Professor Roger Dalrymple

Almost as notorious as Jack the Ripper, US citizen and homeopath Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was forty-eight years old when he was hanged in London in November 1910 for the murder and mutilation of his wife. When Cora Crippen vanished in February 1910, he claimed that she had returned to the United States. Yet the discovery of a dismembered body, buried beneath the cola cellar of their house, and Crippen's attempt to flee to Canada with his cross-dressed mistress exposed and convicted him. The case aroused enormous public interest at the time, and it has remained in the popular imagination ever since, memorialised in crime history, fiction, film and even musical theatre. As late as 2007, some American academics were claiming that the dead body was not Cora's and that Crippen was in fact innocent.
This book aims to account for the endurance of the Dr Crippen murder case in the cultural imagination. Highlighting the case's disruptive blending of cultural traditions, it discusses historical precedents, analyses diverse literary traditions, looks at broadside balladry and music-hall repertoire and addresses queer theory discourses. The book shows how the case, part throwback to earlier crime sensations and part presage of a new understanding of criminality, represents a watershed in the representation of criminality and played a distinctive role in the development of crime fiction.

This chapter considers the motif of the plunge into darkness in Christie’s postwar works including A Murder is Announced (1950) and The Mousetrap (1952). This chapter explores how Christie’s treatment of the motif of the darkness-plunge adapts and transcends the associations of Gothic sensation fiction to broach the traumatic memory of wartime blackout and to explore the contrasting blackout cultures that developed during the Blitz. The discussion shows how Christie’s transformation of the darkness-plunge ultimately served to reaffirm individual agency for her postwar readers by substituting the lone murderer’s hand on the light-switch for the state imposed darkness of curfew and blackout, and asserting the familiarity and relative rationality of motive-led murder over indiscriminate murder from the skies.

Apparently removed from letter-writing firsthand, the Paston women were nevertheless far from unlettered. Their mastery of the topoi of administrative and familial letters is well documented, their expressive force memorable. Envisaging their composition of a letter, however, scholarly tradition has the Paston women sit down with amanuensis rather than pen. Norman Davis has remarked the likelihood that Agnes and Margaret Paston ‘could not write themselves, or at any rate did not find writing easy and did not like it’ — a view supported more recently in V.M. O’Mara’s survey of female scribal activity in late medieval England: ‘there is very little proof provided by the Paston letters that women could write. and even if they could, they did so but rarely’.

This literature review is part of a six-month longitudinal project for the Connect Benefit Series 2021-22 on Student Success, which focuses on embedding employability in higher education as well as a second theme of access, retention, attainment and progression.

This literature review aims to identify specific impact and evidence in relation to embedding employability within higher education since the most recent Advance HE literature review from 2016. Conducted by a research team from Oxford Brookes University consisting of Dr Roger Dalrymple, Associate Dean: Student Outcomes; Dr Andrea Macrae, Principal Lecturer, Stylistics and Student Experience;  Dr Maia Pal, Senior Lecturer in International Relations; and Dr Shirley Shipman, Principal Lecturer (Student Experience) and Programme Lead (Law), the review focuses on peer-reviewed journal articles on employability within higher education which present and/or discuss evidence of 'what works'.

The review illustrates the dominant themes in the literature since 2016, with discussion of how employability has been theorised, critiqued and challenged in this time, featuring examples of long-term cohort studies, case studies, international comparative studies, and analysis of employability outcomes in relation to large-scale data sets.