Skip to content

Faculty of Education and Language Studies > People Profiles > Daniel Allington

Daniel Allington

Lecturer, English Language Studies/Applied Linguistics

The Open University Faculty of Education and Language Studies Centre for Language and Communication



Personal Website

Profile

As a researcher and educator, my central concern is with understanding cultural history in terms of the social production, reproduction, circulation, and consumption of the material and linguistic artefacts that we know as 'texts'. This approach underlies my interest in such apparently diverse fields as the sociology of culture, the history of the book, and literary theory, although I conceive it as a form of philology.

I am an affiliated academic member of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change and a core member of the Open University's Applied Language and Literacies Research Unit. In addition, I am a member of the Open University's Book History and Bibliography Research Group and retain a close involvement with the Discourse of Reading Groups research project, although this study was officially completed in October 2008.

Click here for a more detailed list of my research interests, and here for a list of my peer-reviewed publications. Further information is available on my personal website, and on my reader, audience, and reception study blog.

Teaching Interests

My primary teaching interests comprise: the analysis of speech and text, the social history of the English language, and the history of the book.

Research Interests

My primary research interests comprise: the history and sociology of reading, the sociology of art, and the production of digital culture.

Current Research

Click here for my profile, and here for my publications. Fuller information is available on my personal website and my reader, audience, and reception study blog.

.

Publications

Book Chapter
Allington, Daniel (2012). Theorising postcolonial reception: writing, reading and moral agency in the Satanic Verses affair. In: Benwell, Bethan; Procter, James and Robinson, Gemma eds. Postcolonial audiences: readers, viewers and reception. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, pp. 199–210.
Allington, Daniel and Benwell, Bethan (2012). Reading the reading experience: an ethnomethodological approach to 'booktalk'. In: Lang, Anouk ed. From codex to hypertext: reading at the turn of the twenty-first century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, (In Press).
Allington, Daniel (2011). The production of 'creativity'. In: Swann, Joan; Pope, Rob and Carter, Ronald eds. Creativity in language & literature: the state of the art. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 277–289.
Allington, Daniel and Swann, Joan (2011). The mediation of response: a critical approach to individual and group reading practices. In: Crone, Rosalind and Towheed, Shafquat eds. The History of Reading, Vol. 3: Methods, Strategies, Tactics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 80–96.
Allington, Daniel (2010). On the use of anecdotal evidence in reception study and the history of reading. In: Gunzenhauser, Bonnie ed. Reading in History: New Methodologies from the Anglo-American Tradition. The History of the Book (6). London: Pickering and Chatto, pp. 11–28.
Journal Article
Allington, Daniel (2012). Private experience, textual analysis, and institutional authority: the discursive practice of critical interpretation and its enactment in literary training. Language and Literature, 21(2), (In Press).
Allington, Daniel (2011). ‘It actually painted a picture of the village and the sea and the bottom of the sea’: Reading groups, cultural legitimacy, and description in narrative (with particular reference to John Steinbeck’s The Pearl). Language and Literature, 20(4), pp. 317–332.
Bragg, Sara; Allington, Daniel; Simmons, Katy and Jones, Ken (2011). Core values, education and research: a response to Mark Pike. Oxford Review of Education, 37(4), pp. 561–565.
Allington, Daniel (2011). Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(2), pp. 129–145.
Swann, Joan and Allington, Daniel (2009). Reading groups and the language of literary texts: a case study in social reading. Language and Literature, 18(3), pp. 247–264.
Allington, Daniel and Swann, Joan (2009). Researching literary reading as social practice. Language and Literature, 18(3), pp. 219–230.
Allington, Daniel (2008). How to do things with literature: Blasphemous speech acts, satanic intentions, and the uncommunicativeness of verses. Poetics Today, 29(3), pp. 473–523.
Allington, Daniel (2007). 'How come most people don't see it?': Slashing the Lord of the Rings. Social Semiotics, 17(1), pp. 43–62.
Allington, Daniel (2006). First steps towards a rhetorical psychology of literary interpretation. Journal of Literary Semantics, 35(2), pp. 123–144.
Allington, Daniel (2005). Re-reading the script: a discursive appraisal of the use of the 'schema' in cognitive poetics. Working With English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama, 2 pp. 1–9.
Other
Allington, Daniel and Swann, Joan (2009). Special issue of Language and Literature: Literary reading as social practice. Sage, UK.