Speaker: Swansea author Stevie Davies, Professor of Creative Writing based in Swansea University’s College of Arts and Humanities.

Date: Thursday 3 February 2011

Time: Refreshments will be available before the lecture from 5.15pm

The lecture will commence at 6pm

Venue: Wallace Lecture Theatre, Wallace Building, Swansea University

Admission: Free, everyone is welcome

Other: In her lecture, “Experiments in Life”: George Eliot and the Wisdom of Fiction, Professor Davies will consider the nature of the empathy that lies at the foundation of Eliot’s artistic and social values. Are there limits to her empathic vision? In what sense can Eliot, who called herself a ‘chameleon’, be seen as our contemporary?

As George Eliot observed in Adam Bede, ‘no story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters’. Professor Davies will offer not only a readers perspective but also a writers consideration of Middlemarch: what has George Eliot to teach writers in 2010?

The lecture will focus on the image of the web that structures Middlemarch, shaping the relationship between the novel’s characters and their milieu, as well as the relationship between omniscient realist author and readership.

Contact details: For any enquiries email riah@swansea.ac.uk

About the Author: Professor Davies is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. She has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history. She has written on Milton and the radicals of the seventeenth century, on Donne, Henry Vaughan, Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf.

Her first novel, Boy Blue, won the Fawcett Society Book Prize for 1987. This was followed by ten further novels, of which The Web of Belonging (1997) was short-listed for the Portico and Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year. It was adapted as a television film written by Alan Plater, starring Brenda Blethyn, Kevin Whately and Anna Massie and shown on Channel 4 in 2004. Stevie also adapted it as a radio play for Radio 4. The Element of Water (2001) was long-listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes and won the Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year; Stevie adapted it as a Radio 4 Saturday Play. The next novel, Kith & Kin, was short-listed for the Orange Prize and is being adapted as a feature film by ‘The Producers’ screenwriter Sandra Goldbacher. Stevie’s new novel, Into Suez, set in the years leading up to the ‘Suez Crisis’ of 1956, was published by Parthian in 2010.

This news item has been posted by Katy Drane, Swansea University Press Office, Tel: 01792 295050 or email k.drane@swansea.ac.uk