On Satire

In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett, a would-be author, by calling him a ‘pisseur de copie’. Bartlett seeks revenge with the help of Hawkins’s fellow lodger, Wanda, with tragic results. Yet the true plot of any Spark novel is difficult to pin down, not least when the word ‘plot’ is deployed so frequently by her characters to imply conspiracy and misinformation. Colin and Clare discuss Spark’s kaleidoscopic view of reality and the ways in which both Catholicism and Calvinism play through her work. 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://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Jenny Turner: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n15/jenny-turner/she-who-can-do-no-wrong Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n17/frank-kermode/mistress-of-disappearances Susan Eilenberg: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n24/susan-eilenberg/complacent-bounty James Wood: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n17/james-wood/can-this-be-what-happened-to-lord-lucan-after-the-night-of-7-november-1974 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality. 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://apple.co/4dbjbjG In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey 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.

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Barbara Everett https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance John Bayley https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming Marilyn Butler https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process 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.

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: John Mullan: Clubs of Quidnuncs https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n04/john-mullan/clubs-of-quidnuncs Barbara Everett: Tibbles https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n18/barbara-everett/tibbles Colin Burrow: Puppeteer Poet https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n08/colin-burrow/puppeteer-poet 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.

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to Charles II, his poetic subject was most often the licentiousness and intricate political manoeuvring of the court’s various factions, and he was far from a passive observer. In this episode Clare and Colin consider why Restoration England was such a satirical hotbed, and describe the ways in which Rochester, with a poetry rich in bravado but shot through with anxiety, transformed the persona of the satirist. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more in the LRB: Germaine Greer: Doomed to Sincerity https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/germaine-greer/doomed-to-sincerity Terry Eagleton: In an Ocean of Elizabeths https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n20/terry-eagleton/in-an-ocean-of-elizabeths Christopher Hill: Reason, Love and Life https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n22/christopher-hill/reason-love-and-life 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.

In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the vein of the Roman satirists, and they mark not only the chronological start of his poetic career, but a foundation of his whole way of writing. Colin and Clare place the satires within Donne’s life and times, and explain why the secret to understanding their language lies in the poet's use of the ‘profoundly unruly parenthesis’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/satireapplesignup In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/satiresignuppod Read more on John Donne in the LRB: Catherine Nicholson: Who was John Donne? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n02/catherine-nicholson/batter-my-heart Blair Worden: Donne and Milton's Prose https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n12/blair-worden/things-the-king-liked-to-hear Tobias Gregory: Lecherous Goates https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n20/tobias-gregory/lecherous-goates Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford. Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much. Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark. Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the LRB. Non-subscribers will only hear an extracts of most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings Read more on satire in the LRB: Jonathan Coe: Sinking Giggling into the Sea https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking-giggling-into-the-sea Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.