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IN OUR TIME
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MISSED A PROGRAMME?
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PROGRAMME INFO |
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds in the world. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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LISTEN AGAIN |
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PRESENTER |
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BIOGRAPHY |
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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LATEST PROGRAMME |
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VICTORIAN REALISM
A reaction against Romanticism, the realist novel presented life as it was in urbanized, industrial Britain.
Attacked as ordinary, mundane, overly democratic and lacking the imaginative demands of poetry, its defendants argued that the ordinariness of life contained a complexity and depth previously unseen and unconsidered.
At its best the realist novel was like life itself - complex in appearance, rich in character, diverse in outlook, teeming with ideas and operating on several levels. It was a forum for the confusions of the Victorian age over Christianity and Darwinism, economics, morality and psychology, yet it was also a domestic novel concerned with the individuality of human relationships.
From the provincialism of George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Hardy’s bleak and brutal Wessex, Victorian Realism touched all the great Victorian authors, but can it truly be the touchstone of an age which produced the fantasy of Alice in Wonderland, the escapism of Tthe Waterbabies and the abundant grotesquerie of Dickensian London?
Guests
Philip Davis
is Reader in English Literature at the University of Liverpool and author of The Victorians, a volume of the New Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press 2002)
A.N. Wilson
is a novelist, biographer and author of The Victorians (Random House 2002).
Dinah Birch
is Fellow and tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford.
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