Ripe for Dictatorship: Fearing the worst in American fiction and film of the 1930s Professor Kasia Boddy, University of Cambridge
Event details
The Annual Berthoud Lecture
During the 1930s, Americans began to imagine what a homegrown fascism might look like. Drawing widely on the fiction and film of the period, this lecture will concentrate on Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a mild-mannered journalist comes to realise that there has never been ‘a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours’. Little read for many years, Lewis’s novel has recently come to seem relevant again, as the book that predicted Trump.
This public lecture will be preceded by a mini-symposium in honour of Professor Kasia Boddy and the varied themes of her major works, including Blooming Flowers: A Seasonal History of Plants and People (Yale University Press, 2020); Geranium (Reaktion Books, 2013); The American Short Story Since 1950 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Boxing: A Cultural History (Reaktion Books, 2008).
Plants, Poetry, and Punchy Prose: A mini-symposium in honour of Kasia Boddy
Wednesday 8 May, 4.15pm-6.15pm, Bowland Auditorium
Poetry, papers, and more from Bryony Aitchison, Janine Bradbury, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Becca Drake, Lucy Foster, Tom Houlton, and Sam Reese.
Contacts: natasha.tanna