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As I write this, there’s many a final year English student in a library in every university town, panicking about their upcoming dissertations. For many of us, January means sales, snow and sticking to our new year’s resolutions but for the student, January brings with it the dark cloud of looming deadlines and, consequently, panic often begins to set in.

Billed as the ‘pinnacle of one’s academic career’, most English dissertations can be up to 20,000 words and ought to be focussed on a particular aspect of literature, the more specific the better. Gender in Victorian literature, for example, is far too broad a topic, whereas corseting the female body in the works of Margaret Oliphant is much more appropriate. As a final year student myself, I had my own dissertation-induced troubles just before Christmas, when it was time to submit initial ideas and choose a specific focus. As someone who enjoys the broad spectrum of literature, how does one go about choosing just one single area to focus on?

Perhaps you might assume that most third-year literary dissertations would target the big guns – Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen – classic authors that many will study at school and whose work is never out of print or off the screen and stage. At my university, however, this has not always been the case. There are many examples that I know where Shakespeare has been side lined, Dickens disdained and Austen avoided:  my fellow students were turning away from the ‘great classics’ of the literary canon, choosing to focus instead on modern authors, such as Margaret Atwood and Stieg Larsson. Indeed, there were plenty of unexpected choices, with one student deciding to study the stories of Roald Dahl, whilst another chose David Nicholls’ recent bestseller, One Day. Many people, however, would be quick to rank the literary merits of King Lear over The Twits. So what is it that attracted my friends and classmates, the latest generation of English Literature students, to pick a novel more likely to be found on the bestsellers’ table rather than on a traditional University reading list? Why boycott the canon?

First and foremost, when it comes to writing a dissertation, it has to be unique. With such a vast body of criticism in existence already on authors such as Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen and, with much of it easily accessible via the Internet, it’s tricky to find something to say which hasn’t already been said before. Books like Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, although not yet typical fare on the school curriculum, offer an ambitious undergraduate some uncharted territory and a chance to write an entirely original thesis.

Nicholls’ One Day has probably been influenced by classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and this might allow the dissertation’s author to provide some interesting comparisons between them. There would be an opportunity to explore how Nicholls has managed to reinvent the old love story that we’ve read so many times before and yet provide a fresh and original take on it. Relevance is another key reason why I believe modern books have become such a popular choice for final year students. A dissertation is one’s contribution to present-day academia and so it’s important that it can reflect current issues, rather than rehash old ones. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a dissertation topic ought to be chosen because it’s something you enjoy and can be truly passionate about: Roald Dahl might be no James Joyce and The BFG is far from being Ulysses, but if I’m going to devote the next few months of my life to this project, slavishly working away every night in the library and missing out on all kinds of fun social events, I think it’s preferable that I write about some books that I find enjoyable to read.  After all, I’ll be reading them more than once over the next three months.

It’s often said that it’s a mistake, as a student, to choose a degree because you feel you ought to, rather than one that you are going to enjoy studying for months and years. So, even before I start typing out a first draft of my dissertation, I’d like to offer an apology to William, Jane and Charles – we are sorry and we still really do like most of your works and promise to return to them later this year.  In the meantime, across universities throughout the country, Roald and Stieg await.

Briony Wickes

A scene from The Pitman Painters at the Theatre Royal

In the first scene of The Pitmen Painters, set in the coal-mining town of Ashington in the 1930s, a group of miners have organised an after-work art appreciation class. The professor arrives and begins to give a slightly snooty lecture about Renaissance technique, but he’s quickly stopped by the leader of the group. They don’t want to hear about how painting is done, he explains. They just want to be able to look at a picture on a wall and know whether or not it’s any good.

I went to see The Pitmen Painters last week, and so this nervous attitude to culture was already in my head when my housemate the actuary turned to me a few nights ago and announced that he wanted to get into poetry, but he was afraid he wouldn’t understand what it was all about. At school, he explained, they were always talking about what poetry meant. What did he need to know, he asked, to be able to understand it?

