Rebecca Anne Barr
@rabarr.bsky.social
Reading, writing, thinking about the long 18th Century at the Faculty of English @cam.ac.uk. Irish woman baffled by the fens and the English middle classes. Emotional support/ emotional manipulation provided by a terrier.
Pinned
Rebecca Anne Barr
@rabarr.bsky.social
· Nov 25
Here's our magnificent cover: a little-known illustration of Richardson's 'Pamela' by Francis Hayman. 'The Elopement' decorated one of the original #Pamela supper-boxes at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Thanks to @nationaltrust.bsky.social who hold the original at Sizergh Castle, Cumbria. #18thcentury
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it
An essential development over the past decade-plus is that the ignorant went from feeling chastened when their ignorance was revealed to banding together and deciding that, actually, they were right. They might disagree at times, but they agreed that ignorance itself was an indicator of trust.
December 29, 2025 at 6:46 PM
This, combined with "vice signaling" (taking pride in antisocial behavior) has given us the reign of the Stupid Asshole, something most people are against, but can only be remedied if we're not too polite to talk about it
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Tonight you will be visited by the ghosts of three gender studies majors, each warning you that you’ll have to burn off in hell after death all the sins you accumulated in your futile effort to be a real man in life …
December 26, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Tonight you will be visited by the ghosts of three gender studies majors, each warning you that you’ll have to burn off in hell after death all the sins you accumulated in your futile effort to be a real man in life …
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
This individual had no right being in a *Muppets* movie.
December 25, 2025 at 10:39 PM
This individual had no right being in a *Muppets* movie.
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Cardiff couple invited man in for Christmas, he stayed for 45 years
An arrangement Rob and Dianne Parsons thought would last a few days ended up changing their lives.
www.bbc.co.uk
December 25, 2025 at 7:24 AM
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller)
more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”
worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”
worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
Criticism Is Literature. Why Is It Vanishing?, by Adam Morgan
What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.
worldliteraturetoday.org
December 23, 2025 at 4:53 PM
“there are only 7 full-time book critics left in the US: three at NYT ( Jacobs, Garner, Szalai), 2 at WaPo(Rothfeld, Charles), 1 each at WSJ (Sacks), NY mag (Chu), Slate (Miller)
more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”
worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
more people have walked on the moon than write book reviews for a living”
worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.
December 20, 2025 at 2:44 PM
not that the present economic picture is rosy, but i do think that popular culture — and specifically nostalgia bait television — is a big part of the reason that our public memory of the 1970s, 1980s and even 1990s seems to miss the real economic pain that marked each of those decades.
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking today not just about Tristram Shandy but also about Holly Medgar's 2012 print-on-demand (&-btw-destroy-your-printer) artist's book "Black Friday."
apod.li/black-friday
apod.li/black-friday
December 20, 2025 at 1:00 AM
For obvious reasons, I've been thinking today not just about Tristram Shandy but also about Holly Medgar's 2012 print-on-demand (&-btw-destroy-your-printer) artist's book "Black Friday."
apod.li/black-friday
apod.li/black-friday
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
December 19, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Jane Austen used 'however' at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.
December 16, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Jane Austen used 'however' at the beginning of a sentence, and so can you.
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
L is for Lovelace, who Lost in a dueL.
our Clarissa reading group celebrated finishing the novel yesterday by visiting the Morgan Library for a personal display of their Richardson holdings. I just love this Edward Gorey-ish frontispiece to a children's adaptation (!) of Clarissa.
December 13, 2025 at 5:19 PM
L is for Lovelace, who Lost in a dueL.
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
a transcription thereof
December 13, 2025 at 1:57 PM
a transcription thereof
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
I was asked yesterday if I thought that English might benefit from a governing academy, like French, and noted that a language that, to date, supports dreamed and dreamt, dove and dived, and pleaded and pled, is not a language you can govern.
(And I wouldn't want to.)
(And I wouldn't want to.)
December 11, 2025 at 8:27 PM
I was asked yesterday if I thought that English might benefit from a governing academy, like French, and noted that a language that, to date, supports dreamed and dreamt, dove and dived, and pleaded and pled, is not a language you can govern.
(And I wouldn't want to.)
(And I wouldn't want to.)
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Writing words by hand on paper is so satisfying. We really fumbled the ball on changing culture to doing so much less of it 😩
December 8, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Writing words by hand on paper is so satisfying. We really fumbled the ball on changing culture to doing so much less of it 😩
Erudite, eloquent, and moving lecture on Shakespeare & the textile imagination by the magnificent @starcrossed2018.bsky.social this evening. The hall was packed with admirers. Good to be reminded how enthralling the best scholarship can be. #Cambridge
December 1, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Erudite, eloquent, and moving lecture on Shakespeare & the textile imagination by the magnificent @starcrossed2018.bsky.social this evening. The hall was packed with admirers. Good to be reminded how enthralling the best scholarship can be. #Cambridge
#Google blurbs RF Brissenden's 'Virtue in Distress'. 'Coco Crocodile is rehearsing her song & Billie the Pig has a dance to perfect & all in time for the evening show! But the Fox Clowns are in a muddle & Magician has made his assistant vanish, COMPLETELY!" Is that #Clarissa or Sade? #18thcentury
November 26, 2025 at 3:42 PM
#Google blurbs RF Brissenden's 'Virtue in Distress'. 'Coco Crocodile is rehearsing her song & Billie the Pig has a dance to perfect & all in time for the evening show! But the Fox Clowns are in a muddle & Magician has made his assistant vanish, COMPLETELY!" Is that #Clarissa or Sade? #18thcentury
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Without much reading, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths.
