This lecture traces the reception of George Eliot from her own time to the present. It traces the development of the ‘modernist smirk’ at the Victorians, of whom Eliot was taken as archetypal; it considers how Woolf honoured Eliot despite writing in this climate, then how F.R. Leavis honoured Eliot as part of the Great Traditon, and finally how Eliot’s works have been treated by Deconstructionist, feminist, Marxist, and science-orientated approaches.
Watch podcast This lecture, given in June 2015 at the How The Light Gets In (Institute of Arts and Ideas) festival, which sits alongside the Hay-on-Wye literary Festival, concentrates a discussion of the ethics of torture in the War on Terror by focusing on the...
Watch podcast. This lecture, given in June 2015 at the How The Light Gets In (Institute of Arts and Ideas) festival, which sits alongside the Hay-on-Wye literary Festival, is a survey of some of the key aspects of sex in literature in the nineteenth and...
Watch podcast If you live in a British town or city, the Victorians will be all around you. To become aware of them (to take the example of London) try to imagine what existed of London before 1837 (not much), and what existed of it by 1901. The Victorians destroyed...
Watch podcast We should be careful of generalising about 'the Victorians'. 1837-1901 was a huge period of vast changes. The early part of the period should be understood with reference to the Regency, which came before it; the later part should be understood with...