Sarah Antony Historic Literature Series – Autumn term
To book on any of these courses please contact Sarah by filling in the Contact Form at the end of this page. Please include the reference for any of the courses you are interested in using the Comments field.
Crime and Punishment
Dates: October 5, 12, 19, 26
Day and Time: Mondays 10.30-12.30,
Reference: Crime
Cost: £32
Course Description
This four-week course looks at Dostoyevsky’s great novel of damnation and redemption; a novel which evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. Crime and Punishment tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be beyond conventional moral laws. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck.
Resources
Crime and Punishment | Project Gutenberg
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky | Full Audiobook – YouTube
“Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know”: A Literary Biography
Date and Time: Thursday 8 October, 2-4pm
Reference: Byron
Cost: £10
Course Description
The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence.
This lecture looks at the life of Lord Byron, described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, his astonishing career as a poet matched only by his astonishing record as a breaker of norms, an insatiable lover, a bizarre hedonist, a restless exile, an ardent revolutionary, and in general, one of the greatest embracers of life the world has ever seen.
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day,
Dates: October 14, 21, 28
Day and Time: Wednesdays 10.30-12.30
Reference Woolf
Cost: £25
Course Description
Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 24 October 1919. Set in Edwardian London, the novel contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. Woolf deals with questions concerning women’s suffrage, and asks whether love and marriage can co-exist and whether marriage is necessary for happiness.
Night and Day is the longest of Woolf’s novels and is written in a largely realist prose style that, compared to Woolf’s other more experimental works, is sometimes seen as an anomaly within her oeuvre. This is the most traditional of Woolf’s novels, yet even here we can see her beginning to break free; in this, her second novel, with its strange mixture of comedy and high seriousness, Woolf had already found her own characteristic voice.
Katherine Hilbery, torn between past and present, is a figure reflecting Woolf’s own struggle with history. Both have illustrious literary ancestors: in Katherine’s case, her poet grandfather, and in Woolf’s, her father Leslie Stephen, writer, philosopher, and editor. Both desire to break away from the demands of the previous generation without disowning it altogether. Katherine must decide whether or not she loves the iconoclastic Ralph Denham; Woolf seeks a way of experimenting with the novel form that still allows her to express her affection for the literature of the past.
Resources
Night and Day by Virginia Woolf | Project Gutenberg
Night and Day by Virginia WOOLF read by J. M. Smallheer Part 1/2 | Full Audio Book – YouTube
Night and Day by Virginia WOOLF read by J. M. Smallheer Part 2/2 | Full Audio Book – YouTube
The House of the Seven Gables
Dates: December 7, 14, 21
Day and Time: Mondays 10.30-12.30
Reference: Hawthorne
Cost: £25
Course Description
The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. The setting for the book was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, belonging to Hawthorne’s cousin Susanna Ingersoll, as well as ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.
The novel, set in mid-19th-century Salem, Massachusetts, is a sombre study in hereditary sin and a profound exploration of the human condition. This course explores Hawthorne’s themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement, in the context of the Puritanism of early America, the misappropriation of American land, and the witchcraft trials of the seventeenth century.
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Project Gutenberg
(5) The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne | Full Audiobook – YouTube
Sarah Antony’s Booking Contact Form
To book on any of the above courses please contact Sarah by filling in the Contact Form below, Please include the reference for any of the courses you are interested in using the Comments field.