HUAS94201 - Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

Course Description

Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time – an epic series of novels grouped into four “movements” – presents a panoramic social history of England during the crucial decades of the 20th century. Powell begins in the early 1920s when his central characters are schoolboys and follows their lives and careers through the maelstrom of the 2nd World War and the postwar social upheavals, leaving his reader in the 1970s. Admiring critics have compared Powell’s achievement to that of the great French social novelists Balzac and Zola, and indeed to Proust, a major influence. This two-quarter course sequence will treat the entirety of Powell’s magnum opus and situate it in its historical context.

HUAS94201