BOOKS: PICK OF THE WEEK

"My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath," declared Catherine Earnshaw, "a source of little visible delight, but necessary."

The figure of the dark brooding stranger, smouldering with elemental passions, lies on the bedrock of Western literature - one of those emblematic figures that recurs throughout cultures and centuries - eternal and necessary. Beginning on Thursday, a series of talks on the South Bank lines up an identity parade of familiar characters to examine the history of some of the most enduring literary archetypes: Dr Faustus, Don Quixote, Don Juan (above) and Heathcliff, the Wandering Jew, Circe, and Queen Guinevere.

Don Quixote, driven mad by his passion for reading, reinvents himself as Madame Bovary, reveals Miranda France (2 Feb); while Circe, the Homeric enchantress shape-shifts into Milton's Comus, before putting in appearances in Alice in Wonderland and HG Wells' fable of the surgically mutated beast- folk, The Island of Dr Moreau, explains Marina Warner (27 Jan).

"The delight of these figures is that tingle below the diaphragm," suggests Professor Martin Swales. "We recognise them at a profound level of our psyche. This is primal stuff."

"Don Juan and Dr Faustus are both over-reachers, figures in quest of more than is usually given to know, to feel, to experience," explains Swales, who examines both characters on 23 Feb. Where once they were portrayed as sinners getting their just desserts, as society became more secularised, they achieved a different status. "Take away the idea of having offended against God's order, and they acquire ambiguity and become desperate heroes," says Swales.

The development of literary archetypes often offers an intriguing reflection of society's evolving moral attitudes - nowhere more so than in our views of adulterous royalty - as Fiona MacCarthy discovers when she goes on the trail of Queen Guinevere (18 Feb).

"Vanessa Redgrave is a very permissive girl in Lerner & Lowe's Camelot, reflecting the 1960s Kennedy era," explains MacCarthy, "while Tennyson and William Morris write tenderly about someone sinful but forgiven." Morris, the King Arthur of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, perhaps understood Guinevere better than most, through the infidelity of his wife Janey. "In a strangely parallel situation, Rossetti was in almost exactly the position of Lancelot, betraying his lord," reveals MacCarthy.

Voice Box, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (0171-960 4242) to 23 Feb. Begins Thur, 7.30pm with Michelene Wandor on The Wandering Jew, pounds 4