From the team that brought you 'Mary Shelley’s Dundee: Frankenstein Begins' comes 'H.G. Wells at 150: Hope and Fear', a series of events that will celebrate the 150th birthday of the author of The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898) as part of the UK’s Being Human Festival of the Humanities (17th-25th November 2016).

Building on the success of our involvement with Being Human 2015, we are delighted to confirm that this year Dundee has been promoted to the status of Scotland’s “festival hub”. Led by the School of Advanced Study, Un...

Shadwell vs. Dryden. Swift vs. Smedley. Plath vs. Hughes. Many a rivalry has been played out in audaciously appropriative poetry. Shakespeare vs. Watson is surely one of the greatest mismatches, to be sure. A vernacular and Latin love poet, Watson seems to have enjoyed a fairly good reputation among his peers, particularly as an imitator of Petrarch. In 1582 he published a series of love sonnets, Hekatompathia, among which we find Sonnet VII:

Hark you that list to hear what saint I serve:

Her yellow locks exceed the beaten gold;
Her sparkling eyes in heav'n a place deserve;
Her forehead high and fair of comely mold;
H...

A noticeable trend among some eighteenth-century novelists was to claim one's work as the offspring of a well-received work of fiction. In the anonymously published Charlotte Summers (1750), the narrator-author presents himself as the illegitimate offspring of Henry Fielding’s narrator-author: ‘You must know then, I am the first Begotten, of the poetical Issue, of the much celebrated Biographer of Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones’. He continues in a playful, Fieldingesque tone – ‘I dare not pretend to be legitimately begotten’ – feeding off a relationship with the noted author while openly drawing attention to...

Outwardly appropriative texts tend to frontload the notional hypotext with which they are engaged in their opening stages, as in Fielding's reworking of Richardson's Pamela over the first ten chapters of Joseph Andrews or Robert Bloch's almost verbatim relocation of some lines from Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' in the opening paragraph or so of his gothic mimicry, 'The Man Who Collected Poe'. In an audaciously allusive and endlessly inventive short story, 'The Bloody Chamber', Angela Carter masterfully rewrites the fairy tale 'Bluebeard', along with snatches of Dracula, popular romance fiction, and other piec...