My housemate may be part of the very suit-wearing, sushi-eating bourgeoisie that the Pitmen spend a lot of time railing against, but their worries about culture aren’t actually worlds apart. There is an assumption, encouraged by the way the arts are taught in schools, that works of art have to mean a particular thing that certain people (defined as those who have the correct, sanctioned bits of difficult-to-understand information in their heads) get and all the rest don’t.

As an English MA student, I’m one of the ones who should be in the know, but even I remember spending what felt like unbroken centuries of torment sitting in an English lesson waiting for someone to tell the teacher what the bird in Tennyson’s The Eagle represented. It occurred to me then, and it still does now, that no matter what ideas Tennyson may have had in his own head about the significance of eagles in general or that eagle in particular, there was no real reason why I or anyone else couldn’t just read the poem as being about an eagle.

There’s a great bit in The Pitmen Painters, after the men have moved on from appreciating art to trying to make some themselves, when they all gather round to critique each other’s work. One of them has done a very nice painting of a Bedlington Terrier standing in a garden. The size of it in relation to the scenery around shows the importance of dogs to the working men of Ashington, says someone. The painting is trying to convey something about the simple beauty in everyday life, says someone else. No, says the man who made it. I just wanted to paint a Bedlington Terrier. And I ran out of space on the board to do the surroundings properly.

This perfectly sums up two (slightly contrasting) things I believe about the arts – first, that there’s no reason why something shouldn’t be both simple and interesting, and second, that there’s not really a meaning at all.

You can look at Millais’s Ophelia, for example, and perfectly validly see a scene from Shakespeare, or the model who nearly froze to death posing for it in a bathtub in the middle of winter, or just a girl inexplicably drowning in very shallow water while surrounded by extremely ornate foliage. Similarly, if you know about Leda and Zeus you’ll be able to literally understand the story Yeats is telling in Leda and the Swan. Even if you don’t, the poem works just as well as a description of what it’s like to be assaulted by an enormous and angry bird. I completely admit that I have no real idea what is going on in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, but that does not stop me finding it both amazingly colourful and completely hilarious (Google it and you won’t be disappointed).

In fact, the more confusing something is, the more you are free to decide what you think it’s about. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot keeps coming up on the courses I take, and the more I read it, and read what’s written about it, the more I realise that no one in the entire world has any real understanding of what the hell it actually means. Therefore, I have decided that it’s perfectly fine to like it just because it sounds great.

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair 

Spread out in fiery points 

Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

Who is this woman? What is her significance? What does she represent in the poem? Who cares! Her hair is on fire. What I’m trying to say is that culture, like tax, doesn’t have to be taxing. At the end of the day, what it all means doesn’t matter. Although teachers and professors may try to convince you otherwise, no one really knows, anyway. The message of The Pitmen Painters, at least in my mind, is that even though not everyone is capable of being an artist, everyone is capable of being interested in art. Formal knowledge is just an added bonus, something that gives you another way to see a poem or a play or a painting. You don’t need to be daunted by it – one of the most important things about art is whether or not you like it. In fact, it’s still perfectly possible to dislike something even if you know it’s technically good. Ulysses is a masterpiece, and when I read it I hated it so much I wanted to take a flamethrower to its front cover. You should feel free to read and look at what you want to and conclude from that whatever you like. After all, it’s really all up to you.

Robin Stevens

Well, it may be 2012 already but many of the recent weekend papers took the opportunity to look back at the bestselling books of 2011. I always find it good fun to try and spot trends and make a note of a book or two that may have passed me. Previous years and, in fact, much of the last decade has been dominated by the mighty works of Dan Brown and JK Rowling. Love them or loathe them, you can’t deny the sales success. If you look at the overall sales in the UK from 1998 to 2010, Dan Brown occupies top spot (4.5m copies of The Da Vinci Code sold), as well as 4^th and 11^th  position, with Harry Potter occupying 2^nd, 3^rd, 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th and 10^th with only Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight disrupting their dominance at No 9. In terms of value, though, because some of those Harry Potter books were hardback versions, JK Rowling trumps everyone and my quick calculation shows that the boy wizard has brought in around £200m in sales over that 12-year period in the UK alone.

