Leaping into our literary past
Literature has taught us a great deal. It continues to teach those that delve into it and helps us to see the bigger picture. It provides insight into our past, and encourages us to ask questions. It can take us away from reality but also forces us to consider issues that are relevant to the lives we live.
In the videos below, academics from the School of Arts, English and Drama, share their thoughts and interpretations of key literary texts.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
By Oscar Wilde
“There’s no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, books are well written or badly written, that is all.”
Oscar Wilde wrote poetry, short stories, critical essays, plays, book reviews, and hundreds of letters, but he published only one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. His work first appeared as a ‘novelette’ in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890. At this point, the text was only 30,000 words long and had thirteen chapters, but the following year, Wilde expanded it for publication as a novel, adding seven new chapters and his notorious ‘Preface’, in which he claims that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’ It is this version, weighing in at around 80,000 words, which is most widely read nowadays.
In this video, Dr Nick Freeman, a specialist reader in Late Victorian Literature at Loughborough University, discusses the importance of morality and art in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.
PARADISE LOST
By John Milton
The best well-known work of John Milton (1608-1674), ‘Paradise Lost. A Poem in Ten Books’, was first published in London in 1667. In 1674, a new edition was published with some amendments and was divided into the twelve books we are most familiar with now.
The ‘books’ are what we would think of as chapters or sections. The whole book is an epic poem – which is a long story told in blank verse form, with over 10,000 lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter.
The poem retells the story of Adam and Eve from the biblical book of Genesis, fleshing out the story and imagining the couple’s reactions to the events that led to them being expelled from the Garden of Eden (or Paradise).
Here Dr Sara Read, an English lecturer at Loughborough University provides a summary of Book 9 of this epic poem.
Visit our School of Arts, English and Drama website for a summary of Book 10.
THE WASTE LAND
By T.S. Eliot
“The Waste Land presents a highly eloquent account of despair. Its powerful vision of urban alienation spoke to a generation of young post-war readers and in doing so, it changed poetry forever.”
T. S. Eliot’s landmark modernist poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Divided into five sections, the poem explores life in London in the aftermath of the First World War, although its various landscapes include the desert and the ocean as well as the bustling metropolis. The poem is notable for its unusual style, which fuses different poetic forms and traditions. Eliot also alludes to numerous works of literature including the Bible, Shakespeare, St Augustine, Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts, as well as French poetry, Wagnerian opera, and Arthurian legend surrounding the Holy Grail. But the poem is also strikingly modern in its references to jazz music, gramophones, motorcars, typists and tinned food.
Not long after its publication, The Waste Land became a talking-point among readers, with some critics hailing it as a masterpiece that spoke for a generation of lost souls, and others denouncing it for its allusiveness or modernist style. It continues to divide readers, but its reputation as one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century is secure.
Here, Dr Oliver Tearle, an English lecturer at Loughborough University discusses the key themes within The Waste Land, the most prominent of which is the breakdown.
Visit the School of Arts, English and Drama website for more on all three of the classic texts.
