Oxbridge Literature
The St Petersburg University Representative Office in Barcelona will host a lecture on the literary works of Oxbridge and their authors. The lecture will be delivered by Nina Shcherbak, PhD in Philology.
The term Oxbridge owes its origin to two of the oldest universities in the United Kingdom, Oxford and Cambridge, whose high reputation is confirmed by centuries of tradition and the worldwide fame of their talented graduates. The word Oxbridge first appeared in 1849 in the novel Pendennis by the English satirist William Thackeray and has since become widely used.
Lord Byron and Vladimir Nabokov are desperate Oxbridge wordsmiths and snobs, occupying a place of honour in the long list of names of famous graduates of the University of Cambridge. It is important to add to that list the names of such popular English writers as: Terry Eagleton; William Golding; Graham Greene; Iris Murdoch; Kingsley Amis, who dedicated his novel to a Russian girl; Julian Barnes, the author of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters; and Jeanette Winterson, who persistently enforced platonic, radically feminist myths about female sexuality through her own experience and difficult fate.
Cambridge was the home of not only one of England’s most famous poets, the archetype of the Romantic artist, Lord Byron, but also William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, some of the most prominent representatives of the Lakes School. Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Oxford’s Thomas de Quincey, the author of the scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford ─ from a historical and literary point of view, they all worked in the same field of English Romanticism.
Speaker
Nina Shcherbak, Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.
The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia. The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.