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.
'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.
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Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell on syphilis:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n14/clare-bucknell/colonel-cundum-s-domain
John Mullan on Sterne:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n11/john-mullan/shandying-it
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.
