'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make 'Our Mutual Friend' one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope Further reading in the LRB: John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1 David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2 Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: https://lrb.me/naeliot1 Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: https://lrb.me/naeliot2 Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: https://lrb.me/naeliot3 Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: https://lrb.me/naeliot4 Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, published in 1854, and described by Ruskin as the greatest long poem of the 19th century. It tells the story of an aspiring poet, Aurora, born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, who loses both her parents as a child and moves to England and the care of her aunt. From there she pursues her poetic ambitions to London, Paris, Italy and back to England while negotiating a traumatic love triangle between the vicious Lady Waldemar, the impoverished seamstress Marian, and the austere social-reformer Romney. In this episode, Clare is joined by Stefanie Markovits and Seamus Perry to discuss the wide range of innovations Barrett Browning deploys to fulfil her commitment to immediacy and narrative drive in the poem, and the ways in which she uses her characters to explore the extent of her own emancipatory politics. Read the poem: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56621/pg56621-images.html Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/nabrowning1 Ruth Yeazell: https://lrb.me/nabrowning2 Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters. Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n19/dinah-birch/the-unwritten-fiction-of-dead-brothers Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/rosemarie-bodenheimer/secret-keeping John Bayley: Mrs G https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/john-bayley/mrs-g Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: John Sutherland on Thackeray: https://lrb.me/nathackeray1 Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness': https://lrb.me/nathackeray2 Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1 John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2 Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3 Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4 Buy this book from the London Review Bookshop: https://lrb.me/crbooklist Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: Thomas Keymer on Peacock https://lrb.me/napeacock1 Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act https://lrb.me/napeacock2 Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing https://lrb.me/naausten1 Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts https://lrb.me/naausten2 W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness https://lrb.me/naausten3 Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023. Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.
Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property. The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park. Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023. Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients. The full list of texts for the series: Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Anthony Trollope (TBD) Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13. Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read the poems: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm Further reading and listening from the LRB: On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind
Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’ https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song Anne Carson, Nox https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57 Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/ W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/ Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war Further reading in the LRB: Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters: https://lrb.me/ldwar1 Jonathan Bate on war poetry: https://lrb.me/ldwar2 Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB: https://lrb.me/ldwar3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the possibilities of elegy more extensively than any English poem before it, not least in its innovative, incantatory rhyme scheme, intended to numb the pain of grief. From its repeated dramatisations of the experience of private loss, 'In Memoriam' opens out to reflect on the intellectual turmoil running through Victorian society amid monumental advances in scientific thought. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the unique emotional power of Tennyson’s style, and why his great elegy came to represent what mourning, and poetry, should be in the public imagination of his time. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/ldtenn1 Seamus Perry: https://lrb.me/ldtenn2 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne’s laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift’s breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose on Plath: https://lrb.me/ldself1 David Runciman on Larkin and his father: https://lrb.me/ldself2 John Bayley on Larkin https://lrb.me/ldself3 Matthew Bevis on Hardy: https://lrb.me/ldself4 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Further reading in the LRB: Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You https://lrb.me/ldpoets1 Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell https://lrb.me/ldpoets2 Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland https://lrb.me/ldpoets3 Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose https://lrb.me/ldpoets4 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre https://lrb.me/ldgray1 Tony Harrison: ‘V.’ https://lrb.me/ldgray2 Read the texts online: https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read the poems here: Ben Jonson: On My First Son https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld Geoffrey Hill: September Song https://lrb.me/hillcrld Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia https://lrb.me/bishopcrld Read more in the LRB: Blair Worden on Ben Jonson https://lrb.me/ldch1 Blair Worden on puritanism https://lrb.me/ldch2 Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill: https://lrb.me/ldch3 Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop https://lrb.me/ldch4 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable, pre-Christian form to honour his friend. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'): https://lrb.me/ldmilton1 Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism): https://lrb.me/ldmilton2 Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton): https://lrb.me/ldmilton3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld
Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing. The first episode will come out on Monday 20 January, on Milton's ‘Lycidas’. Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation. Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.