Close Readings

‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.

Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market

This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk

Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation

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Read more in the LRB:

Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid

Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced

John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness

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In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract form this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Further reading in the LRB:

John Henderson: Dead Eyes and Blank Faces

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n07/john-henderson/dead-eyes-and-blank-faces

Nora Goldschmidt: Pompeian Group Therapy

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/nora-goldschmidt/pompeian-group-therapy

Thomas Jones: See you in hell, punk

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.

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The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly.

Read the text here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle

Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke

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After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.

Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.

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Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance

John Bayley

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming

Marilyn Butler

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

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In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilizing misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom.

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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.

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The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power.

Read the text here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf

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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day.’

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

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Further reading:

Anita Brookner: Women Against Men

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men

Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her

Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.

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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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