Two Mondays: July 10 and 17, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
Close Reading, Lecture and Discussion. This live class will be recorded and available for later viewing.
Lauded by critics and loved by readers since it hit bestseller lists, Demon Copperhead is an old yarn spun in a new country. A retelling of David Copperfield, named for Dickens’s favorite child, the flame-haired Damon, or “Demon” is a boy similarly lost and mishandled, but also a unique creation in his own right. With a rougher edge, and a snake-bite wit, he is battered in the woods of misfortune—orphaned in Appalachia, alienated by social services, failed by the foster system. In the end, it is friends, art, books, fairy grandmothers, and better luck which save him, alongside the grit and tenacity he has found in himself.
The outline follows the classic novel of development or Bildungsroman which was the darling of the Victorian reader, and perfected by Kingsolver’s inspiration, Charles Dickens; Demon Copperhead also shares with Dickens a relish for idiolect and voice, colorful minor characters, festering settings, and grubby illustrations of social ills, before it diverges into new territory and hits pay dirt. In a part of America which Dickens himself reviled and rejected in Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes, Kingsolver has rescued a narrator from backwater oblivion. Owing as much to the male friendships of Mark Twain, the twisted family trees of William Faulkner, the grotesques of Flannery O’Connor, the aesthetics and addictions of Tennessee Williams, Barbara Kingsolver channels "Coming of Age" through late twentieth century Southern Gothic.
Over the course of two meetings, we will discuss the familiar elements of the narrative, and pore over the raw invention which gives Demon Copperhead such vitality as a novel of awakening set during the American opioid crisis.
Two Mondays: July 10 and 17, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET Online
Required Book:
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (9780063251922)
Nicole Miller's prize-winning essays have appeared in Litmag, Switchgrass Review, New Letters and Arts & Letters magazines. Her fiction has been published twice in The Mays, edited by Jill Paton Walsh and Sebastian Faulks. She received an M.Phil. in Victorian Literature from Lincoln College, Oxford; a PhD in English at University College, London; and an MFA at Emerson College, Boston, where she held the Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. At The Oxford English Dictionary, she has served as a scholarly reader for British Dialects since 2002. She edited manuscripts for Harvard’s English Faculty for a decade in Cambridge, MA and at Dumbarton Oaks after moving to DC. She is former Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, UK and a current consultant in fiction and memoir at GrubStreet. She teaches nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, the contemporary American novel and creative writing at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C.
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
