Part of the Arts & Humanities Festival 2012: Metamorphoses: Transformations and Conversions

Presented by the English Department

We’ve heard a lot about the “Big Society” in recent years. Yet for centuries some of England’s most ardent defenders have been following the example of Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, who famously praised England as a “little world” threatened by change and, perhaps, dissolution too.

What are we to make of this tendency towards miniaturisation? This lecture will find its earlier examples in the defence of rural England mounted by William Cobbett in the 1820s, in the deindustrialized English utopia imagined by William Morris at the end of the same century, and in the defiantly parochial arguments of G.K. Chesterton, who was among the “Little Englanders” who opposed the Boer War at the beginning of the twentieth century. It will pursue its investigation through the paintings of Stanley Spencer, who found the universe in the small Berkshire village of Cookham, and through the fictional worlds of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and Tolkien’s “the Shire”.

It will consider the work of various writers who have engaged the theme more recently, including J.G.Ballard, Nicola Barker and Will Self, and also the bucolic rural scene that opened Danny Boyle’s “Isles of Wonder” at the London Olympics this summer. In some versions, this impulse is evasive , regressive and exclusive. But there is much more to be said about it than that – especially in a present defined by greatly increased mobility and mixture of populations, by devolutionary pressure within the British state, and by global economic and technological trends that appear to be making “little worlds” of all localised cultures.

For more information please visit the King’s College London website.