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Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students – from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic.

Addressing the impact on students’ ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses:

• Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms
• Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives
• Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face
• Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux.

This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

In my reading of Ballard's short story 'Dream Cargoes', I find a post-growth imaginary that focuses on a profound species-wide change of pace in the context of future nano- and biotech waste. I compare this to Tom Wolfe's heady account of the Merry Pranksters set during the Great Acceleration of the 1960s and 1970s. While Wolfe captured multiple fragmented points of view located in scattered time frames in his account of the Pranksters, Ballard is suggesting that time and its specific contemporary associations with extinction, renewability and futurity has become a central concern for humanity at large. I argue that literary representations of toxicity yield insight by awakening the reader to the ultimate limits of consumer culture. Thus, this essay offers an approach to fictions such as Ballard's and Wolfe's seeing them as essential resources for assessing toxicity in our lives as a source of insight as well as motivation to look for alternatives to petroculture.

This article reports on the project to design and implement a web-based mechanism for formative self-assessment, to be used as part of Mick Short's online stylistics course, Language and Style (see the preface to this issue for details). Using the self-assessment mechanism, students can compare their own performance on extended academic tasks (the stylistic analysis of three literary texts – a poem, a piece of prose fiction and a drama extract) with benchmarked sample answers. In this article we describe the process of developing benchmarks for the self-assessment mechanism and explain how this mechanism works in practice. Finally, we discuss students’ reactions to the self-assessment instruments, as part of our own assessment of their validity and pedagogical value.

In 2019, China reported coronavirus disease which has spread around the world since then (WHO, 2020). It has been named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (WHO, 2020). While it has spread around the world because of being a highly infectious disease, each country has tackled the measure to contain the disease and protect its citizens in different ways. Sweden is a unique case in the European context which has not gone into any lockdown, but institutes of higher education have been closed since the middle of March and have turned to distance teaching. Similarly, high schools had been closed for Spring 2020, but in the Autumn, 2020 they had been reopened. The Public Health Agency (HSLF-FS 2020) as from 1 July 2020 issued the regulations and general guidelines with the aim of reducing the transmission of COVID-19 in restaurants, bars and cafés (2020:526). As a background, Swedish is the official language of Sweden, whereas it has five officially recognised minority languages, besides several migrant languages spoken in different language communities within its polity. English is taught at the compulsory school level in Sweden and is also an extramural language as well as lingua franca among various highly educated groups as well as Anglophone migrants. This study aims to study the discourses and language of the instructions displayed on the Public Health Agency’s website with a particular focus on English and globalization. According to Blommaert (2020), COVID-19 is a textbook example of contemporary globalization processes, which started as a health crisis but became an economic crisis as well as of mobility. Furthermore, according to Blommaert’s (2018) definition of globalization, it is a process of increasing interconnectedness between different parts of the world, creating global modes of organization and conduct. In a complete paradox, while mobility and local cultural phenomenon arise because of globalization and spread of COVID-19, English language was one of the main sources of information in many contexts as well as Sweden beside Swedish language being the main source. In this regard, this study will focus particularly on English. According to Canagarajah (1999), the use of English is dynamically negotiated, and its status in contextually modified in socially strategic ways, and in the process modifies the communicative and linguistic rules of English according to local cultural and ideological imperatives” (ibid, 1999:76), while Pennycook (2007) argues that the choices around moves into particular languages may be on pragmatic, aesthetic, or commercial grounds, but they are also political decisions to do with language, identity, and authenticity. With this theoretical background, the study argues a particular kind of English created post-COVID19 in each context.