All the writers on this course were engaging with debates that still resonate. Shakespeare was writing at the beginning of ‘the modern period’. As such his topics are our topics. In Measure for Measure he looks at the power vested in men and sees how unregulated it is. The Duke seems to govern by whim and fancy and Angelo through hypocrisy and exploitation. The women Mariana and Isabella seem mired in the conventional beliefs of their period. Puritanism is distorting the characters’ moral ideas, yet, bleakly, the play seems to offer very little way out of this corrupt power politics.
Wordsworth wrote at a time of revolutions; the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, and the Industrial Revolution. He wanted a style of verse that could be read and understood by a larger audience, rather than just the elite and his choice of manageable vocabulary and polemical content were powerfully aimed at creating a respect for the natural world, a respect he saw dwindling. His ideas and his stylistic changes are very much our own.
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is set in a large country house, the type that still haunts the British imagination. Its Lord and his son are its dominant figures, choosing what is moral and what is not. Lord Thomas's dismantling of the theatricals harks back to the very puritanism that Shakespeare was observing in Measure for Measure. Within this skewed world Fanny tries to navigate a responsible life, but how can she when she kowtows to the monstrous Aunt Norris? She is a profoundly compromised heroine, so different from Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice and so much more constrained by class and power.
Virginia Woolf was one of the 20th century’s great artists, but that doesn’t mean she was locked in an ivory tower. In her two great Cambridge lectures, published as A Room of One’s Own in 1929, she made the argument that “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Seminars three and four will invite students to respond to A Room of One’s Own personally, politically and critically, asking literary questions about its form alongside practical ones about how writing actually gets done in the world. We will follow some of Woolf’s ideas into our own time, considering popular work by Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Alison Bechdel and Naomi Alderman and drawing on our own experiences of gender politics in art, culture and life. In lecture five we will turn to an example of Woolf’s own experimental fiction, seeking to understand how and why she broke with literary conventions and what she expected of her readers.
All our texts engage with debates and ideas that we are still worried by. They are as exciting today as they were when they were first created.
