Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
This lecture considers the ways Barbara Pym’s novels recapitulate an early Twentieth-century Victorianism. Pymmian disinterestedness absorbs the modernist material world—the mundane, the advertised, the everyday, the dreary—while also retaining a stance of Arnoldian disinterestedness, devoid of troubling personal contingency. In this lecture, I’ll describe the ways Pym’s Oxford education in English literature (a Victorian invention), references to Victorian texts (particularly Matthew Arnold’s), and the insertion of recognizably Victorian books into her novel’s frames all work to shape her fictions.
