English Literature – Page 16

Course: James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – SOLD OUT

Date / Time

February 16, 2019
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
March 16, 2019
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
April 27, 2019
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
May 18, 2019
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
June 15, 2019
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

In this course, we’ll read two modernist masterpieces by James Joyce: Dubliners, a collection of stories, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel. Along the way, we’ll read some of Joyce’s letters and earlier writings, and a few key works of literary criticism, seeking to understand the forces that drove Joyce to exile himself from Ireland, only to then repeatedly turn his attention back to the city he left behind. Veterans of The Rosenbach’s Ulysses course will find so much to love in Joyce’s earlier writings, while those steeling themselves to take the plunge into Joyce’s famously difficult book will gain an invaluable introduction.

Hands-On Tour: 19th Century Gay Lives, or, Love Revealed

Date / Time

January 4, 2019
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Bold, cautious, resolved, ambivalent, and sometimes all of the above, gay men of the 19th century strove for authentic identities in art, literature, and love. In this Hands-on Tour, we’ll look at the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde, follow John Addington Symonds path from self-acceptance to advocacy, fraternize with Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, and see the first use of the word homosexual in an English publication.

Hands-On Tour: Sleuths and Spies

Date / Time

December 21, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore early mystery stories, examine an original cypher belonging to a female Civil War spy, and exercise your sleuthing skills to detect a forgery.

Hands-On Tour: Charles Dickens’ Christmas Ghosts

Date / Time

December 5, 2018
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Description ‘Tis the season for Dickens. With A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens established a holiday literary tradition for which he wrote four more Christmas books and many other stories in his lifetime. The supernatural world played a significant part of these stories, and the ghost story is still a traditional part of the British holiday season. (more…)

Hands-On Tour: Not Shakespeare, or Shakespeare’s Shadows

Date / Time

November 30, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

This hands-on tour looks at Shakespeare by… not looking at him. In Shakespeare’s Shadows we’ll meet the bard’s equally brilliant contemporaries Miguel de Cervantes and John Donne, his friend and rival Ben Jonson, his collaborator and successor Jon Fletcher, and his most famous forger, Henry Ireland. We’ll also take a look at an early printing of the first woman in England to earn a living as a playwright, the dashing poet, spy, and libertine Aphra Behn.

Hands-On Tour: Lewis Carroll

Date / Time

November 9, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Mathematician and cleric Charles Lutwidge Dodgson published children’s books under the pen name Lewis Carroll. This tour will explore both the man and the author, drawing on letters from Dodgson to his publishers, original drawings by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the Alice books) photographs of children taken by Carroll, and, of course, copies of his books. We may not figure out why a raven is like a writing desk, or believe six impossible things before breakfast, but it is sure to be an enlightening tour nonetheless.

Hands-On Tour: James Joyce & Irish Authors

Date / Time

October 17, 2018
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

The Rosenbach celebrates Bloomsday on June 16, so as a warm-up, we’ll break out some of the other notable Irish authors from our collections. Along with James Joyce’s handwritten manuscript of his modernist masterpiece Ulysses, we’ll also read and handle works by Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and more! These Irish authors have connections and inﬂuences extending from Thomas Jefferson and Moby-Dick to the present day.

Hands-On Tour: Shaping Shakespeare

Date / Time

October 12, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

When is Shakespeare not Shakespeare? And what is a folio, anyway? After seeing some of Shakespeare’s earliest printings and books that inspired his plots, we’ll explore how his work has fared at the hands of actors, editors, and forgers.

Hands-On Tour: Picturing Cervantes

Date / Time

October 3, 2018
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm

“Picturing Cervantes” explores the ways Don Quixote has been imagined and illustrated through the centuries, featuring remarkable drawings and prints by notable artists such as Gustave Doré and Honoré Daumier. Explore depictions of the questing Don, his companion Sancho Panza, and his noble steed Rocinante from artworks created shortly after the heroic entry of the “Ingenious Gentleman” onto the field of literature, and through the centuries beyond.

Hands-On Tour: Women Novelists at the Rosenbach

Date / Time

September 28, 2018
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Female novelists of the 19th and 18th centuries traveled different routes to find readership for their work. Some used male or deliberately ambiguous pseudonyms; others published anonymously before claiming their creations. Through early editions and manuscripts of Frances Burney, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Elliot, we will explore the ingenuity these immortal writers used to bring their masterpieces before the public.