Start Date
31 January, 2025
There will be three monthly sessions, Friday 31 January, Friday 28 February, and Friday 28 March, 11am - 2pm.
Overview
This course will focus on relationships between men: together and apart, in love and friendship, in conflict and in memory. We will consider Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder recalls his intense friendship with Sebastian Flyte and his involvement with the family drama of the aristocratic Marchmains; J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a meditation on work, art and community in the life of a soldier returned from war; and Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, which presents a passionate love story in the midst of the horrors of the Great War. All of these books resonate with times, places and people remembered.
The course aims to discuss concepts of masculinity, friendship and sexual love across 3 texts written in the 20th and 21st centuries but all set in the first half of the 20th century.
This course would appeal to anyone interested in masculinity and Englishness. No previous academic reading is required.
Syllabus
Book one: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945
Book two : J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country, 1980
Book three: Alice Winn, In Memoriam, 2023
Please note that the ‘last date available to book’ date is only a guide. We reserve the right to close bookings earlier if courses are over- or under-subscribed. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure enrol as soon as possible. Registrations will not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm.
Course Lecturer: Dr Shirley Jones
At Continuing Education, I currently run courses on contemporary women's writing, nineteenth-century writing, and the thematic strand, The Monthly Novel. Previously I have also taught courses on classic authors, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Dorothy Wordsworth. My Ph.D was a study of the Victorian writer, Margaret Oliphant.
Outside of Continuing Education, I am a member of a writers' group and I run community writing workshops at the VG&M and the Lowlands centre in West Derby.
Courses fees: Full fee £70/Concession £35.
Back to: Continuing Education