Chris McCully - Academic and other prose

Academic and other prose

Now in the final phase of his academic career, Chris continues to work on metrical matters and problems relating to poetic form. In 2015 he hosted a small symposium on English metrics at the University of Essex. His most recent articles relate to counting, closure and the representation of metre, particularly in earlier forms of English verse. In 2021, and along with other members of the 2015 'Essex group', Chris expects to contribute to a symposium - part of the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics hosted by Leiden University (NL) - on the value of early English metrics to the reconstruction of the history of English, and has also indicated his willingness to edit the proceedings of that symposium together with his colleague Prof. Donka Minkova (UCLA) for a special issue of English Language and Literature. To read a draft copy of one of Chris's recent (2017) essays on metrics (published in PNReview 237, pp.54-61 as 'Beginning with endings: An essay on prosody') please click on the relevant link below.
Another, probably final, strand to Chris's research has been some work on dragons and the narratology of dragons in Western literature (particularly English literature). Chris chose to talk about both metrics and dragons in his professorial inaugural lecture (postponed from 2020) but has just completed writing up the draft of an article themed more specifically around dragons and their narratological meanings. You can open a draft version of that article by clicking on the relevant link below. (Please ask for copyright permission and thereafter acknowledge this work, incidentally, if you use or cite anything from it.)

Beginning with endings doc file type logo

Notes on dragons (draft, 2021)

Academic Book covers written by Chris McCully An overview of Chris’s academic books

2011 (ed., with David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez Otero, Emma Moore). Analysing Older English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Can be ordered from the Cambridge University Press website.

2009 The Sound Structure of English: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Accompanying The Sound Structure of English website). 233pp. ISBN 978 0 521 85036 0. pb.

2005 (with Sharon Hilles). The Earliest English. London: Pearson Education. 307pp. ISBN 0 582 40474 6. pb. Available from Amazon.

2000 (ed., with Ricardo Bermúdez Otero, David Denison and Richard Hogg). Generative Theory and Corpus Studies: A dialogue from 10ICEHL. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 559pp. ISBN 3 11 016687 9. hb. Available from Amazon.

1996 (ed., with J.J. Anderson). English Historical Metrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 257pp. ISBN 0 521 55464 0. hb. (pb. rpr. CUP, 2006). Available from Cambridge University Press.

1987 (with Richard Hogg). Metrical Phonology: A Coursebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rpr. 1990. 279pp. ISBN 0 521 30363 X. hb. Available from Cambridge University.

A pier at Harwich The natural and local world

One project completed in 2018 is Chris's work on the angling, history and culture of the Stour valley (Suffolk/Essex). In Stour Diaries Chris has written not only about angling, but also about dragons, about Anne Boleyn, about cancer and recovery, and about the voyage of the Mayflower to America. The master of the Mayflower was Christopher Jones, born in Harwich. An excerpt from Stour Diaries about Christopher Jones was published in 2016 (as 'Christopher Jones, gentleman') as part of the 'Wild Writers' blog edited by Miranda Cichy (to whom thanks for permission to re-use the excerpt). To read this fragment of Stour Diaries, please click on the link below:

Christopher Jones, gentleman

Roman Greece Travel essays and creative non-fiction

In 2018 the Muscaliet Press published a short collection of Chris's travel essays, Four Places. (The book can be ordered direct from the publisher: https://www.muscaliet.co.uk/). The work comprises four essays, edited down from a much larger project, in which Chris explores how time past occupies time present - in art and architecture, in poetry, in music and in forms of how humans manifest their senses of the sacred. One such essay details how it was (many years ago now) to spend Easter in Kerkyra (Corfu). To read a fragment of that essay, please click on the link below:

Other Work

Chris's books - a chronological list

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