Foreign Literatures Departmental Seminar
Nearly one-hundred years after the publication of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman (1929), Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience (2023) returns to the theme of obedience as a method to consider a woman’s circumscribed life. Townsend Warner imagines a liberating obedience, Bernstein, a menacing obedience. Both foreground their protagonists’ independence and liberation in rather than outside its parameters. Such a conceptual reshuffling contributes to an undoing of the overdetermined discourse we use to address women’s action, independence, individuality and identity and offers a new way of testing the ideologically and morally divisive concepts of agency, care and individuality. This paper traces the history of the term, its relation to female identity and its meaningful articulations in the two novels to tease out the freedoms imagined within the experience of subjection.
Yael Levin is associate professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and research fellow at the Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study in London. She is author of Joseph Conrad: Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2020), and is editor of the special issue of Poetics Today on literary attention (volume 47, 2026). Her articles on modernism, the subject and disability have appeared in journals of modernism and the history of ideas including Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Beckett Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Partial Answers, The Conradian and Conradiana.
