight, Stephen ×

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    Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), 1905: The Four Just Men
    Knight, S ; Miskimmin, E (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2020)
    Commentators seem unable to avoid using the term ‘phenomenon’ to describe Edgar Richard Horatio Wallace, referring usually to his enormous popularity in Britain, America and Germany, and his extraordinary productivity. In crime fiction he produced at least 158 novels and story collections (though titles were often changed, and there may be overlaps), and he could be astonishingly prolific: his finest year was 1929 when he produced twenty-three titles, nearly matched by 1926 (eighteen) and 1927 (fourteen).
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    Robert Barnard (1936–2013), 1974: Death of an Old Goat
    Knight, S ; Miskimmin, E (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2020)
    Born on 23 November 1936 in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, Robert Barnard studied English at Balliol College Oxford, lectured at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia 1961–6, moved to Bergen, Norway, 1966–76, where he took a Ph.D. in 1972, and then became Professor at Tromsö, 1976–83, when he retired early to write full-time.
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    'The Original Hoods' Late Medieval English Crime Fiction
    Knight, S (FIRENZE UNIV PRESS, 2021)
    Early crime fiction is usually linked to the true crime stories that developed into The Newgate Calendar by the mid-eighteenth century, but there were late medieval and early modern narratives in popular poetry that described and even celebrated actions by free peasants against the authorities of the church and the then somewhat fragmentary state. Four domains of such narratives - seen here as the ancestors of the crime novel - are described and explored. They are: Robin Hood ballads, focusing on the early major texts, ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’, ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’, ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ and ‘A Gest of Robyn Hode’. Popular ballads recording family crimes, ‘The Twa Sisters’, ‘The Cruel Brother’, ‘Edward’, or ‘Lord Randal’ or presenting conflicts with the supernatural, ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’ and ‘Gil Brenton’. Anglo-Scottish border ballads of politico-military conflict, ‘Johnie Armstrong’ and ‘Tam Lin’. Early modern verse narratives usually called ‘King and Subject Narratives’, where a free peasant directly challenges the anonymous monarch and finally meets him, awkwardly, at court: ‘King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth’, ‘John the Reeve’ and ‘King Edward and the Shepherd’, with its intriguingly open ending. Across these little known rich popular narratives are transcribed the patterns of early and politically-resistant crime fiction.
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    Medieval Literature and Social Politics: Studies of Cultures and Their Contexts
    Knight, S (Routledge, 2021-03-02)
    Medieval Literature and Social Politics brings together seventeen articles by literary historian Stephen Knight. The book primarily focuses on the social and political meaning of medieval literature, in the past and the present. It provides an account of how early heroic texts relate to the issues surrounding leadership and conflict in Wales, France and England, and how the myth of the Grail and the French reworking of Celtic stories relate to contemporary society and its concerns. Further chapters examine Chaucer's readings of his social world, the medieval reworkings of the Arthur and Merlin myths, and the popular social statements in ballads and other literary forms. The concluding chapters examine the Anglo-nationalist `Arctic Arthur', and the ways in which Arthur, Merlin and Robin Hood can be treated in terms of modern studies of the history of emotions and the environment. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval Europe, as well as those interested in social and political history, medieval literature and modern medievalism.
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    `Foreword’, `Edgar Wallace(1875-1932): 1905, The Four Just Men’ and `Robert Barnard (1936-2013), 1974, Death of an Old Goat’
    Knight, S ; Miskimmin, E (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020-12-06)
    With entries spanning the earliest authors of crime fiction to a selection of innovative contemporary novelists, this book considers the development and progression of the genre in the light of historical and social events. 100 British ...