Pride or Prejudice: How we Read Now

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Pride or Prejudice: How we Read Now: Teaching Novels

Teaching Novels

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Professor Abigail Williams asks how today's English students are reading the novel.

Professor Abigail Williams asks how today's students read the novel in an era of content warnings, cancel culture and calls to decolonise the curriculum.

Novels have always sparked controversy. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and American Psycho were all subject to fierce attacks.

But something is happening now that feels different - a rolling boil of social media outrage and news stories that are not about one novel but about the very nature of reading, studying and writing fiction.

In an era of content warnings, cancel culture and calls to decolonise the curriculum, Abigail Williams, Professor of English at the University of Oxford,  asks how today's students are reading the novel. 

From Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 by the way of the television campus comedy The Chair, Abigail finds a path through outrage and offence as she explores new approaches to teaching and studying the novel. 

Producer: Julia Johnson 
Series Producer: Julia Johnson
Executive Producer: Steven Rajam

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Professor Abigail Williams explores changing views of the novel.

Professor Abigail Williams asks how we read now, as offence, outrage and the prejudices of authors past and present dominate the literary landscape.

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