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The Art of Intimacy

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Our age is confused about sexual consent - what should it look, sound and feel like?

Our age is confused about sexual consent. Novelist Eimear McBride asks how writers, artists and performers have depicted these intimate conversations.

The Art of Intimacy: Part 1

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Part 1 BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Intimacy, Part 1

Novelist Eimear McBride looks at the way writers have depicted sexual consent.

Our age is confused about sexual consent - what should it look, sound and feel like? Novelist Eimear McBride asks out how writers have depicted these intimate conversations.

What should good ‘sexual consent’ look, sound and feel like? 

Eimear McBride broke new ground with her writing about sex in the novels ‘A Girl is a Half-formed Thing’ and ‘The Lesser Bohemians’. She was praised for her ‘truth-spilling, uncompromising’ ability to take us right inside the experience of sex. Now Eimear wants to explore the moments just before sex – when consent is still molten and evolving. So where in our literature can we find good examples of this kind of intimacy? 

Eimear looks back to Samuel Richardson’s 17th century novel ‘Pamela’ ( one of the most influential writers on later courtship narratives, including the work of Jane Austen), to D.H.Lawrence’s depiction of  consent and rejection, to Shakespeare’s comedy cross-dressers, to W.H. Auden and to contemporary writers such as Sarah Hall, Sarah Waters, and the US Romance writer Nora Roberts. She also meets Dr Fern Riddell to explore the possibilities of non-verbal consent (the language of hats and fans), as practised by the Victorians.

Music: composed by 'Scanner'
Producer: Faith Lawrence



Interviewed in this programme:
Sarah Hall, novelist and short story writer - author of ‘The Wolf Border’; editor ( along with Peter Hobbs) of the anthology ‘Sex and Death: Stories’
Professor Judith Hawley (interviewed at the British Library with a first edition of Samuel Richardson’s ‘Pamela’), Royal Holloway, University of London.
Dr Jarlath Killeen, Trinity College, Dublin
Dr Fern Riddell, author of ‘The Victorian Guide to Sex’ and the forthcoming ‘Death in Ten Minutes:The Forgotten life of radical suffragette Kitty Marion’
Dr Catherine Brown, New College of the Humanities
Andrew McMillan, poet and senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University
Professor Emma Smith, Hertford College, The University of Oxford, author of ‘This is Shakespeare’ (May 2019)
Professor Jacqueline Rose, Birkbeck College, University of London

In part two, Eimear explores ‘consent’ in the performing and visual arts.

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