It’s been three weeks since I finished Part V, so I’m really closing in on finishing this, by far the longest lecture series I’ve listened to. This set is subtitled “Literature of the 19th Century”.
Individual lectures include:
- William Wordsworth
- Jane Austen
- Stendahl
- Herman Melville
- Walt Whitman
- Gustave Flaubert
- Charles Dickens
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Leo Tolstoy
- Mark Twain
- Thomas Hardy
- Oscar Wilde
You know, I thought that I would find that I’ve read fewer and fewer of the authors as we got further along in history, but with the focus on the French authors in the preceding binder, that seems to have peaked. I’ve read all of these except for Stendahl and Flaubert (French writers). Heck, this very blog contains book reports for some of the works the author focused on (such as Great Expectations–in 2007–that long ago already?). I wondered if I had Madame Bovary–I mean, I know I have Madame Bovary, C’Est Moi, and, apparently, I read it almost ten years ago–so I must see it on my read shelves when I dust and not my to-read shelves when looking for something to read. And when I was looking for something to read recently, I found my copy of Madame Bovary. Which I had the urge to read in 2017 which, clearly, passed.
So the lectures serve as a bit of a refresher as much as an introduction to these authors; given the overlap of this series with some of the others I’ve listened to (for example, The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets last year), it’s almost like I’m back in Dr. Duffy’s class at the university. Which isn’t bad, and it makes me feel smart. And it passes the time I have in the car alone.
