Professors John Carey and Declan Kiberd go head-to-head on the thorny subject of great novels, popular novels and the point where greatness and popularity may be said to interesect.
In Ulysses and Us Declan Kiberd shows that Ulysses, far from being the epitome of elitism, was always intended as a book for the common people, rooted in their experience and offering a democratic and humane vision of a tolerant, decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world. Ulysses continues to be one of the central books of the twentieth century and this is an audacious new take on it, designed to remove it from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Joyce industry and restore it to its shocking, democratic origins. It is also a stinging rebuke to the anti-intellectual sneering which is all too common here in Ireland.
In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his spare time. His work had been rejected by every publisher until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile. This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition. In this, the first biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist – William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies—the UK’s most popular literary critic, John Carey, reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster’, a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.
Why is Ulysses the book people boast about never having read while most school children have been obliged to read Lord of the Flies as part of the curriculum? Find out in the course of what promises to be a fascinating debate.
