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)
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.