Language & Literature
Simon Winder
100 Best Novels in English: The Penguin English Library
3:00pm | Friday 14 September 2012Tickets: | Duration: | Venue: |
£N/A | 1 Hour | Blenheim Palace: The Marlborough Room |
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This was an Oxford Literary Festival 2012 Event.
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How do you pick the best 100 novels in the English language? What is it that makes them so great, and why are so many people inspired by them years, sometimes centuries after they were written? Simon Winder, publishing director of Penguin, explains what went into the choice of the 100 best novels in the English language for the new Penguin English Library. Penguin published 20 classic titles in the new series in April and is publishing a further 10 a month until the end of the year.
The series starts with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the very first novel in English, and spans two centuries up to Joyce’s Dubliners, published just before the First World War. It encompasses Austen, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontës, Hardy, Wilde, Conrad and Lawrence to name but a few.
Winder will explore what makes some novels survive well beyond their lifetime while others are quickly forgotten. What do they tell us about the human condition? And why do we keep going back to some works to replay them? For example, between 1900 and 1975, there were more than 60 radio, television and stage productions of Jane Austen’s novels.