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Lecture series9 lectures

The Powers of the Novel

Professor John Mullan · Gresham College

Start with lecture 1 At Gresham College

About

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t

Lectures

  1. Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard 2020-10-28 · YouTube
  2. Crime in Fiction: Defoe and Dickens to Spark, Highsmith and McEwan 2021-02-24 · YouTube
  3. Fiction and the Supernatural: Gothic novels and the Brontës to Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters 2021-04-14 · YouTube
  4. Plotting Novels: from Austen and Dickens to Agatha Christie and John le Carré 2021-10-27 · YouTube
  5. Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nichols 2022-03-02 · YouTube
  6. Villains in the Novel: from Dickens, Hardy and Wilkie Collins to Hilary Mantel 2022-04-06 · YouTube
  7. Adultery in the Novel, from Flaubert to Sally Rooney 2022-10-26 · YouTube
  8. Historical Fiction from Sir Walter Scott to Georgette Heyer and Hilary Mantel 2023-03-01 · YouTube
  9. Endings in the Novel, from Austen and Dickens to Edward St Aubyn and Rachel Cusk 2023-04-05 · YouTube

Credits and licence

Institution
Gresham College
Speaker
Professor John Mullan
Year
2020
Level
For everyone
Language
English
Subjects
Law, History, Literature and writing, Languages and linguistics, Art, architecture and design
Source
Gresham College
Licence
Educational use (Gresham College's terms), as Gresham College states it. Gresham College's terms
Attribution
Gresham College states: "We positively encourage the use of the Gresham College lecture transcripts, audio and video files for educational purposes. However, we do not allow use of Gresham College materials for commercial, personal or institutional gain."
Who can watch
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