This paper discusses the possibilities of a corpus analysis applied to literary study and interpretation. It is thus its goal to present some findings related to the disambiguation of some pronominal references, i.e. you and one, as they occur in speech and thought presentation in prose fiction, across periods in the 20th century. The texts selected are two of Virginia Woolf's novels (early and late modernist period) and one by Hugo Hamilton (in the postmodern era). The analysis benefits from a multi-layered interpretive framework drawing on discourse analysis, corpus-based approaches and literary study, particularly in that it unpacks ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures. These involve readers in a dialogic interpretation of the text's “polyphony” and “heteroglossia”, either conveying the generic pronoun reference or the protagonist's inner voice.

Purpose The B-MaP-C study investigated changes to breast cancer care that were necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we present a follow-up analysis of those patients commenced on bridging endocrine therapy (BrET), whilst they were awaiting surgery due to reprioritisation of resources. Methods This multicentre, multinational cohort study recruited 6045 patients from the UK, Spain and Portugal during the peak pandemic period (Feb–July 2020). Patients on BrET were followed up to investigate the duration of, and response to, BrET. This included changes in tumour size to reflect downstaging potential, and changes in cellular proliferation (Ki67), as a marker of prognosis. Results 1094 patients were prescribed BrET, over a median period of 53 days (IQR 32–81 days). The majority of patients (95.6%) had strong ER expression (Allred score 7–8/8). Very few patients required expedited surgery, due to lack of response (1.2%) or due to lack of tolerance/compliance (0.8%). There were small reductions in median tumour size after 3 months’ treatment duration; median of 4 mm [IQR − 20, 4]. In a small subset of patients (n = 47), a drop in cellular proliferation (Ki67) occurred in 26 patients (55%), from high (Ki67 ≥ 10%) to low (< 10%), with at least one month’s duration of BrET. Discussion This study describes real-world usage of pre-operative endocrine therapy as necessitated by the pandemic. BrET was found to be tolerable and safe. The data support short-term (≤ 3 months) usage of pre-operative endocrine therapy. Longer-term use should be investigated in future trials.

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The representation of the world cannot be separated from its spatial context. Making the effort to understand how space and landscape influence short stories and their structure, and are represented in them, can help us to make sense of the role of this formerly underestimated subgenre, its social and cultural connections and dissonances, its relation to storytelling and popular narratives, and its alleged low importance. How does the short story genre relate to regional and landscape literature? Can we see it as humble fiction and, in this case, how does the humbleness of this subgenre play a part in the growth of the modernist short story? The oral, mythic and fantastic sources of the short story, together with the travel memoir tradition that brought the love for landscape description and the interest in the narration of brief and easily publishable episodes of local life, helped to consolidate a connection between the short story form and regional literature. ‘Humbleness’ is used here in association with the absence of complexity, plainness, simplicity of approach to a complex reality, straightforwardness. From this perspective, aesthetic value was usually absent from regionalist fiction as its only aim was to render the local truth faithfully. However, this ‘aesthetic humbleness’, which should not be used as a generalization, has been increasingly questioned in regard to modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism and also when we consider specific works.

This paper aims to provide a reflection on literary representations of home alternatively to current collocations in the media, in the psychological and sociological realm (home vs comfort zone). The selection of two postcolonial texts, one by Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), and another by Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984), provides ways-in to discuss changing social and cultural experiences with a focus on characters’ search for identity in a multicultural and multilingual setting, as is the one in the United States. The study will depart from a brief theoretical survey (Anderson 1991) to a corpus-based approach which maps such shifts and changes (Baker 2006) while resorting to a close analysis of contexts of occurrence of the keywords home and house, along with their patterns of collocation, in the texts under scope (from the sentence to the textual levels, following Biber et al. 1998; Sinclair 2004, among other). The analysis is meant to unveil ways in which writers make use of linguistic structures and most importantly what it means to be at home when characters never felt welcome there, or characters’ inner / outer struggle to develop a sense of belonging in disrupted settings.