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Elaborate plotting is the novelistic skill least often valued by critics, even if relished by readers. This lecture will look at novelists who raise plot to a literary art. We begin with Henry Fielding, the first great novelist to delight in cunning narrative design. Then Dickens’s complex plot making, including the half-finished and tantalizing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Finally, the lecture will celebrate the plotting artistry of modern writers like Ian McEwan and John le Carré. Elaborate plotting is the novelistic skill least often valued by critics, even if relished by readers. This lecture will look at novelists who raise plot to a literary art. We begin with Henry Fielding, the first great novelist to delight in cunning narrative design. Then Dickens’s complex plot making, including the half-finished and tantalizing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Finally, the lecture will celebrate the plotting artistry of modern writers like Ian McEwan and John le Carré.
Founded in 1597 by Sir Thomas Gresham’s will, Gresham College is London’s first institute of higher education providing free public lectures.
130 free lectures delivered every year including subjects from the original 7 professorships: Astronomy, Divinity (Religion), Geometry (Maths), Law, Music, Physic (Medicine), and Rhetoric.
Archive of over 2,500 lectures you can watch on our website or YouTube channel.
All the lectures are free and will be live-streamed in 2021-22. To watch lectures live online, please register through the course webpage. The registration process is simple, free, and only requires an email address.
Tickets for in-person attendance at this event will be available two months in advance.
Gresham College was London’s first institute of higher education when it was founded in 1597 by Sir Thomas Gresham. Unusually for the time, Gresham lectures were free and given in both English and Latin – where most other higher education...