'One Day' by David Nicholls

This year, however, it seems that British homes must be saturated with Dan and Harry, as neither has any book featuring in the top 10. I guess that if you haven’t bought Potter yet, then you’re probably not going to. Top of the list in 2011 was One Day by David Nicholls, a book published nearly two years ago but given a boost last year with the release of the film, starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess.  This did seem to be the book that everyone was reading on the train or on the beach this summer, so I’m not too surprised about its success.

Also no surprise to find the usual cookbooks, with Jamie Oliver at 2^nd and 12^th and solid contributions elsewhere in the list by Lorraine Pascale, Linda Collister and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Similarly, plenty of the multimillionaire regulars feature on the 2011 list, with John Grisham (8^th and 36^th), Patricia Cornwell (29^th) and James Patterson (40^th, 52^nd, 55^th, 57^th and 65^th).  Previous years have seen the successes of the celebrity autobiographies of Peter Kay and Russell Brand, for example, but the 2011 list did seem a little light in this area, with Lee Evans at 30^th and the paperback edition of Michael McIntyre’s 2010 book at 42^nd, although Dawn French’s first novel from 2010, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, is still as high as 3^rd.

From a personal point of view, I’m pleased to see the fantasy epic A Game of Thrones featuring in the top 100 (with Book 1 in 13^th place and Book 2 at 76^th), no doubt propelled by the wonderful series on TV, starring Sean Bean. I have a particular soft spot for well-written fantasy sagas, and have read all five books published in the series so far (with two more to come). As the number of characters expand, the series does tend to sag a little but don’t let that put you off. If you don’t mind 1000-page epics of swords and sorcery, then these could be the books for you, even though you might find that you are continually flicking to the 50-page list of characters at the end of each book just to remind yourself who’s who and whether they met with an untimely end in the previous book.

The feature on the list that really stands out for me, however, is the continuing success of Scandinavian crime novels. Again, no doubt helped by film success, along with the TV success this year of The Killing and two versions of Wallander, we find the late Stieg Larsson occupying 7^th, 9^th and 10^th in the 2011 list, with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series and five of Jo Nesbo’s books in the top 100, featuring Norwegian Detective Harry Hole.  Now, I have read two of the Stieg Larsson books recently and I did admire them, without quite liking them. Perhaps, and I wonder if I’m alone in this, it was just the wrong time of year. Maybe the winter months are not the time for settling down to read a Scandinavian crime novel, set in a cold climate with simply too many hours of darkness. I love crime fiction but with Britain currently lashed by wind and rain, there’s much to be said for reading of dark deeds happening on the sunny beaches and in the sunlit hills of southern California.

Briony Wickes

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson

There are several different ways of making an adaptation. You could go down the 1980s Brideshead Revisited route, which is to take the entire text of the book, get Jeremy Irons to recite it and then overlay a really involved soundtrack, so it becomes essentially a radio play with costumes. Or you could take the basic concept of a novel (such as: Man solves crimes. Man talks to animals. Man falls hopelessly in love with woman) and make something that is essentially invented by you but still happens to share a title with the original work. This is the explanation for Eddie Murphy’s Doctor Doolittle film (which we do not talk about) and also the Guy Richie Sherlock Holmes films, the plots of which I suspect were the product of people shouting random words, like ‘GYPSIES! SHOOTING! WEAPONS! DISGUISE! HUMOUR! NUDITY! DOG!’ and then turning them into scenes.

But as well as these, there’s the rare adaptation that considers the essential concept behind a book, takes that and puts a twist on it, so that what comes out is interesting and new but still recognisably from the same source. (This is, incidentally, very similar to what happens in good fanfiction). This is extremely difficult to do well, and it’s a rare project that manages it – and among that elite group is the BBC’s Sherlock.

While Guy Richie’s films seek to answer the question “What would happen if Sherlock Holmes was a person who punched people in the face a lot?” The BBC wonders, far more intelligently, how the Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle actually made up would react to being alive in the twenty-first century. The answer, of course, is that he would be a technical wizard, solving crimes with iPhone and Google and publishing his monographs on his website, while Watson blogged about it.

