On June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris, Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left teetering at the top. The... Continue Reading →
New Podcast: The Classical Underworld as a Memoryscape
In reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of the past, often encountering them in that strange meeting room represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from classical Greece... Continue Reading →
New Podcast: Bakhtin and Shakespeare
All the world’s a stage – one of Shakespeare’s more famous sayings, and perhaps now almost a cliché. However, Helen Clifford uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to cast a new light on how Shakespeare’s stage and language are indeed bounded to coordinates in the world. His metaphors often ask us to... Continue Reading →
New Podcast: Wandering Across Scandinavia in Egils Saga
An island nation that wants to be involved in the politics of wider Europe, but also removed from it. A fractious debate over power, sovereignty, the rule of law. The experiences of emigrants and immigrants. Not a potted summary of twenty-first-century political events, but rather of the themes raised by the thirteenth-century Icelandic poem, Egil's... Continue Reading →
New Podcast: Sounds Unreal
Stream here or download via your favourite podcast player. Sound is part of our everyday life experience, but it’s hard to understand and define its meaning and workings; sound can feel strange or unfamiliar when we try to put it into words. Professor Helen Abbott, a specialist in nineteenth-century French poetry and music at the... Continue Reading →
