Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow attempt, over twelve episodes, to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in all of English literature. What is satire, what is it for, and why do we seem to like it so much?
Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Episodes will appear once a month throughout 2024, on the 4th of each month.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow attempt, over twelve episodes, to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in all of English literature. What is satire, what is it for, and why do we seem to like it so much?
Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Episodes will appear once a month throughout 2024, on the 4th of each month.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.
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Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind
Marilyn Butler: Success
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success
John Mullan: Hidden Consequences
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences
Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
