Watch podcast This lecture, given in June 2015 at the How The Light Gets In (Institute of Arts and Ideas)...
Podcasts
Sex in Literature
Watch podcast. This lecture, given in June 2015 at the How The Light Gets In (Institute of Arts and Ideas)...
Victorians All Around Us
Watch podcast If you live in a British town or city, the Victorians will be all around you. To become aware of them...
Approaching the Victorians
Watch podcast We should be careful of generalising about 'the Victorians'. 1837-1901 was a huge period of vast...
The Narrator Part 2
Watch podcast In the second half of this short introduction to Narrators I consider some of the complexities that can...
The Narrator Part 1
Watch podcast. This is a brief introduction to the concept of the 'Narrator' in literature. In this first of its two...
Sex in Victorian Literature
Watch podcast The Victorians were not only caricatured as prudes by the modernists who followed them, but were known...
Reading
Watch Podcast When we 'read' a book, a lecture, a situation, or a face, are we doing the same thing? How much do these...
Chapters
Watch Podcast Chapters are deep in the structure of most prose works, doing much of the supporting and some of the...
Unreliable Narrators
Watch Podcast Narrators are almost all we have to go on – so how can we know when they are being unreliable? This...
Sebastian Faulks’s ‘A Week in December’
Watch Podcast A Week in December takes the pulse of London in 2007. It describes a web of characters connected by...
Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 88’
Watch Podcast Shakespeare's 'Sonnet 88' is the first of a mini-sequence in which the poet anticipates his friend's...
A.D. Miller’s ‘Snowdrops’
Watch Podcast Snowdrops is a thriller set in Moscow in the early 2000s. The protagonist – an English lawyer - is...
Julian Barnes’s ‘A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters’
Watch Podcast Barnes's title is provocative; it announces that this is not in fact a history, but a novel. The novel...
Samuel Beckett’s ‘Breath’
Watch Podcast Beckett's thirty-five second play was sent on the back of a postcard to New York in 1969, where it was...
Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’
Watch Podcast Atonement is structured around a series of oppositions: war and peace, guilt and innocence, literature...
Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration’
Watch Podcast Regeneration follows the efforts of a First World War psychiatric doctor to uncover the triggers of his...
Walcott and Naipaul: History and Myth
Listen to Podcast This lecture compares West Indian writers Derek Walcott and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on their...
Realism
Listen to Podcast This lecture tackles head-on the issue of what 'realism' is - or rather, how the term has been used...
George Eliot 1: Intellect and Consciousness
Listen to Podcast This lecture notes the power and range of Eliot's intellect, and her changing attitudes to the...
George Eliot 2: Genre and Justice
Listen to Podcast This lecture considers how narrative justice, and the genres of comedy and tragedy, relate to each...
George Eliot 3: Reception History
Listen to Podcast This lecture traces the reception of George Eliot from her own time to the present. It traces the...
George Eliot – A Very Large Brain
Watch Podcast This mini lecture explains why, to George Eliot, being truly intelligent entailed being moral, and vice...
D.H. Lawrence 1: Consciousness
Watch Podcast This lecture introduces one of the most important and vexed issues in D.H. Lawrence's thought and...
D.H. Lawrence 2: Humour
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence's detractors and fans alike have long treated him as an entirely serious - or would-be...
D.H. Lawrence 3: Christianity
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence was brought up in Congregationalism, and although he left a belief in the exclusive truth...
D.H. Lawrence 4: The World at Large
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence spent most of his life, after his elopement with Frieda Weekley, restlessly travelling the...
D.H. Lawrence 5: The Alps
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence first saw the Alps when he was eloping with his Professor's wife, Frieda Weekley. They...
D.H. Lawrence 6: Birds, Beasts and Children
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence described flowers and children better than any other writer I can think of. This lecture,...
D.H. Lawrence 7: Reception History
Watch Podcast D.H. Lawrence's reputation was much contested during his lifetime, and has fluctuated dramatically ever...
Unreliable Narrators
Watch Podcast This lecture considers one of the trickiest of literary devices to interpret and describe: the...
Chapters: Why Writers Have Them, and How To Read Them
Watch Podcast Why are nearly all long prose works divided into chapters? This lecture considers the uses of chapters...
Multiple Plotting
Watch Podcast What does it mean for a novel to be multi-plotted? Does not a novel has as many plots as characters? And...
What is ‘Comparative Literature’?
Watch Podcast What is really meant by the phrase 'comparative literature'? How does it relate to comparative...