Oliver Smithies Lecture: "Oh my beloved Victoriana:" Barbara Pym's Forms of Critique
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.
Date: 23 November 2017, 17:15 (Thursday, 7th week, Michaelmas 2017)
Venue: Balliol College, Broad Street OX1 3BJ
Venue Details: Buttery Old Archive Room
Speaker: Professor Claire Jarvis (Oliver Smithies Fellow, Balliol College, University of Oxford and Assistant Professor in the English Department at Stanford University)
Part of: Oliver Smithies Lectures
Booking required?: Not required
Cost: Free
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Victoria Holt