The Scholar's Armchair

What comes after postmodernism? In this interview, Dr Usha Wilbers and Dr Dennis Kersten of Radboud University explore metamodernism as a new cultural “structure of feeling” emerging in contemporary literature. Moving from modernism’s search for meaning to postmodernism’s irony and scepticism, we ask what it means to read and write fiction today in a world that no longer fully believes in either....

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 Alch...

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 ============================== Description: Did George Eliot secretly challenge the myths of Victorian so...

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. ==============================...

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: htt...

📖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 ============================================= In this wide-ranging interview, Dr John Burton discusses Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, historicity, the Haiti...

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 controv...