Great Writers Inspire
Summary: PLEASE NOTE: The 'Great Writers Inspire' project has its own website which features much more extensive, diverse and updated content. Please visit https://writersinspires.org From Dickens to Shakespeare, from Chaucer to Kipling and from Austen to Blake, this significant collection contains inspirational short talks freely available to the public and the education community worldwide. This series is aimed primarily at first year undergraduates but will be of interest to school students preparing for university and anyone who would like to know more about the world's great writers. The talks were produced as part of the Great Writers Inspire Project which makes a significant body of material freely available on the subject of great works of literature and their authors. Visit https://writersinspire.org/ to see how great writers can inspire you.
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- Artist: Oxford University
- Copyright: © Oxford University; the media items are released with a Creative Commons licence
Podcasts:
Dr Catherine Brown gives a talk on George Eliot and her influences. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Dr David Fallon introduces the poetry, painting, and engraving of William Blake, focusing on the imaginative and visionary aspects of Blake's work and his desire to break the publics 'mind-forg'd manacles'. Dr Fallon also highlights Blake's exposure to the political radicalism of the 1780s and 90s through his work as an engraver for the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson. Blake's unorthodox Christianity led him to challenge conventional notions of good and evil in his visionary 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', in which dynamic energy is praised. Blake is best known for his Songs of Innocence and Experience and 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. Dr Fallon highlights Blake's exposure to enlightenment thinking and the political radicalism of the 1780s and 90s through his work as an engraver for the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson published works by Joseph Priestley (Unitarian minister and discoverer of oxygen), ground-breaking feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Erasmus Darwin (grandfather to Charles Darwin), among others. Blake's unorthodox Christianity led him to challenge conventional notions of good and evil in his visionary 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' (1790-93), in which dynamic energy is praised above all else. In the poem, Blake famously wrote 'The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.' Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Dr Jennifer Batt gives a talk on Stephen Duck, one of the 18th Century labouring-class poets. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Dr Abigail Williams gives a talk on Jonathan Swift and the Art of Undressing. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Dr Francis Leneghan gives a talk on Beowulf, one of the most important works in Anglo-Saxon literature. The title of this collaborative project, 'Great Writers Inspire', naturally brings up several questions, most importantly of which is, 'What is a Writer?' In his talk on the Old English poem Beowulf, Francis Leneghan discusses that very concern. The term 'author' does not convey the same static quality in the Anglo-Saxon period as it does in the modern day. Beowulf could have existed in a multiple of versions, depending on how many Anglo-Saxon poets (scops) were around to interpret and re-tell the tale, much like the many interpretations of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'. He also discuses the poet's taste for poetic license, taste, and embellishment that his own character, Beowulf, possesses. The poet invites the audience to consider the complex role of oral poetry, and how the audience - both Anglo-Saxon and modern - should interpret this work. Is this particular poet's rendition of events true? Is Beowulf a less trustworthy individual since he embellishes the nature of the fight when reporting back to Hygelac's court? Every performance and reading reshapes the poem and how we approach it, even to the modern day. The Beowulf-poet, in a sense, is more of a collective noun than an individual author. Also, if you want to hear what Old English sounds like, check out 2:25-2:32 to hear Leneghan speak the opening lines of the extraordinary poem, or 6:27-7:01 to hear the section in which Hrothgar's poet praises Beowulf by comparing him to the valiant men of old. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
Professor Tiffany Stern gives a talk on William Shakespeare and how his plays were performed in Elizabethan England. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
