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Languages & Culture
Literature: British Literature in the Belle Epoque.
Early booking is a membership perk for WEA members, where courses are available exclusively before becoming available for everyone else.
Course overview
This course will explore four novels: The Turn of the Screw by
Henry James; Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame; Sons
and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence; The Good Soldier by Ford
Madox Ford, and the work of one poet, Thomas Hardy,
specifically Poems 1912-1913, a record of his reactions to the
death of his first wife.
We will discuss the end of Empire, the rise of Modernism and
Feminism and psychological study, and the political situation
leading up to 1914 and changing perceptions of individual and
national identity.
There will be ample opportunity for discussion and a chance
to reassess what may in some instances be familiar texts.
This course is for early booking only.
Course description
We will begin our discussion with The Turn of the Screw and
discuss its perception of the ghost story genre, the roles
assigned to women and the emerging practice of
psychoanalysis. Our second text, Wind in the Willows, long
known as a children’s book, will reveal to us that it is in fact an
elaborate form of social commentary on late Victorian Britain,
and we will discover those emerging concerns which related
to class in that era.
When we turn to Lawrence, we will trace the continuation of
the emerging movement towards suffrage and relate this to
the earlier positions of women glimpsed in James’ text. We
will aim to restore Lawrence to his position as a subtle
interpreter of the social situation in the Edwardian novel. This
concern with social positions and hierarchies will continue
into Ford’s text, and here we shall speculate about the rise of
Modernism, before we arrive at Hardy’s poetry and evaluate
his role as a bridge between the Victorian Age and the new
Modernist poets.
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