Nation, Class, Identity: 20th and 21st Century Britain in Literature and Culture

This lecture series offers a survey of the 20th and 21st century in British Literature and Culture, from the 'long Edwardian summer' over Modernism's urge to "make it new!" and the Scottish literary Renaissance to an Empire that writes back, and from the 1948 Windrush generation to the 2016 Brexit vote. We will look at a century deeply engaged in warfare, but also chasing innocence, offering the notion of a "cool Britannia" and building up a veritable heritage industry.

These lectures will present you with a broad spectrum of authors, ranging from E.M. Forster to Ali Smith, from James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Kay, John Burnside and Carol Ann Duffy, from Nan Shepherd and Alasdair Gray to Hanif Kureishi and Bernardine Evaristo, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Angela Carter and from John Osborne to Zinnie Harris. We will cover different genres and media, from theatre to novels, poetry and early film, music and visual art, thus introducing canonical and less canonical texts and cultural artifacts. The lectures will focus, for instance, on the socio-political discourse of a sense of citizenship and nationhood, on literary and cultural movements of localism and regional revivals, and on the power of nostalgia. We will listen to Henry Wood and The Kinks, The Clash and Oasis, and we will have a look at Tracey Emin's art as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh's. We will encounter suffragettes, enthusiastic soldiers, pacifists, some elves, and a dragon in the woods. We will roam through cities real and imagined, play on village greens and chase through disappearing forests, board ships across the Irish Sea and trains into the Highlands, and have cake in a tent in Wiltshire.

Specific features of the historical context essential for understanding contemporary cultural objects and movements will receive particular attention – such as the formation of the British Commonwealth and movements of decolonization, the radical social and political transformation brought forth by Thatcherism, and the slow crumbling of the welfare state. But we will also consider the rise of fantasy literature and questions of gender and identity.


Picture:

Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare's public art work Nelson's Ship in a Bottle occupied the Fourth Plinth on London's Trafalgar Square in 2010 (image © 2021 Yinka Shonibare CBE [RA).