What are the many mirrors of the Shakespearean stage really showing us?

In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with literary scholar Dr. Valentina Finger of LMU Munich about her new book Mirrors in Shakespeare and Early Modern English Drama: Power, Gender and the Magic of the Theatre. Together, we explore how mirrors in plays like Richard II, Macbeth, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Alchemist do far more than reflect reality—they expose it, distort it, and sometimes shatter it completely.

We discuss how mirrors on the early modern stage were used to explore:

• The fragility of kingship and political power

• The construction of identity and the “two bodies” of the king

• Gender, cosmetics, and female agency in Jacobean drama

• Magic, science, and theatrical illusion in the Renaissance

Drawing on history, philosophy, and close reading, this conversation reveals how Shakespeare and his contemporaries used mirrors to turn theatre itself into a space of reflection, inversion, and revelation.

If you’re interested in Shakespeare, early modern drama, literary theory, gender studies, or the history of theatre, this episode offers a fresh way of seeing familiar plays.

📖Read Valentina’s book for FREE: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350535381

🙋‍♀️ Valentina’s profile at LMU: https://www.anglistik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/wiss_ma/finger/index.htm

Read Alessandra's book The Myth of George Eliot: https://www.routledge.com/The-Myth-of-George-Eliot-How-Marian-Evans-Invented-the-Victorian-Novelist/Grego/p/book/9781032551128

🙋 Prof Alessandra Grego's profile and further links to her work: https://www.johncabot.edu/directory/alessandra-grego

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Did George Eliot secretly challenge the myths of Victorian society — while writing behind a myth of her own?

In this episode of The Scholar’s Armchair, I speak with literary scholar Professor Alessandra Grego of John Cabot University about her fascinating book The Myth of George Eliot. Together we explore one of the most intriguing questions in literary history: how Marian Evans, writing under the male pseudonym George Eliot, used the realist novel to challenge the “common sense” assumptions of Victorian culture.

Grego argues that George Eliot was not simply a pen name but a carefully constructed authorial persona — a myth that allowed Evans to question the myths of her own society. From the ideals of the Victorian gentleman and the “damsel in distress” to the cultural expectations placed on women’s bodies and ambitions, Eliot’s novels quietly dismantle the stories Victorian society told about itself.

We discuss how Eliot’s great heroines — Dorothea Brooke, Maggie Tulliver, Gwendolen Harleth and others — disrupt these inherited narratives. Grego describes them as “towering women”: characters whose moral and intellectual aspirations exceed the narrow roles society offers them. Through these figures, Eliot exposes how cultural myths shape our understanding of gender, power, and social possibility.

Topics we explore include:

• Why “George Eliot” may be a mythic authorial identity

• How realist fiction can challenge cultural “common sense”

• The Victorian myths of the knight and the damsel

• Eliot’s complex and powerful female characters

• Why some of Eliot’s heroines seem “too big” for the worlds they inhabit

This conversation offers a fresh way of thinking about one of the greatest novelists in English literature — not simply as a moral voice of Victorian realism, but as a writer who reimagined the stories society tells about itself.

Welcome to The Scholar’s Armchair, where each week Dr. John Burton sits down for an informative insightful conversation with a leading literary scholar about the big ideas behind the big books that have shaped our world.

What happens when you take a short text — and read it slowly, live, without a script?

In this wide-ranging and intellectually electric conversation, I’m joined by literary critic Dr Neil Cocks of the University of Reading (no less!) to explore the art of close reading, the role of theory, and what it really means to “work through” a text rather than simply affirm it.

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Bibliography and links from Neil:

Children’s Literature intro:

Jacqueline Rose. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Karin Lesnik-Oberstein. 1994. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon.

Rudd, David. 2020a. The Theory Wars Revisited: Rose and the Reading Critics vs. the Liberal Humanists. The Lion and the Unicorn 44:89–109.

Marah Gubar. 2013. Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children’s Literature Criticism. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 38: 450–57

As part of the discussion of coming out and Frozen:

The Butler I reference in terms of ‘I am a lesbian’:

· Judith. Butler. 1993. Gender Imitation and Insubordination. In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aine Barale and David M. Halperin. London: Routledge, pp. 307–20.

The ‘coming out in Neo-liberal times’:

· Stephanie D. Clare. 2017. ‘Finally, She’s Accepted Herself!’: Coming Out in Neoliberal Times. Social Text 1: 17–38.

There are many examples of the straightforward social media queer advocacy work on Frozen I mention, but see:

· Geek and Sundry Vlogs, Disney’s Frozen and the LGBT Community, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_r0QTzg6Bw

· Queer Kids Stuff, Give Else a Girlfriend, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cTFGkEI4Rc

I take the riff on neuroscience and brain scans from:

· Jan De Vos. 2020. The Digitalisation of (Inter)Subjectivity: A Psy-critique of the Digital Death Drive. London: Routledge.

I keep referring to an idea of fixing or defending identity, even as that identity is called into question. I have in mind here especially Daniel Baker and Paul Ryan’s ‘Mirror Mirror’, a video artwork for the first Roma Pavillion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Baker and Ryan work to secure a distinct Roma identity and aesthetics, but in such a way that engages with what they term a necessary ‘provisionality’ also. Their work takes the opposite approach to my own (its broadly against linguistic approaches), but seems to me exemplary of ethical and rigorous practice in the area of identity and ethnicity.

