Why are some works of fiction – often written by men – revered as ‘literary’, whereas others (often by women) dismissed as lesser novels?

In this lively day school, academics working in English literature will discuss the works and writers who they read for pleasure – and who you ought to be reading too.

Authors to be discussed include Anita Brookner, Georgette Heyer, Rosamund Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor and one man – L.P. Hartley. These are not ‘guilty pleasures’, but rather ‘secret classics’, which should be more widely known.

The speakers’ choices will enable them to ask larger questions about the relationship between popular and ‘serious’ reading cultures.

Speakers:

Dr Sandie Byrne
Associate Professor of English Literature and Director of Studies in English, OUDCE and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. She is the author of a number of books and articles on nineteenth-and twentieth-century writing.

Dr Lynn Alison Robson
Dr. Lynn Robson is Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at Regent’s Park College, Oxford. Her research interests are in early modern print culture, particularly cheap print. Her initial research into prose murder pamphlets of the period is developing to encompass prison literature: writing from and about the early modern prison, with a concentration on the depiction of penitence. She is currently working on two projects based in Shakespeare’s plays: one is on the significance of kneeling and supplication, and the other is the development of a modern liturgy based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Prof Will May
Will May is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton. His books include Stevie Smith and Authorship (OUP, 2010) and Postwar Literature (Longman, 2010), and he has published articles on Elizabeth Taylor, Rebecca West, and Dorothy Parker.

Dr Andrew Blades
Andrew Blades is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. He previously taught English at Bath Spa University and various colleges at the University of Oxford. He has published articles and chapters on the American poets James Merrill and Mark Doty and the novelist John Weir, as well as Twentieth Century American Literature (Longman, 2011). He is also the co-editor of Poetry and the Dictionary (LUP, 2020). He is currently working on the cultural understanding of hoarding / hoarding disorders.