We are delighted to wholeheartedly invite you to visit an online presentation of Professor John Bowen and the British Library ‘Discovering Literature’ series
John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. His main research areas are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, in particular the works of Charles Dickens and other major Victorian novelists, but he has also written on modern poetry and fiction, as well as essays on literary theory. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens, a Fellow of the English Association (FEA), and has given many keynote addresses and public lectures around the world. He is the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford University Press, 2000, 2003) and has edited Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (2014) and Phineas Redux (2011) for Oxford World’s Classics. He was expert advisor to the Royal Shakespeare Company for David Edgar’s acclaimed adaptation of A Christmas Carol (2017). He has contributed to a number of television documentaries and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, Front Row, Open Book, Beyond Belief, PM, Today and Woman’s Hour, Channel 4’s ‘Dickens’s Secret Lover’ and BBC2’s ‘Being the Brontes’. His edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Oxford World’s Classics in 2021.
Organizer: dr hab. Małgorzata Hołda prof. UŁ, Department of British Literature and Culture, University of Lodz
The film is from the British Library website and is used under Creative Commons.
John about the genesis of his contribution to the British Library ‘Discovering Literature’ website:
I was delighted when the British Library asked me to collaborate on the ‘Discovering Literature’ website. It grew out of a talk I gave to a group of very lively school students at the BL about nineteenth-century Gothic, which is a perennially popular topic, and which I’ve recently written about for The Cambridge History of the Gothic (CUP, 2020). We then made a number of short films together for the website at some beautiful literary locations in England, including Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill house, the Bronte parsonage in Yorkshire, and the Dickens House Museum and University College (for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) in London. I also contributed some articles to the website, on authors such as George Orwell, Dickens and the Brontes, as well, on the Gothic. It’s now an incredibly rich resource across a huge range of English literature, with hundreds of contributors and thousands of unique artefacts and collection items from the BL’s unparalleled collections, as well as lots of helpful articles and short films. It’s such an exciting and stimulating resource!