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Close Readings

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  1. Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

    When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and

  2. Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

    Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and cont

  3. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino

    Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground

  4. Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James cons

  5. Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

    Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters,

  6. Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop

    This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstr

  7. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift

    Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting poin

  8. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach

    In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, J

  9. Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

    On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculatio

  10. Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'

    Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later rol

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