Gillian Russell

Gillian Russell is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. Her most recent book is The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century: Print, sociability, and the cultures of collecting (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She was born and educated in Northern Ireland and has taught at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.

'Raking the past: Northern Irish fiction in the age of social media' by Gillian Russell

October 2022, no. 447 • 27 September 2022

A ‘rake’ of fiction by women from Northern Ireland was published in the first months of 2022, much of which takes the Troubles as its focus, both directly and indirectly. ‘Rake’, a dialect word which crops up across these books, means a significant quantity or gathering of something. ‘Rake’ can also mean to drive a car hard, like ‘hoon’ in Australian English. The use of such terms ... (read more)