On 11 July, at the Dobrolyubov Library No. 3 (Moscow) Professor John Mullan of University College London will be giving a lecture "What Matters in Jane Austen?"
All who appreciate the classical novel at its very best are welcome to attend John Mullan’s lecture on the “First Lady” of 19th century English literature.
Which characters in Jane Austen’s novels never speak? Why is it dangerous to go to the seaside? What is the right and wrong way to propose marriage? This lecture will answer these questions and many more. By looking at some of the riddles in Jane Austen's novels, it will reveal the essence of her genius.
The lecture will be held in English with simultaneous interpretation into Russian. The lecture begins at 19.00.
Admission free. Registration required.
John Mullan
John Mullan is Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at University College London. He completed his BA and PhD at the University of Cambridge where he was a Lecturer before moving to UCL in 1994.
John Mullan has published widely on eighteenth-century literature, including Sentiment and Sociability. The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (OUP) and Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture. An Anthology (OUP). He has edited several works by Daniel Defoe, most recently A Journal of the Plague Year. He is currently writing a volume of the Oxford English Literary History that will cover the period from 1709 to 1784.
His research interests extend to the 19th century: he was General Editor of the Pickering & Chatto series Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries and in 2012 he published a book on the fictional techniques of Jane Austen, What Matters in Jane Austen? His new edition of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility for Oxford World’s Classics will appear later this year. He has also published How Novels Work (2006), which examines novelistic technique, setting contemporary novels against classics of the past, and Anonymity. A Secret History of English Literature (2007).
A regular broadcaster and literary journalist, John Mullan hosts the Guardian Book Club and appears regularly in literary discussions on BBC radio and television. In 2009 he was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.
