Many of the podcasts in the Great Writers Inspire project seek to indicate ways in which readers can engage critically with texts,
themes and authors in order to find great writing inspiring.
Just as those who read literature find writers and their works fascinating, so writers in their turn, find other writing fascinating.
Writers generally are prolific readers for it is in the pages of other books that many authors learn to glory in the new type of literary writing,
just as they hope their own readers will do so,
revealing to scholars or authors reading habits that many authors bequeath not only their letters,
manuscripts and diaries to university libraries, but often their whole personal library.
The Irish modernist James Joyce is one such example.
And Michael Gillespie's catalogue of James Joyce's Tree Library from 1986 gives an insight into the reading habits of the biblical flick author,
who collected six hundred and twenty three volumes over twenty years in Trace.
Virginia Woolf's personal library is also interesting because it includes four volumes that she resigned herself to volumes of Jack Emil Blanches,
Cahiers du artist Autoline Morales, a farewell message and Alfred's weakness.
Didn't put the time and effort Wolf would have taken to recover.
These books indicates that they may have been well loved and well used.
Many of the other podcasts in this series situate writers on their works within political and social contexts
or relate to the author's own life experiences may have impacted on their writing and how it was received.
These aspects are undoubtedly important, but it is also worth considering how certain texts respond not just social,
personal and political contexts, but also to literary contexts.
How the literary texts respond to other literary texts.
Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, could be an interesting starting point on our journey.
This well-known novel charts the life of the title heroine,
first revealing her childhood with abusive aunts and cousins and later up the oppressive Lowood school.
She then becomes a governess up filled hall where she falls in love with her employer, Edward Rochester.
He proposes marriage, but when it is revealed he is already married to Bertha,
who is not incarcerated as a married woman in the attic tea and leaves Anfield and is taken in by some relations, the religious rivers family.
The man of that house, also proposes marriage, which would make Jane and missionaries wife.
But she can't accept this offer and returns to a chain store and filled.
Rochester's first wife has set the house on fire and killed herself.
And so Jane accepts a proposal of marriage from the injured Rochester.
The final chapter opens reader. I married him on that.
As far as the romance narrative goes, should be that.
Except it isn't the end of the novels until the story of Jane Eyre was so poignant that it influenced the creation of other works.
Daphne Demaryius 1938 novel Rebecca is one example of a tale heavily inspired by Bronte's novel The Second Wife of Mr. de Winter.
The new Mrs. Winter finds she can't live up to her predecessor,
undermined by a villainous housekeeper called Mrs. Danvers until the knotty and disturbing truth of the matter ice.
In 1966, Jean Reese also published a novel inspired by the events of Jane Eyre,
Wide Sargasso Sea is a postcolonial prequel which takes the tale of the Imade first wife,
Antoinette, who would become known as Bertha as its sympathetic protagonist, covering her early life in Jamaica.
The early years of her marriage to Edward Rochester in Dominica and her time in the attic of Thorne Field Hall.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a very different novel to Jane Eyre, reflecting the growing concern with feminism and post-colonial AP in novels.
But the tale couldn't exist, at the very least wouldn't have the same meaning without that first text as its source of inspiration.
There are many, many other novels which have been influenced or inspired by Jane Eyre.
And one of the reasons to read great writing is to recognise its influence when it appears
the owner has moved with the times and has even been retooled in the horror mash up genre,
which is popular today with the heroine recast as a vampire slayer in the 2010 novel Gene Flare.
Yet the tale of the literary afterlife of Bronte, this novel is but one facet of the tale.
Bronte herself was influenced by romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron,
and she and her sisters read novels from their father's library, including the works of Sir Walter Scott, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
The family also subscribed to Blackwood's Magazine, and they shared their own work amongst themselves to proofread or offer advice.
Inspiration is described in dictionaries such as the Oxford English as a kind of prompting awakening or even on absorption or inhalation.
For writers, however, the kind of inspiration which comes from great writers can be seen to be more antagonistic.
The presence of great writing is problematic for an aspiring creator because if greatness already exists,
the challenge in creating more is increased since it will be judged by a gold standard.
The reading which writers do is a dangerous endeavour because they run the risk of
being influenced too much and being accused thereby of imitation or derivation,
rather than the much grander state of literary originality and innovation.
Yet, by studying a work in close detail, writers can hope not merely to imitate it,
but to inhabit the greatness which created it, and in doing so, attempt to do the achievement of the first work.
Wilfred Owen, one of the great poets of the First World War,
spent much of his youth imitating the poetry of the romantic John Keats in a manner akin to hero worship.
His early poems, such as on seeing a lot of cases hair, are clearly derivative of Keats, his own poetry.
In this case, the old lines on seeing a lot of Milton's hair.
In 1915, the year he enlisted, Owen wrote that the only thing that would hold him together would be the sense
that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats on the rest of them wrote.
Yet it was the influence of the Great War on the slightly older poet Siegfried Sassoon,
which brought Odin's walk away from this imitative mood and into the much stronger and individual voice of his later war poetry.
The critic, Harold Bloom, wrote in 1973 about the anxiety of influence.
He claimed that poets are essentially hindered in writing by the presence of precursor poets.
The poet in a poet is inspired to write by reading other poets,
and that work will be weak and anxiety ridden until the younger writer can forge an original vision by wrestling with their influences.
This process, Blum contends, is what separates the minority of strong or great writers from the rest of the literary field.
It is inspiration and influence until writers address them.
That effectively creates great writers and the literary tradition. T.S. Eliot, the poet, editor and critic,
inspiration and influence are not necessarily a damaging force in his 1919 essay Tradition on the Individual Talent.
Elliott claims that a poet must embody the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, as well as responding to the contemporary context.
In this theory, poets don't have to be original because of their difference from other writers, but rather in truly great poetry.
All the writers of history lived through the new writing, asserting their immortality most vigorously.
Whether or not you feel that inspiration and influence is a haunting or a battle to overcome,
what seems clear is that while influence and inspiration can be a troubling and antagonistic relationship for great writers as readers,
so tuning works within the context of other related works can be stimulating 18 races wide
Sargasso Sea without Charlotte Bronte and there would be a lesser text and at the same time,
for modern readers, sea and air is a lesser text with 18 races back story.
Great writers inspire great writing. Which means perhaps future generations have much to look forward to.
Thank you for listening.