On March 12th Professor Mary Bryden (Modern Languages and European Studies) gave a talk for the Archives and Texts seminar series entitled ‘Public Reviews and Private Responses: Herbert Read and T E Lawrence’. Her paper looked at Herbert Read’s deeply critical review of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and traced its impact on Lawrence through his private correspondence. It set out some of her recent research findings, following her one-year AHRC Fellowship to conduct research on T E Lawrence. Professor Bryden is currently completing a monograph on him, entitled The Transnational T E Lawrence.
The seminar was well attended by colleagues from Modern Languages and English Literature, including postgraduate and undergraduate students. The subsequent discussion was lively, and developed many of the themes in Professor Bryden’s talk, including the public persona of T E Lawrence, his obsessive fascination for typography and book design, his ideas on war literature, and Herbert Read’s analysis of the hero and the epic in Lawrence’s book.
This was the final paper in the Archives and Texts seminar series for the spring term. In the summer term, on April 23rd, Dr Mark Nixon will be giving a talk entitled ‘Scholarly Editing in the Digital Age’. All are welcome to attend, and wine and refreshments are provided. For more details contact the seminar convenors, Dr Nicola Wilson n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk and Dr Sophie Heywood s.l.heywood@reading.ac.uk.
