The University’s open access repository (Oxford University Research Archive, ORA) now contains over 70,000 full text items freely available by Oxford academics and researchers.
The 70,000th item is the manuscript for an article by Dr Erica McAlpine (Associate Professor, Faculty of English and A. C. Cooper Tutorial Fellow, St Edmund Hall) entitled ‘James Merrill’s puns’ which was published in the journal Essays in Criticism in 2018. The deposited manuscript has now been released from the embargo set by the publisher (Oxford University Press), so anyone can now read the accepted-for-publication version, as opposed to needing a subscription to read the final published article, via the ORA record.
Erica commented: “I began this article about wordplay in James Merrill’s poetry years ago — when I was still a graduate student. I’m delighted it is now a finished piece, albeit something very different from what it was at that time. My interest in the ways poetry relates to jokes, puns, and other forms of linguistic play has developed and changed; and likewise, I’ve changed the way I write about poetry — hopefully turning my own style into something more playful, too. This piece is primarily about Merrill, but it contains some personal notes, including an anecdote about the first (and best?) pun I ever made. It makes me happy to think that this work in particular can be accessed by anyone: puns are an aspect of language-making to which we all indeed have access, whether we are poets or not. Merrill, an American poet of the late 20th century, would probably also be delighted; he loved numerical as well as linguistic games and would perhaps find significance in the fact that an essay about his work was the 70,000th item to be given open access.”
About ORA
ORA is Oxford University’s institutional repository: a permanent and secure archive which increases the dissemination and visibility of Oxford’s research freely on the web and helps researchers to meet funders’ Open Access requirements. It currently contains records for around 250,000 publications of various types deposited by our academics and researchers: journal articles, doctoral theses, working papers, conference papers, book chapters, books and more. Full text files are made publicly available if and when permitted by the publisher. To browse ORA by item type or file availability click here. To open a deposited file, click on the link next to the green open padlock symbol in the ‘Access Document’ section of the ORA record.
