Far from being cut-down versions of the adult form, children’s dictionaries constitute a distinct genre with their own history and methodology. The chapter charts the development of children’s dictionaries, from Renaissance bilingual dictionaries to the present day, showing how they have evolved to reflect changing perceptions of childhood. It discusses the bewildering range of dictionaries now available for children as they progress from ABCs and picture dictionaries to those for school use and creative writing, including innovative subgenres based on fictional worlds and dictionaries supporting language revitalisation. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the chapter explores content and page design adapted to engage young readers. It considers how lexicographers aim to reflect the world as experienced by children, from the selection of headwords to the framing of definitions, using dedicated corpora and reading programmes. The tension between descriptive and prescriptive approaches is often acute in children’s dictionaries, for example over the inclusion of slang and taboo words, and lexicographers aim to balance young dictionary users’ needs against adult perceptions of what a children’s dictionary is for.

This essay considers Sebald as an academic. Arguably, the acdemy as an institution shaped his entire life. Originating from a non-academic background, studying in Freiburg was his escape ticket from the Allgäu province. His transfers to the universities of Fribourg and Manchester in turn determined his life as an expat and his profile as a Germanist abroad. By remaining at the university, his academic profession provided the basis for his intellectual career and secured his livelihood. His literary work emerged as a frustrated reaction to the neoliberal reforms of UK HE; Sebald conquered his own free space through the writing of literature. In the second part of the essay, Sebald’s teaching style and didactics are examined, not least on the basis of the author’s personal experiences. Sebald was an unorthodox university teacher who aimed to encourage his students in their own talents and abilities.

This chapter examines the literary institutions that helped American short fiction to flourish in the twentieth century and maintain its visibility today. These institutions, from the Best American Short Stories and the New Yorker, to the Pushcart Prize and the National Book Award, form a kind of patchwork canon of American short fiction, a record of the writers most celebrated in their moment and most remembered since. Despite the persistent notion, espoused by artists and scholars alike, that the short story is “the art form best suited for the description” of a diverse and “heterogeneous culture,” these institutions also testify to the fact that the genre has, until very recently, underrepresented women and overlooked racialized writers. This chapter documents the writers that these organizations have consecrated, examining how that patchwork canon has often failed to live up to the ideals of cultural pluralism at the heart of the American short story tradition.

This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

This chapter looks at the work of the contemporary Noongar writer Kim Scott, focusing both on its portrayal of his family history and the history of Indigenous settler contact in Western Australia. It emphasizes the importance of the university as a context for Scott’s historical fiction, focusing on creative-writing programs and practice-led research. It demonstrates how the rise of “the doctoral novel” plays a vital role in a more plural and more just model of literary engagement.

Frederic Taveau makes a strong argument for reconceptualising modern languages – in this case French – as a subject discipline, with knowledge domains and pathways that explore alternative ways of learning and using language with beginner or near-beginner students. By foregrounding textual fluency, he challenges more traditional approaches to language learning that emphasise linguistic systems. Instead, he focuses on the use of multimodal literary texts to promote meaning-making and language learning through deepening learners’ critical and cultural awareness of relevant, motivating real-world phenomena. Taveau outlines the processes involved in enabling novice learners of French to become more self-confident and self-directed creative literary writers using language in unprecedented ways. Through a series of scaffolded text-centred learning episodes, learners are guided through pluriliteracies-based steps, increasingly using cognitive discourse functions creatively and confidently (explaining, describing, classifying, arguing and evaluating) to construct their own descriptive literary texts on a Gothic theme. These texts are ‘owned’ by students, demonstrating language learning as a creative, motivating means to understanding their world and that of others.

This chapter traces multiple genealogies for the contemporary “lyric essay,” from the American memoir boom of the 1990s to the experimental writings of language poets, practitioners of postcolonial and Black diasporic thought such as Édouard Glissant and M. NourbeSe Philip, and writers who combine lyric and essayistic writing such as Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Khapil.

English as a university subject covers a very wide range of topics, with variation around the world both in scope and in how programmes are organized. Work in English is often more or less formally divided into sub-disciplines. In the UK, language, literature, and creative writing are the three most common subdivisions. In Europe, different divisions are made and students on English programmes often look at two or more of these areas. In the USA, divisions are stronger, with very little work in universities that combines or connects linguistic and literary perspectives. This chapter focuses on undergraduate research on language, literature and creative writing, without presupposing that this encompasses all that can be covered by English or that these areas should be sharply distinguished. It highlights higher education in the UK, partly because there is little data on international practice and anecdotal evidence often relates to particular institutions.

In this chapter, the author presents some of her creative courses or workshops at Aix-Marseille University and in a local medical centre, as well as a new action research project in creative pedagogy. As a lecturer, she has developed an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and research, infusing her academic teaching with creative, plurilingual practices. She became aware of the pleasures of thinking and writing between languages when studying English poetry for her PhD in French, as well as of the negotiation of the cultural and conceptual mismatches between the discourses of English poetry criticism and French academia, and between interior and exterior languages, but with a crossover effect: a language of intimacy from which one was estranged by distance, a language of exteriority in the immediate environment. The creative energy of language learning, and the pleasure learners take in the phonetics and physicality of foreign words, led the author to develop a pedagogical approach designed to include what Yoann Loisel calls the ‘maternal side of language’. She references Julia Kristeva’s chora to convey the way creative translation and plurilingual creative writing workshops offer the possibility of playing with new ‘ways of [writing]’, new ‘manners of being’.

In this chapter, the creative processes that are explored include those of writers and readers. Narrative stories derive from conversation, which is thought to have begun with the evolution of language between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago. Conversation is a mode in which people develop and sustain relationships by sharing memories, perceptions, emotions, anecdotes, thoughts, and understandings – pieces of consciousness – with others. It’s fundamentally creative; each conversation today, engaged in by each of the world’s 7.5 billion inhabitants, with relatives, friends, and other people, is unique, as have been all other conversations. Written stories, which started some 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, have taken this further, with pieces of consciousness being sent by writers to others whom they do not usually know.

Steinbeck received much of his early training in creative writing classes at Stanford University. Focusing on Steinbeck’s short story cycle, The Pastures of Heaven, this chapter explores Steinbeck’s education in writing--and his resistance to many of its principles--as it relates to his understanding of the colonial history of the American West. The unstable mixture of realist and fantastic forms, particularly as they relate to the construction of literary character, here encapsulates an ambivalent resonse to the haunting lagacies of slavery and race in the California land. The second part of the chapter, on the story “The Snake,” traces another aspect of Steinbeck’s education--this time in the scientific laboratory--to understand an approach to gender more complex than critics would admit. The experiment with narrative point of view uncovers sexist ideologies in the purportedly objective act of scientific observation, thus bringing attention to the process of attention itself.

This chapter examines the relationship between poetry and academic institutions in the twenty-first century, an era in which creative writing MFA and PhD programs are an established and durable part of the landscape. The real solidification of poetry’s academic situatedness has given rise to poetry that chooses to interrogate the notions of creative freedom and personal expression. Folding an explicitly hermeneutic practice or process into the poetry itself creates a reflexivity that imagines the speaking subject as an actively, discursively analytical subject – one that sees in these analytical methodologies not a way to stifle creative possibility, but to expand it. The work of Myung Mi Kim, particularly Commons, seeks to reconfigure the personal in service of the more broadly intellectual: the lyric speaker as an active analyst both of “lyric” and of “speaker.” Alongside the work of poets like Claudia Rankine and Nathaniel Mackey, the result is what we might call an academic avant-garde at the crossroads of programs in creative writing and those in literature, history, philosophy, and the other humanities.