Post Type Archives: VBC Events

E. M. Forster was described by D. H. Lawrence as the “last Englishman,” and it’s indeed difficult to imagine a writer who better embodies the dramatic cultural transitions from England out of the nineteenth-century and Edwardian Era into the time of world wars and modern social upheaval (Forster died in 1970 at the age of […]

Many of you may already be familiar with the writing of Zadie Smith, who burst on the scene as a 25-year-old literary phenom in 2000 with the remarkable novel White Teeth. A sparkling inquiry into the social tensions of modern multicultural London, White Teeth is often hailed as a key work in recent postcolonial literature. Smith has followed that […]

I think of Turgenev’s novel as the epitome of the great 19th-century novel, those feats of narrative and dazzling characterization that transport the reader to a remote time that somehow feels familiar and intimate. A moving account of family life, Fathers and Sons tells the story of the young university graduate Arkady’s return home, accompanied by a […]

Winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Demon Copperhead is a modern-day recasting of Charles Dickens‘s legendary 19th-century novel David Copperfield, which I will be teaching in October 2023 in The Charles Dickens Seminar: DAVID COPPERFIELD (see details below). Kingsolver’s dialogue with Dickens is evident from the first page of her book, which essentially “rhymes” with the opening of Dickens’s great novel: First, […]

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, The Color Purple is as much a cultural phenomenon as a literary event. It was adapted into an acclaimed film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg in 1985, and it was also the basis for a musical. The Color Purple is the searing account, narrated in epistolary form, of Celie, a poor young Black girl […]