Centre for Creative and Critical Practice (CCPRG)

Exploring the mutually interdependent relationship between creative and critical writing.

The  Creative and Critical Practice Research Group (CCPRG) explores the mutually interdependent relationship between creative and critical writing. The critical insights of practising creative writers, gained from the subjective experience of the writing process, may be lost to scholars who wish to establish a critical object of study in their fields. Conversely, theoretical insights about interpreting texts, grounded in a knowledge of literary history and cultural criticism, may remain unheard by aspiring writers, even though such insights may be potentially ‘creative’.

The creative-critical group is an interdisciplinary forum for the benefit of the research community throughout the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and beyond. The CCPRG’s mission is to:
provide a home and shop window for the considerable outputs of creative writing. organise research/practice-led discussion groups, panels, guest lectures, roundtables, presentations and interviews which will provide intellectual coherence to our thriving constituency of PhD students. develop partnerships with creative industries in close collaboration with the Cultural Institute. provide an interdisciplinary hub within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (and potentially cross-Faculty) for those working in creative writing (including media), creative-critical and/or critical practice. in partnership with the Cultural Institute, support career-development networking opportunities for those working in creative fields (both staff and postgraduates). constitute a forum in which the growing body of Creative Writing PGRs can work alongside an interdisciplinary network of staff. advocate for arts funding. work in close partnership with the Cultural Institute to provide a range of public engagement and outreach events for diverse target audiences, including the possibility of the incorporation of more critical-creative events in the future.

The creative-critical group is an interdisciplinary forum for the benefit of the research community throughout the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and beyond. The CCPRG’s mission is to:

provide a home and shop window for the considerable outputs of creative writing.

organise research/practice-led discussion groups, panels, guest lectures, roundtables, presentations and interviews which will provide intellectual coherence to our thriving constituency of PhD students.

develop partnerships with creative industries in close collaboration with the Cultural Institute.

provide an interdisciplinary hub within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (and potentially cross-Faculty) for those working in creative writing (including media), creative-critical and/or critical practice.

in partnership with the Cultural Institute, support career-development networking opportunities for those working in creative fields (both staff and postgraduates).

constitute a forum in which the growing body of Creative Writing PGRs can work alongside an interdisciplinary network of staff.

advocate for arts funding.

work in close partnership with the Cultural Institute to provide a range of public engagement and outreach events for diverse target audiences, including the possibility of the incorporation of more critical-creative events in the future.

Projects

Adaptations

A discussion of the art of adaptation, ranging across screen, radio, and popular culture.

After Rilke Fairy Tales and Fables Horror and the Taboo Memory

People

The Creative and Critical Practice Research Group (CCPRG) is a forum for the exchange of views between writers of all types: poets, novelists, short story writers, dramatists, literary critics, scholars, essayists and journalists. The group explores the interconnected practice of creative reading and critical writing in a series of regular meetings throughout the academic year. We also engage with the creative industries which, via the Cultural Institute and departmental partnerships, bring this writing to the public in all its forms.

Management Board: Dr Alan Bilton and Dr Richard Robinson (Co-Convenors), Dr Elaine Canning, Professor Kirsti Bohata, Professor Julian Preece, Professor Tudur Hallam and Dr Alexia Bowler.

Co-Convenor

Dr Alan Bilton is an academic and novelist who lectures American Studies and English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University. He is the author of two, dreamlike, surrealist novels, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (2009) published by the independent Welsh press Alcemi and Unknown Sea (2014), along with the short story collection Anywhere Out of the World (2016).

Dr Alan Bilton

Co-Convenor

Dr Richard Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature, Media and Language. He works in twentieth-century and contemporary writing, with a particular interest in modernism and its afterlife, style, Irish Studies, border studies, and aspects of Italian film and fiction.

Richard Robinson

CCPRG Members

Name		Research Interests
Dr Alan Bilton (Co-Convenor)		Creative Writing, Contemporary Fiction, Postmodernism, Surrealism, Silent Film
Dr Richard Robinson (Co-Convenor)		Modernism and contemporary writing, modern Irish writing, theories of style, border studies
Dr Rachel Farebrother		Collage; Black U.S. literature and culture; modernist magazines; interdisciplinary approaches to U.S. modernism and Afro-modernism; Black feminist theory
Professor Kirsti Bohata		Postcolonial theory and Anglophone Welsh writing; feminist, queer and interdisciplinary disability studies
Dr Anne Lauppe-Dunbar		Creative Writing, historical fiction, editing, sports doping, child terrorism
Dr Elaine Canning		Director, Cultural Institute, Creative Writing, historical fiction
Professor Julian Preece		German literature, politics and the literary imaginary; narratives and narrators; adaptations
Professor Daniel Williams		Literature, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Literatures of Wales and North America
Dr Joanna Rydzewska		World and European Cinema, especially Polish
Professor Tudur Hallam		Welsh literature, poetics, creative writing, drama, language planning, translation, language teaching
Dr Francesca Rhydderch		Creative Writing, novel and short story, Welsh writing in Welsh and English
Owen Sheers		Creative writing (poetry, fiction, drama), hybrid theatrical projects, arts TV and radio documentary
Dr Eoin Price		Shakespeare, early modern drama, the literary canon, audiences, memory, time, periodization, performance
Dr Laura Kalas		Medieval women’s writing, including devotional texts; gender and sexuality; literature and medicine
Professor Jasmine Donahaye		Creative non-fiction, nature writing, British Jewish Studies, Welsh Writing in English
Dr Roberta Magnani		Intersectional feminism, medievalism, Chaucer, manuscripts and queer theory
Dr Chris Pak		Science fiction, utopia, terraforming and geoengineering, climate change, human-animal studies, worldbuilding, infrastructure, socio-technical systems
Dr Alexia Bowler		Applied Linguistics, Feminism, Neo-Victorianism, Women in Film, Science Fiction, Technology

