Week 6: Anglo-Saxon Verse

Week 6: Anglo-Saxon Verse

Introduction This week looks at Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the ways in which the earliest English poetry has come back to influence more recent poets such as Hopkins, Hardy, Auden, and Hughes, following its reintroduction to school syllabuses in the late Victorian...
Week 5: Irish Lyric

Week 5: Irish Lyric

Introduction This week looks at the development of Irish poetry, finding in its particular traditions a number of poetic practices and ways of working which modern students can adapt to their own poetry-writing. It begins with another insight into how the practice of...
Week 4: Tang Dynasty

Week 4: Tang Dynasty

Introduction This week examines how many of our ideas about poetry in the west have their roots in ancient Chinese poetry. It focuses on the poetry of the Tang Dynasty (sometimes also transcribed as T’ang), which included many of China’s most famous poets, such as Li...
Reimagining Dostoevsky III

Reimagining Dostoevsky III

In this piece, Caitlin Ingham explores the literary concept of the double, rewriting passages from Dostoevsky’s The Double in the style of Nabokov’s The Eye and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. It represents an effort to emulate the writers…

Reimagining Dostoevsky II

Reimagining Dostoevsky II

This piece experiments with Dostoevsky’s style in the opening of Notes from Underground, using it to interrogate the chaos and contradictions of the post-truth era and the contemporary states of anxiety and existential distress that have become a…

Reimagining Dostoevsky I

Reimagining Dostoevsky I

Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846) explores the gulf that can exist between how a person sees themselves and how others see them – between self-perception and reality – and how exhausting it can be maintaining an image for society.