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Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
Season 15 Episode 9
'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…
9 months, 2 weeks ago
Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
Season 14 Episode 9
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…
9 months, 3 weeks ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Season 13 Episode 9
Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelle…
9 months, 4 weeks ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger
Season 12 Episode 9
What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his au…
10 months ago
Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
Season 15 Episode 8
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 ‘dream…
10 months, 1 week ago
Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
Season 14 Episode 8
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 (W…
10 months, 2 weeks ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
Season 13 Episode 8
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented…
10 months, 3 weeks ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James
Season 12 Episode 8
Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William J…
11 months ago
Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Season 15 Episode 7
‘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 ad…
11 months, 1 week ago
Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson
Season 14 Episode 7
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 pu…
11 months, 2 weeks ago