Articles by: Valerie Krips

Author Biography:

Valerie Krips taught at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University before moving to the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, where she was chair of the interdisciplinary Children’s Literature program. She also taught in the department’s graduate program, Critical and Cultural Studies, and has been a consultant for a variety of heritage projects. She was a co-editor of Arena Magazine and is Associate Editor (poetry) for Arena (third series).

Born for Leaving: Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast

Unionist paramilitaries who want to ‘cleanse’ the area of Catholics erect barriers at the end of the street. Buddy asks his father whose side they’re on.

Informit: Make or Mar: Hilary Mantel’s ‘The mirror and the light’ [Book Review]

Review(s) of: The mirror and the light, by Hilary Mantel.

Informit: Privileged images

Review(s) of: The Souvenir, by Joanna Hogg, 2019.

Informit: Film: Bodies that matter

Review(s) of: The Favourite, by Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018; and Peterloo, by Mike Leigh, 2018.

Changing the Subject, by Valerie Krips

Transgender and children’s fiction

Informit: Changing the subject

'I told her I think I'm a girl', says George, the epony - mous narrator of Alex Gino's children's novel. George is what her family and friends call her, but she (and throughout the story the narrator uses the feminine pronoun for George) prefers Melissa. Published by Scholastic in the United States, it has won several prizes, and was a best book of the year for Booklist, School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews and a…

Informit: Brexit Britain

Review(s) of: Collateral, written by David Hare, directed by J. S. Clarkson, produced by BBC2/Netflix/The Forge; premiered March 2018

Informit: A remedy against forgetting

Review(s) of: Dunkirk, by Christopher Nolan, 2017.

Informit: Passionate defiance

Review(s) of: A quiet passion, directed by Terence Davies, 2016; and Lady Macbeth, directed by William Oldroyd, 2016.

Ken Loach, by Valerie Krips

That subversive gentleman

Informit: Ken Loach

It's easy to admire and respect Ken Loach's work, both in television and film, and also to dismiss it as bound by political ideas that have little relevance in today's world. Talk about class, and questions about which side you are on in a class struggle, can seem almost grotesquely outdated in a society in which the emphasis is increasingly upon personal identity, choice and indivi dual freedoms. Yet Loach continues to speak in terms…

Informit: ‘The reader’: Ethics at the movies

One of the virtues that film shares with literature is that it offers us a means of rehearsing scenarios that go to the heart of our sense of right and wrong. Or to put that another way, if, as Fredric Jameson asserted, our contemporary mode of cultural and literary criticism remains ethical - in spite of heroic attempts to wean us from it - our tendency will be to respond to films and books in…