Academic Publications

Dr Alan Bilton

‘From Emptyland to Uncanny City: Saul Bellow’s Chicago’ in Chicago: A Literary History, Cambridge University Press. 2022 (chapter)

A discussion of the role of Jewish neighbourhoods in Saul Bellow’s Chicago-based fiction, exploring notions of idealism and materialism.

The End of The Yellow House, Watermark Press, 2020 (novel)

A novel set during the Russian Civil War, exploring the notion of ‘Madness’ as ‘The Russian Disease’.

Anywhere Out of the World, Cillian Press, 2016 (short story collection)

Surreal and dreamlike short stories exploring the invasion of the dreamlike into everyday life

The Known and Unknown Sea, Cillian Press, 2014 (novel)

A Magic Realist novel exploring a Welsh family’s journey to the shadowy and nightmarish dark side of the moon.

Silent Film Comedy and American Culture, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013 (monograph)

An exploration of silent slapstick comedy as a metaphor for modernity in the early twentieth century.

Dr Richard Robinson

John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2017)

This monograph asks how and why John McGahern’s fiction, sometimes taken to be a documentary form of belated Irish naturalism, conceals and reveals the traces of literary modernism.

Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007)

This work of literary geography explores how central European border spaces were often represented as overdetermined settings in modernist writing.

Selected articles:

‘“Many Strange Tongues in the Fenlands”: The Buried Giant as Brexit allegory?’, English Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0013838X.2022.2150941  

‘Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe’, in Critical Quarterly, 48:4 (2006) 107-30

Co-edited Special Issue of Textual Practice on ‘The Contemporary Problem of Style’: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/36/4   

Article in Textual Practice on dialect and middlebrow style in Elena Ferrante: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0950236X.2022.2030514  

‘The Violation of Style: Englishness in Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels’, co-written with Barry Sheils, Textual Practice 29:6 (2015) 1-22

“Not Even a Shadow of Violence”: Undead History in John McGahern’s Anglo-Irish Stories’, in Assessing a Literary Legacy: Essays on John McGahern, eds Eamon Maher and Derek Hand (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019)

‘An Umbrella, a Pair of Boots and a “Spacious Nothing”: McGahern and Beckett’, in Irish University Review, Vol. 44: 2 (Autumn/Winter 2014) 323-40

‘That Dubious Enterprise, the Irish Short Story: Dubliners and The Untilled Field’, in James Joyce and the Nineteenth Century, ed. John Nash (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

‘The Modernism of Ian McEwan’s Atonement’, Modern Fiction Studies, 56:3 (Fall 2010) 473-95

‘Buckley in a General Russia: Finnegans Wake and Political Space’, in Joyce in Trieste: An Album of Risky Readings, eds. Sebastian D.G. Knowles, Geert Lernout and John McCourt (University Press of Florida, 2007), pp.170-87

PhD students that have participated in CCPRG:

PhD Student	Topic Title
Sarah Tanburn	Taking Liberty
Owen Bridge	Twittering Machines
Oliviah Rix-Taylor	Dystopian Fiction: The Midnight Castle
Tamzin Whelan	A Novel of the Women’s Revolution
Sue Dickson	Portrait of a Muse
Vicky Brewster	Hauntings in 21st Century Fiction
Susanne Rösner	Using Creative Writing to Imagine and Explore a Sustainable, Optimistic Path into the Future
Seren Williams	Translating Culture-Specific References in French and German Dubs of Disney Films
Jan Wigley	Sugar and Spice and All Things
Daniel Mitchell	Fair: A Radio Drama
Julie-Ann Rees	How Ancient and Modern Stories Help us to Heal
Ray Cluley	Marilyn, Marilyn is now Marilyn/Marilyn
Rachael Llewellyn	A Novel: The Crow

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Cultural Institute

Centre for Creative and Critical Practice (CCPRG)

Exploring the mutually interdependent relationship between creative and critical writing.

Projects

People

Co-Convenor