In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to push the boundaries of what literature could explore, with reference to stories including ‘The Judgment’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Report to the Academy’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff

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Further reading in the LRB:

Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hofmann): Unknown Laws

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/franz-kafka/short-cuts

Rivka Galchen: What Kind of Funny is He?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n23/rivka-galchen/what-kind-of-funny-is-he

Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka

J.P. Stern: Bad Faith

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n13/j.p.-stern/bad-faith

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Next episode: Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and stories by Isak Dinesen.

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T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode, Jonathan and James look at Bradley’s polemic against John Stuart Mill, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, and other essays in Ethical Studies, which challenge the idea of morality as a product of calm reasoning arrived at by mature, rational minds. For Bradley, morality is a characteristic of communities, determined by people’s differing needs at various stages in their lives, and the universal need for self-realisation can only be achieved through those communities.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Read more in the LRB:

Frank Kermode on Eliot and Bradley:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n17/frank-kermode/feast-of-st-thomas

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Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Read more in the LRB:

John Sutherland on Thackeray:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n02/john-sutherland/wife-overboard

Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness':

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n02/rosemary-hill/frock-consciousness

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The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Find further reading in the LRB:

Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n07/mark-ford/no-one-else-can-take-a-bath-for-you

Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n09/karl-miller/some-names-for-robert-lowell

Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n18/nicholas-everett/two-americas-and-a-scotland

Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/helen-vendler/the-numinous-moose

Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist

Next episode: Self-elegies by Hardy, Larkin and Plath.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.

Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n01/marina-warner/you-must-not-ask

Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/dinah-birch/never-seen-a-violet

Marina Warner: Doubly Damned

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned

Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist

Next episode: The stories of Franz Kafka, with Adam Thirlwell.

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

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Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this experience and the breakdown that ensued in his 20s, and the boldness of his life and thought from his views on socialism and the rights of women to his unwavering devotion to his wife, Harriet Taylor, the co-author of 'On Liberty' and other works.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

Sissela Bok on Mill's 'Autobiography':

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n06/sissela-bok/his-father-s-children

Alasdair MacIntyre: Mill's Forgotten Victory

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n20/alasdair-macintyre/john-stuart-mill-s-forgotten-victory

Panbkaj Mishra: Bland Fanatics

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics

Next Episode

F.H. Bradley's 'My Station and Its Duties' can be found online here:

https://archive.org/details/ethicalstudies0000brad/page/160/mode/2up

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When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Read more in the LRB:

David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/david-trotter/heathcliff-redounding

John Bayley: Kitchen Devil

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n24/john-bayley/kitchen-devil

Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n22/alice-spawls/if-it-weren-t-for-charlotte

Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/patricia-lockwood/pull-off-my-head

Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist

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Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Further reading in the LRB:

John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n24/john-mullan/unpranked-lyre

Tony Harrison: ‘V.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v

Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist

Read the texts online:

https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw

https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc

https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc

Next episode: Mid-20th century elegies: Berryman, Lowell, Bishop

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