It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's
- Submitting institution
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University of Wolverhampton
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1513
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Myriad Editions
- ISBN
- 9781912408160
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This collection of twenty stories was nine years in the making and won the Arnold Bennett Prize (2020). These stories form Blower’s re-exploration of the working-class fiction on complexly gendered levels. This included extensive research into working-class short-fiction, unearthing a limited cultural heritage in English writers as opposed to their Welsh, Irish, and Scottish counterparts. Equally, outside of Arnold Bennett, Blower found no reputable short-fiction writers examining Potteries heritage, which the collection pursued in original ways.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Winner of the 2020 Arnold Bennett Book Prize, this collection is based on Blower’s Potteries childhood among working-class matriarchs, who always told stories but never about themselves. She poses the question – how would they tell it otherwise? – and draws on female self-narrative and the bildungsroman to experiment with duo patterns of characterisation, a key characteristic of early women’s self-enquiries. Seeking the private story behind the public face, the collection uses pivotal childhood memories of family holidays, neighbourhood stories, and school experiences. Story conceits are informed by autogeography and autogynography, as the narratives investigate the relationship between place, class, gender and identity. The stories not only bring these silent histories and everyday realities to life through regional voices, but also experiment with ways to tell the story from within, appraising a known situation from an unknown point of view. Key sources here were happy hooker Ruthie in 'The Land of Make Believe'; sleep-deprived Laura in 'The Trees in the Wood'; Di's nifty fists in 'Chuck and Di', and Alma Bunny's profound fear of retirement in 'Dirty Laundry.' Further research was conducted into Thatcherism’s impact on Stoke-on-Trent in shaping its peoples’ identity when no longer defined by products they produced. Stories such as ‘Pot Luck’ (commissioned by Radio 4), ‘Love, Alvin & Ramona', and 'Oceans of Stories' explore the disenfranchisement of class communities and principles, whilst ‘Abdul’ (longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award), explored matters of immigration into marginalised places lacking opportunity for new starts. 'It's gone dark over Bill's mother's' meant to Potters that things were looking bleak, or it was going to rain. Its origins are as a footless and random as the barflies trying to find their meanings in 'Happenstance', but it also sums up this collection: comic-tragic snapshots that make the bleak funny.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -