“Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Circus parties, parties where you have to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in swimming baths and windmills. Dances in London so dull. Comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in the suburbs. All that succession and repetition of massed humanity. All those vile bodies.”
– Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

This reading group explores the theme of “Festivity” in literature. Parties are at the center of these classic and contemporary novels, though often with mixed results—parties can be occasions for celebration, but also filled with surprises, suspense, and even death. How are parties represented in fiction? What is their function? Are representations of parties ever as enjoyable as the real thing?

The Festivity reading group meets on the first Tuesday of each month, October through May, 5-7 p.m. in the Athenæum’s Bound.

Tues, October 4
Happy Hour, by Marlowe Granados
“On Classic Party Fiction”, Elisa Gabbert, The Paris Review

Tues, November 1
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

Tues, December 6
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Metropolitan (1990), dir. Whit Stillman

Tues, January 3
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Tues, February 7
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Just a Little One”, Dorothy Parker, The New Yorker

Tues, March 7
Rebecca, Daphne du Maurer

Tues, April 4
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Passing, Nella Larsen

Tues, May 2
Our Country Friends, Gary Shteyngart
“The Garden Party,” Katherine Mansfield

The Festivity Discussion Group is led by Thomas J. Sojka, a PhD Candidate in History at Boston University. His dissertation explores the Bright Young People, elite sociability, and gossip in 1920s and 1930s Britain. His writing has appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Twentieth Century British History, the Journal of British Studies, and the European Review of History.