· Baker and Ryan. 2011. Mirror Mirror. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iieQf9o-xW0

I found it so inspiring, that a reading of it forms a central chapter in my new book.

· Neil Cocks. 2026. Reading the Racial Encounter in Multi-Media Texts. London: Routledge.

Close reading:

The person I mention in relation to Levinas is Timothy Secret. He has, again, just about the opposite approach to Theory to me, but I find his work incredibly inspiring and clarifying.

· Timothy Secret. 2015. The Politics and Pedagogy of Mourning: On Responsibility in Eulogy. London: Bloomsbury.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

03:57 Ideology Applies to Us Too (Sensitivity to Framing)

10:40 The Critique of the Framing of Childhood

14:00 The Framing of Voice

16:00 The Complexities of Otherness in Texts

18:37 Returning to the Text

20:21 Paul de Man and Resistance to Theory

23:37 Problems with Freud and Lacan

25:17 The Drive to Interpret Can be The Block

27:00 How Encountering Texts is Always Based on Prior Experience

30:50 Our Framing is Always Operational

31:39 Frozen and the Complexities of the Coming Out Narrative

38:38 Problems of Securing Identity by Appeal to Exterior Simplicity

44:48 Peripheral Identities and Texts

54:46 Live Reading of Rilke

Sylvia Plath, Chick Lit, and the Politics of the Kitchen | Interview with Dr Caroline J. Smith

LINKS:

Check out Caroline's book Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick-Lit here: https://www.routledge.com/Cosmopolitan-Culture-and-Consumerism-in-Chick-Lit/Smith/p/book/9780415806268

Check out Caroline's book Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs here: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Season-to-Taste

Check out my video on Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar here: https://youtu.be/SwYPkRBI7r8?si=BcgMIGcUAmjEPFUz

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In this in-depth literary interview, I speak with Dr Caroline J. Smith of George Washington University about her groundbreaking work on Sylvia Plath, women’s magazine culture, consumerism, chick lit, and contemporary food memoir.

We begin with Plath’s The Bell Jar and Dr Smith’s influential essay, “The Feeding of Young Women”, exploring how 1950s magazines like Mademoiselle shaped cultural ideals of femininity, domesticity, and consumption — and how those pressures inform Esther Greenwood’s identity crisis.

From there, we move to Dr Smith’s book Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit, examining how modern “chick lit” both embraces and critiques consumer culture. What does it mean when shopping, lifestyle, and food become tools for constructing female identity?

Finally, we discuss her latest book, Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs (2023), where she explores how writers such as Julie Powell and Ruth Reichl reclaim the kitchen — transforming it from a site of confinement into a space of authorship, pleasure, and power.

Topics include:

Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar

Mademoiselle magazine and 1950s femininity

Consumer culture and women’s identity

Cosmopolitan magazine and chick lit

Food, gender, and feminist literary criticism

Contemporary women’s food memoir

The politics of kitchen space

If you’re interested in feminist literary criticism, women’s writing, food studies, or modern literature, this conversation offers rich insight into how cultural scripts around femininity continue to shape — and be reshaped by — women writers.

Subscribe for more interviews on classic and contemporary literature.

Music for The Scholar’s Armchair by [email protected]

#SylviaPlath #TheBellJar #FeministCriticism #ChickLit #FoodStudies #LiteraryInterview #WomenWriters #Cosmopolitan #FoodMemoir

📖Check out Luis Othoniel Rosa's novel Animal Spiral: https://charcopress.com/bookstore/animal-spiral

💡Check out more from Luis: https://luisothonielrosa.com/

🎯Check out my video on Frankenstein: https://youtu.be/wtV8vT8g_5Y?si=cEBtg1fGScO-GBPj

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In this wide-ranging interview, Dr John Burton discusses Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, historicity, the Haitian revolutions, and ways of reading and interpreting with eminent Latin American scholar Professor Luis Othoniel Rosa. We discuss reading as a revolutionary act, Luis' own theories and ideas about Frankenstein and its correspondence with the Haitian revolutions, and how the novel helped develop a Gothic tone in Latin American literature. "So often you find in the literatures of other people the key to understanding your own", so says Dr Rosa -- poet, novelist, and academic.

Music for The Scholar’s Armchair by [email protected]

In this wide-ranging interview, Brontë scholar Hilary Newman joins The Scholar’s Armchair to explore Wuthering Heights in depth—its unsettling characters, narrative complexity, violence, grief, religion, haunting, and radical departures from the Victorian novel. We discuss Heathcliff and sympathy, Emily Brontë’s narrative strategy, the problem of adaptation, alternative endings, authorship controversies, and modern critical approaches including grief theory. Along the way, we compare Wuthering Heights with Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dickens, and Virginia Woolf’s criticism of the Brontës.

If you’ve read Wuthering Heights, this interview will give you some crucial new insights into the novel. If you’ve yet to read it, this interview will give you some key tips for getting the most out of it.

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Link to Hilary's book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Virginia-Woolf-Lives-Afterlives-Bront%C3%ABs/dp/1666940224

Link to Hilary's paper 'Death and its Aftermath in Wuthering Heights': https://www.academia.edu/107752600/Death_and_its_Aftermath_in_Wuthering_Heights

Link to the Brontë Society: https://www.bronte.org.uk/about-us/the-bronte-society