Humour in Times of Confrontation: 1901 to the Present (2025) examines the various and surprising ways in which humour has been powerfully employed through a wide range of media as a response to conflict experienced across the world over the past 12 decades.
This book argues that such conflict has not only traumatically shaped the modern psyche but created a fertile ground for humour to grow and evolve with the advent of new representations and technologies.
Humour in the Arts (2019;2020) explores humour as a source of cultural formation that engages with ethical, political, and religious controversies whilst acquainting readers with a wide range of humorous structures and strategies used across Western cultures.This collection demonstrates the usefulness of approaching texts—verbal, visual and aural—through a framework of humour. Contributors offer in-depth discussions of humour in the West within a wider cultural historical context to achieve a coherent, chronological sense of how humour proceeds from antiquity to modernity.
Sharks in the Arts (2018;2019) is the most thorough exploration to date of the many ways in which a wild creature has been absorbed, reimagined and represented across the ages in all of the major art forms. The authors consider not only how the identity of sharks in the natural environment became incorporated into a cultural environment but also how sharks came to be considered the most feared creatures in the open oceans as a consequence of this incorporation. Yet sharks are especially important in helping to maintain a balance that is essential to the health of the oceans.
Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England (2016) brings together eleven authors from different disciplines (English Literature, History, Divinity, and the History of the Book), who explore the different policies undertaken to ensure that Catholicism could flourish once more in England. The safety of the clergy and of the public at the Mass was of paramount importance, since sporadic unrest took place early on. Steps were taken to ensure that reformist worship was stopped and that the country re-embraced Catholic practices.
Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England
Reinventing the Reformation in the Nineteenth Century (2014). Since the 1970s, the origins, course and consequences of the English Reformation have been the subject of lively, stimulating and often heated debate among scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pendulum of interpretation has swung wildly: from upbeat assessments of the enthusiastic embrace and swift spread of Protestant ideas towards ‘revisionist’ accounts of the haphazard development and patchy progress of a religious revolution imposed upon an unwilling populace by the Tudor state. This volume explores how the nineteenth century interpreted the Reformation debate.
Reinventing the Reformation in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History
Long Travail and Great Paynes (2001). Some of England’s most fascinating Renaissance texts have been forgotten by historians, literary critics and theologians alike. The earliest printed Bibles in the English language provide an astonishingly rich resource for cross-disciplinary studies in the 21st century. Long Travail and Great Paynes is a close textual analysis of seven texts that for a wide range of reasons, but no good ones, have been reduced to paratextual entries in general histories of the English Bible.