Frank Foley
Frank Foley
MASTERWORKS OF THE WESTERN CANON
LITERATURE ~ CULTURE ~ HISTORY
With Harold Bloom's illuminating and passionate book, The Western Canon serving as a loose guide, my ongoing series of Masterworks courses explores some of the key works of western literature.
From January 2022, I will be running a selection of 5-week courses on a range of superb works from the western canon. Yes, we'll be exploring some of the greatest works of literary history, and yes, this is totally a passion project of mine!
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So with enough time, I hope to cover literary greats including Shakespeare and Cervantes, Moliere and Milton, Dante and Dickens, Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, and Woolf; canonical novels from Moby Dick to Midnight's Children, The Great Gatsby to The Golden Notebook, Vanity Fair, Villette and Ulysses; and great drama from Hamlet to Hedda Gabler, Uncle Vanya, Endgame and The Crucible... I think you get the picture!
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Each course consists of five weekly 2-hour sessions - so even though we won't be able to cover everything a particular work throws at us, the sessions will offer a us a deep and thoroughgoing introduction.
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FEBRUARY 2023
VILLETTE
Charlotte Bronte
A wonderful 4-week exploration of Charlotte Bronte's other superb novel, the often overlooked, Villette, published in 1847. Follow the life of Lucy Snowe, Villette is about home and homelessness, outwards appearances and inner passions, isolation, alienation and identity... Villette is a Victorian novel ahead of its time.
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"Who are you, Lucy Snowe?" the novel asks...
Indeed ... who are any of us?
STARTS THURSDAY 3rd NOVEMBER 2022
MARCH 2022
March 2022
VANITY FAIR
William Makepeace Thackeray
A superb exploration of one of the great English novels of the 19th century.
STARTS THURSDAY 17th MARCH 2022
APRIL 2022
August 2022
MIDDLEMARCH
George Eliot
A wonderful 4-week exploration of Charlotte Bronte's other superb novel, the often overlooked, Villette, published in 1847.
March 2022
JUNE 2022
tba 2022
ULYSSES
James Joyce
Written in 1905, but not published until 1914, Dubliners remains a key work on modernist literature.
STARTS TBA 2022