British Academy Literature Week

Tuesday 20 October

THE ROYAL SOCIETY
6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG

T S ELIOT

5.00pm

ATTENTION TO ELIOT (AND OTHERS)

Sir Christopher Ricks in conversation with Hermione Lee

Christopher Ricks, who is co-editor (with Jim McCue) of the complete poems of T S Eliot, will be in conversation with Hermione Lee about both the principles and the practice that are proposed for this two-volume work. The editorial decisions, still provisional in many respects, whether textual or contextual, are sure to benefit from this British Academy discussion – as well as from the scholarly enterprise, now proceeding apace, on the editions of Eliot’s letters and of his collected prose. He has also edited the poems of Tennyson, of James Henry, and of Samuel Menashe, as well as the Oxford Book of English Verse and the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

6.30pm
T S ELIOT’S DAUGHTER

The 2009 Warton Lecture by Robert Crawford
Commentator: Marina Warner

Though T S Eliot had no children, he stated that paternity was the theme of his poem ‘Marina’. Robert Crawford’s lecture re-examines Eliot’s importance, and concentrates on ‘Marina’ as one of his finest poems. The lecture listens closely to the poem’s sound-textures, and argues that this work in which a man invokes his daughter can be read as part of Eliot’s wider engagement with children and with childlessness.

SIR CHRISTOPHER RICKS, FBA, is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Immediate past president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, he is also the immediate past Professor of Poetry at Oxford (2004-2009). He is the author of T S Eliot and Prejudice and of Decisions and Revisions in T S Eliot, and the editor of Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 by T. S. Eliot. He has edited the poems of Tennyson, of James Henry, and of Samuel Menashe, as well as the Oxford Book of English Verse and the New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

PROFESSOR HERMIONE LEE, CBE, FBA, is a biographer and critic. She grew up in London and was educated at Oxford. After lecturing at Williamsburg, Virginia and Liverpool University, she taught at the University of York from 1977, where over twenty years she was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of English Literature. From 1998-2008 she was the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature and Fellow of New College at the University of Oxford. In 2008 she was elected President of Wolfson College, Oxford.

ROBERT CRAWFORD’S sixth collection of poems, Full Volume (2008) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. His first book, The Savage and the City in the Work of T S Eliot, was published in 1987. Among his recent publications are Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature (2007) and The Bard (2009), a biography of Robert Burns. He is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews.

PROFESSOR MARINA WARNER, FBA, is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, where she teaches courses on Fairy-Tales and other forms of narrative. She is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history and works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. Her novels include The Lost Father (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988) and The Leto Bundle (2001), and her most recent work is Phantasmagoria (2006). She is currently working on a study of the Arabian Nights.

Organised in association with the
Institute of English Studies, University of London