Little Red-Cap

About the lecture

In this module, we introduce the collection as a whole before looking in detail at its first poem, ‘Little Red-Cap’. In particular, we focus on: (i) the key preoccupations of The World’s Wife, especially its interest in giving a voice to the wives and mothers of famous men; (ii) the extent to which ‘Little Red-Cap’ should be read as an autobiographical poem; (iii) the different kinds of masculinity represented by the wolf; (iv) the literary heritage of the ‘deep, dark woods’, which can be a place of danger or a place of liberation; (v) Duffy’s combination of high poetry (“Lesson one that night … was the love poem”) with the mundane (“How nice, breakfast in bed, he said”); (vi) the triumph of the female over the female; and (vii) the ending of the poem.

About the lecturer

John McRae is Special Professor of Language in Literature Studies and Teaching Associate in the School of English at Nottingham University, and holds Visiting Professorships in China, Malaysia, Spain and the USA. He is co-author of The Routledge History of Literature in English with Ron Carter, and also wrote The Language of Poetry, Literature with a Small 'l' and the first critical edition of Teleny by Oscar Wilde and others.