Skip to content

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

Daniel Allington

Lecturer (English Lang/App Linguistics)

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



Personal Website

Profile

As a researcher and educator, my primary interests revolve around literary and popular fiction, though I have growing interests in other forms of culture, including visual art, computer programming, and general 'trade' publishing (especially as it relates to the history of the English language). My interest in popular fiction extends to film adaptation, and one of my most widely-taught papers analyses online discussions between fans of a certain blockbuster film trilogy. I could be described as a discourse analyst, although I tend to advocate the use of sociological methods to study typically linguistic topics more than the use of linguistic methods to study typically sociological topics.

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 also a member of the Open University's Book History and Bibliography Research Group and a former advisory board member for the Reading Experience Database.

Further information is available from my personal website and blog.

Teaching Interests

Open University undergraduate modules in which I am or have been involved include U214 Worlds of English, E304 Exploring English Grammar, U211 Exploring the English Language, EA300 Children's Literature, and A230 Reading and Studying Literature. I have also taught and examined on the M.Res in Applied Linguistics. Prior to my employment at the Open University, I taught sociolinguistics, literary linguistics, and critical theory at the University of Stirling, as well as teaching on the core module of the M.Litt in English Studies. I have been a supervisor for three PhD students, the first of whom passed without corrections in 2012. If you are interested in doing a PhD with me, please look at my research page and then contact me by email.

Further information on my teaching is available here.

Research Interests

I'm best known for my work in reception study: an interdisciplinary field concerned with understanding how people experience, interpret, and evaluate cultural artefacts such as books. I have contributed to this field both on a theoretical level and through primary empirical research in media studies, the history of the book, and the sociology of culture. Other research interests include the relationship between English and other languages in transnational media and the social and economic basis of cultural production. I would be interested in supervising PhD theses in any of these areas, especially the study of reading and reception (whether historically or in the present day).

A full discussion of my research interests is available here.

Current Research

I am currently engaged in writing two books: a jointly-authored monograph on the history of the book in Britain (under contract with Blackwell) and a sole-authored monograph on the future of literature in the digital economy (under contract with Palgrave). Other forthcoming work includes an interview-based qualitative study of career structure among non-commercial artists (ongoing) and a quantitative social network analysis of relationships between authors of interactive fiction (under review).

Further information on my current research is available here.

Publications

Book Chapter
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. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 217–233.
Mayor, Barbara and Allington, Daniel (2012). Talking in English. In: Allington, Daniel and Mayor, Barbara eds. Communicating in English: Talk, Text, Technology. Worlds of English. London: Routledge, pp. 5–33.
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 (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), pp. 211–225.
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.