by eleanorh | Oct 12, 2020 | Uncategorized
Like Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi/The Betrothed, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1349-1353) is set during a pandemic: the Black Death of 1348-49, which killed at least 50% of the Italian population. You can read Italian and English versions on Decameron...
by eleanorh | Sep 28, 2020 | Uncategorized
Italian literature has long had a familiarity with pandemics. The first major Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi/The Betrothed was published in 1840 and is set during the plague epidemic of 1629-31 (you can read an 1844 English translation here: vol...
by eleanorh | Sep 21, 2020 | Uncategorized
Throughout the lockdown I have been thinking about the ways in which I spend my time; am I productive enough, what do I do to wind-down, do I wind-down enough, and how do I compare with others? Both my work-life and leisure are tied to reading, and whilst the...
by eleanorh | Sep 7, 2020 | Uncategorized
At the start of the current pandemic lockdown I started an umpteenth re-reading of Middlemarch. I will be writing briefly on the novel for our new MA, but this choice of reading was as much for my own sanity as for reasons of work. As always, I found so much to...
by eleanorh | Jul 13, 2020 | Uncategorized
At rare off-duty times during lockdown, two moments from novels have repeatedly come to mind. One is Arthur Clennam’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea towards the close of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit: ‘None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted …...
by eleanorh | Jul 6, 2020 | Uncategorized
Lockdown reading takes many forms, from the rediscovery of the attractions of Jane Austen’s socially enclosed worlds, to the recognition of the predictive power of texts like Camus’s La Peste, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. As a specialist in Renaissance...
