Critical Readings

The panel discusses chapters 43-51, examining the presence of Romanticism in the text and character of Ishmael, and highlighting how the text's rapid shifts in perspective and narrative focus may further structuralist and poststructuralist readings. Continue reading

The panel discusses chapters 35-42, exploring Melville's purpose in adopting a multigeneric style, and paying special attention to Ahab's motivations, including his conception of malice and universal evil, and his understanding of justice and vengeance. Continue reading

The panel discusses chapters 26-34, with a particular focus on the effect of genre considerations in framing the novel, its shift into Shakespearean tonality and structure, and Melville's use of humour amidst grave and existential subject matter. Continue reading

The panel discusses chapters 16-25, with a particular attention to characterisation beyond Ishmael and Queequeg--particularly that of Peleg, Bildad, Elijah, and Bulkington--and to the overarching Old Testament Biblical influences upon the narrative. Continue reading

The panel reads chapters 5-15, with a special focus on the description and narrative use of religious symbolism and devotional practice, contrasting the Christian Ishmael and the pagan Queequeg to illustrate Ishmael's welcoming, fraternal worldview. Continue reading

The panel reads the prologues and first four chapters of Moby Dick, provides an overview of the publication history of the text, and discusses the character and reliability of the jocular, circuitous narrator, who commands the reader to 'Call me Ishmael.' Continue reading

The panel concludes with an examination of Lucrece's central role as a Shakespearean protagonist, addressing her attitude towards the conflict between Roman shame and the natural law, and how her speech is situated across historical contexts. Continue reading

The panel reads the second third of Shakespeare's Lucrece, with particular attention to the paradoxical presentation of light and darkness, and to the dual nature of guilt and shame in the poem, as situated within a putatively historical Roman context. Continue reading

In the first of a three-part series on Shakespeare's Lucrece, the panel explores the Roman history and sources for the poem, before reading and examining its metaphors with a focus on Sextus Tarquinius' internal debate and final, abhorrent resolution. Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by the courtier, soldier, privateer, and poet, Sir Walter Raleigh, examining their formal (and informal) qualities, and discussing their connexions to other poetic endeavours and movements, and to contemporary events. Continue reading

The panel reads and discusses the connexions between three poems by Seamus Heaney: "Blackberry Picking", "Three-Piece", and "Mycenae Nightwatch", with attention to their formal aspects, and their use of highly emotive imagery and references to the past. Continue reading

The panel reviews the work of "The People's Poet", Edgar A. Guest, national best-seller, sole Poet Laureate of Michigan, host of the A Guest in Your House radio programme, and author of innumerable verses filled with indefatigable, homespun optimism. Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by Rupert Brooke, a poet of the Georgian movement of the early twentieth century, whose poetry of the early Great War period suggests sentiments and ideals which were about to be transformed by modernised warfare. Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the greatest poet of the Great War, including his "Dulce et Decorum Est", "Anthem for Doomed Youth", and "Spring Offensive", with attention to their arresting imagery and formal characteristics. Continue reading

The panel, joined by special guest Lane Haygood, reads H. P. Lovecraft's Polaris, and discusses its rich symbolism, use of metaphor, deliberately archaic language, ambiguous resolution, and how its formal structure mirrors its narrative content. Continue reading

The panel reads Alexander Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and discusses its moral and ethical instruction alongside its waspish skewering of eighteenth-century "dunces", including Colley Cibber, Lord Hervey, and Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Continue reading

The panel reads Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" and discusses its connexion to the real Loxley Hall in Staffordshire, as well as the poem's formal qualities, and its depiction of nineteenth-century British social, imperial, and military culture. Continue reading

The panel closely reads four poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, focusing primarily on her sonnets, and evaluates their formal structure and potential metaphysical and theological implications, whilst connecting each poem to the others in turn. Continue reading

The panel reads the entirety of Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Horatius" from his collection Lays of Ancient Rome, and discusses the Horatian nature of the work as a narrative which both edifies and delights, along with the formal aspects of the poem. Continue reading

The panel reviews selections from James Joyce's inaugural work, the poetry collection titled Chamber Music, the first-published of his substantial works, giving attention to the formal metrics, structure, and interrelated symbolism of the poems. Continue reading

The panel reads four poems by Lewis Carroll and discusses the importance of poetic form in nonsense poetry, along with several potentially complicated readings that go beyond straight-forward narrative and verge upon social commentary. Continue reading

The panel reads "The Quest of the Sangraal" by the nineteenth-century parson and poet, Robert Stephen Hawker, with special attention to the use of differing Arthurian traditions and the fusion of mediæval and modern poetic forms, syntax, and vocabulary. Continue reading

The panel reads three poems by Thomas Traherne, a late seventeenth-century English poet of imaginative, reflective, and speculative verse, whose manuscripts were discovered by happenstance and saved from the refuse pit in the late nineteenth century. Continue reading

The panel reads Washington Irving's Christmas sequence from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., and examines how its portrayal of an old-fashioned, English Christmas served to influence attitudes towards the ideal of Christmas in the United States. Continue reading

The panel concludes a three-week reading of The Lay of the Children of Hurin, examining the connexion between the history, geography, and cosmology of Tolkien's imagined Middle-Earth and that of our own, very real, terrestrial middle-earth. Continue reading