(Happy birthday to Laurence Sterne.)
(Happy birthday to Laurence Sterne.)
November 24, 2025 at 6:51 PM
Without much reading, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motley emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions, and truths.
(Happy birthday to Laurence Sterne.)
(Happy birthday to Laurence Sterne.)
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
ADVERSARIAL POETRY
ENGLISH MAJORS WILL LEAD THE REVOLUTION
“Adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates.”
ENGLISH MAJORS WILL LEAD THE REVOLUTION
“Adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates.”
does… does this mean that the hackers of the future are poets because ☠️
November 20, 2025 at 7:36 PM
ADVERSARIAL POETRY
ENGLISH MAJORS WILL LEAD THE REVOLUTION
“Adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates.”
ENGLISH MAJORS WILL LEAD THE REVOLUTION
“Adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for large language models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates.”
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
Congratulations, @clemicollett.bsky.social!
NEW REPORT – The Impact of Generative AI and the Novel 📚
Today we've published new research by @clemicollett.bsky.social examining how industry practitioners, from novelists to publishers, are experiencing AI’s significant impacts.
Read now: www.mctd.ac.uk/impact-of-ge...
Today we've published new research by @clemicollett.bsky.social examining how industry practitioners, from novelists to publishers, are experiencing AI’s significant impacts.
Read now: www.mctd.ac.uk/impact-of-ge...
November 20, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Congratulations, @clemicollett.bsky.social!
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
This looks cool.
"‘Britishness’ was an ever-shifting balance of European multiculturalism, imperial ambition, tradition and experimentation, a messy mix that reveals the entanglement of cultures and cuisines, continually changed by the people who cook and eat the food".
"‘Britishness’ was an ever-shifting balance of European multiculturalism, imperial ambition, tradition and experimentation, a messy mix that reveals the entanglement of cultures and cuisines, continually changed by the people who cook and eat the food".
Excited to see that our book page (The King's Dinner) is now live. It is all feeling a bit real now! It has been such a pleasure to work with Rachel Rich @adamcrymble.bsky.social @sarahfoxhistory.bsky.social -- and the lovely editorial team @uclpress.bsky.social uclpress.co.uk/book/the-kin...
The King’s Dinner
The King’s Dinner is about what it meant to be British at the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on a large, open dataset of two royal household kitchen ledgers, the authors study the role and inf...
uclpress.co.uk
November 20, 2025 at 10:47 AM
This looks cool.
"‘Britishness’ was an ever-shifting balance of European multiculturalism, imperial ambition, tradition and experimentation, a messy mix that reveals the entanglement of cultures and cuisines, continually changed by the people who cook and eat the food".
"‘Britishness’ was an ever-shifting balance of European multiculturalism, imperial ambition, tradition and experimentation, a messy mix that reveals the entanglement of cultures and cuisines, continually changed by the people who cook and eat the food".
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
"...I am a hater, which is a kind of integrity."
"...I am more than a critic: I am a hater."
"I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response."
EVERY LINE IS A GEM.
1/
"...I am more than a critic: I am a hater."
"I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response."
EVERY LINE IS A GEM.
1/
I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.
I Am An AI Hater
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
anthonymoser.github.io
November 19, 2025 at 12:48 PM
"...I am a hater, which is a kind of integrity."
"...I am more than a critic: I am a hater."
"I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response."
EVERY LINE IS A GEM.
1/
"...I am more than a critic: I am a hater."
"I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response."
EVERY LINE IS A GEM.
1/
Welp. One of those days when my primary professional mode is despairing shame. Fail again, fail better?
November 18, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Welp. One of those days when my primary professional mode is despairing shame. Fail again, fail better?
Reposted by Rebecca Anne Barr
So exciting to see this in print - congratulations @claireconnolly.bsky.social
I'm told this will be out in early to mid December. Please forgive coming episodes of shameless self-promotion and make a note of launch dates in your diaries!
UCC 19 February
Boston College 11 March
NYU Glucksman House 12 March
Royal Irish Academy 25 March
www.cambridge.org/ie/universit...
UCC 19 February
Boston College 11 March
NYU Glucksman House 12 March
Royal Irish Academy 25 March
www.cambridge.org/ie/universit...
Irish Romanticism | Cambridge University Press & Assessment
www.cambridge.org
November 18, 2025 at 12:35 PM
So exciting to see this in print - congratulations @claireconnolly.bsky.social
New issue of The Shandean is out: @livunipress.bsky.social inc. an essay on 43 unpublished letters of Sarah Scott & Lady Barbara Montagu and my review @stephaniedegooyer.bsky.social's compelling Before Borders. #18thcentury @bsecs.bsky.social www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/shandean...
November 18, 2025 at 12:37 PM
New issue of The Shandean is out: @livunipress.bsky.social inc. an essay on 43 unpublished letters of Sarah Scott & Lady Barbara Montagu and my review @stephaniedegooyer.bsky.social's compelling Before Borders. #18thcentury @bsecs.bsky.social www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/shandean...