Sherlock is a brilliant translation, not just between book and screen but between 1892 and 2012, and one of its best features is that it manages to use the technology that we see around us every day in an incredibly clever and beautifully organic way. Instead of pretending, as many shows do, that the internet doesn’t exist, leading to embarrassing scenes where characters stand there clutching their smartphones and screaming “OH GOD! THE WORLD IS DOOMED BECAUSE WE CAN’T REMEMBER THAT VITAL PIECE OF INFORMATION AND WE HAVE NO WAY OF FINDING IT OUT!”, if Sherlock doesn’t know something he checks it out (bringing the words up on our screens, too, in a fantastic use of visual space).

Part of the message of the Holmes stories is that it’s not just the information that’s important, but the deductions that you make from it – Watson always has exactly the same view of the case but because he lacks Sherlock’s superior brain activity, he can’t understand what he’s really seeing. It’s an added bonus, by the way, that the Watson of Sherlock is not the brain-dead blithering idiot of many adaptations, but something much closer to the sensible, upstanding and fundamentally good ex-soldier of the stories.

Creators Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss have shown that they can both respect their source material and have a lot of fun updating it. Sherlock is filled with delightfully smart and tongue-in-cheek references to its source material. In the season two opener, Watson writes up ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Blonde’, there are thumbs in the fridge (presumably belonging to engineers) and a hilarious reinvention of the origins of the Sherlock-in-a-deerstalker image.

The stories in question, A Scandal in Bohemia and The Hound of the Baskervilles, have been adapted  in ways that simply make sense. Putting all extremely knotty accusations of potential anti-Irene Adler sexism aside, an ‘adventuress’ in 1892 probably would be equivalent to a dominatrix in 2012 (fascinating, sexually suggestive, slightly outside the audience’s comfort zone). Conan Doyle’s pan-European intrigue would, of course, become international terrorism, just as the idea of a giant dog these days inevitably brings with it the suggestion of genetic engineering. It seems very likely to me that Conan Doyle, if he was alive today, would have written extensively about mutant glowing mice and jellyfish with orangutan arms. Genetic engineering has the same basic mixture of outlandish horror and creepy possibility that you find in a lot of Conan Doyle’s real stories – The Adventure of the Creeping Man, for example, or The Sussex Vampire. There’s clearly been a lot of thought put into why the Holmes stories work the way they do, and that care shows through in every episode of Sherlock.

For me, the difference between the two current versions of the Baker Street detective– and the difference between a perfectly adequate adaptation and a really stellar one – can be summed up in equivalent scenes that take place in the first Guy Richie film and Sherlock season one. Both come from the episode in one of the Conan Doyle stories where Holmes makes a deduction about a client’s entire life and character just from a look at his watch. The Richie film does a fairly good recreation of the moment, although it substitutes Watson for the hapless client, but the BBC version updates it into something far more clever. Watches these days just don’t matter to us in the same way – the equivalent, in terms of price and social value, would be an iPhone – so it’s Watson’s iPhone that Sherlock reads, deducing that the person plugging it in to charge scratched its surface with the shaky hands of an alcoholic. There’s a name engraved on the back, ‘Harry’, who Sherlock decides must be Watson’s estranged alcoholic brother. He’s right, except that the ‘Harry’ in question isn’t Watson’s brother but his (lesbian) sister. It’s a lovely bit of shorthand for the both the differences and the essential similarities between 1892 and 2012, and that mirror-image-with-a-twist runs all the way through Sherlock. “I thought you weren’t my housekeeper,” Sherlock says to Mrs Hudson in The Hounds of Baskerville. “I’m not,” she replies frostily, which is technically true – in 2012, she’s his landlady – but the joke-within-a-joke is that we know both that in the original she was his housekeeper, and that really, she still is.

I’m usually a cynic where remakes and adaptations are concerned. It’s so rare to find one that even comes close to being as good as the original – and if it is, it tends to mean that the source material is not up to much. That’s why, to me, Sherlock comes as such a delight. Of course, I’m not saying it’s better than the Conan Doyle stories it comes from. In many ways, it’s very different, which is a lot of what charms me about it. It’s just the right balance of new and old, innovation and thoughtful reference, and it’s made something that’s familiar but very unique.

Robin Stevens