“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” – L P Hartley, The Go-Between
The most enduringly influential literary works are those which prove capable of ‘crossing cultures’, provoking interest, imitation and sometimes indignation in times and places remote from those in which they were created. Often they do so by crossing significant lines within the cultural landscape of their own time and place, acutely questioning the dominant assumptions of their own society and powerfully representing alternative perspectives.
King Lear (c.1605) is now often called the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and has inspired countless stage versions as well as short stories, novels and film adaptations in several languages. Yet its high critical reputation follows a long period during which it was regarded as such an irregular and shocking play as to be unfit for performance without heavy rewriting. We will examine some qualities that provided for King Lear’s rough but ultimately successful crossing into its influential place into modern culture, above all its relentless and bold transgressions of a conventional world-view complacently anchored in paternal, royal, and divine moral authority.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) Recognized as a forerunner to novels by Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust, Jane Eyre employs a psychologically nuanced first-person narrative in order to explore the inner world and external events of the eponymous heroine. Jane’s experience reveals much about the cultural, gender, and class dynamics of mid-19th century England, as well as the development of her moral consciousness and spiritual growth. The basis for numerous filmic adaptations, Jane Eyre was also the inspiration, or provocation, for Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that seeks to uncover the absences and silent voices in Jane Eyre, thereby revealing the structures of colonialism that supported Britain’s power and culture norms at the peak of its Victorian empire. We will examine Jane Eyre first in terms of its treatment of Jane’s developing consciousness and moral sensibility. We will then complement this understanding with an intertextual reading of Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea.
Heart of Darkness (1899), drawing on Conrad’s experiences in the Congo, combines old motifs and structures to new purpose, contrasting the (supposedly) civilised and barbarian to condemn imperialist exploitation. Though little noticed at first, during the twentieth century it became the premiere anti-imperialist text, widely taught and studied – yet in 1975 Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe bitterly condemned it for recycling racist ideas, and its status was sharply contested while its most famous adaptation, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), gave it a newly telling incarnation. We will consider both the tale and its reception, with the challenges it still offers to white complacencies, racisms, and post-imperial history.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) is the first major work in Faulkner’s lifelong chronicles of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and a classic of Modernism. Marked by fragmented chronology and multiple narrators, including a ‘simpleton’, whose accounts may clash with, complement, or undermine one another, it devastatingly exposes the hollow bankruptcy of the once pre-eminent Compson family amid the heartbreaking fault lines of the American South—between individuals, families, and classes, as well as races—in the decades after the Civil War. We will look at the novel’s journey from a radical experiment many found incomprehensible to iconic status as an anatomy of Jim Crow prejudice and patriarchal vainglory, underlining the needs and rage that fuelled the Civil Rights Movement.
The four works individually and jointly exemplify ways in which literary art takes on the hardest questions, thriving in places where cultures cross and clash, often harshly and violently, yet also midwiving major changes in our self-understandings as human beings sharing a single planet.
