Episodes

It's one of the great mysteries in American history. The "lost colony" of Roanoke Island, where 120 or so men, women, and children living in the first permanent English settlement in North America simply disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a mysterious word carved into a tree trunk. While historians remain baffled, speculation has run rampant, with everything from massacre to relocation to space alien abduction taking their turns as potential theories. What happened to those people? And is t...

In his lifetime, the Romantic poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) was barely known and frequently misunderstood. Today, his genius is widely celebrated and his poems are some of the most famous in the English language - and yet we still struggle to comprehend his unique way of seeing the world. In this episode, Blakean biographer John Higgs, author of the new book William Blake vs. the World, joins Jacke to discuss Blake's life, art, and visions. Additional listening suggestions: ...

As a devout and passionate religious observer, Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) lived a life that might seem, at first glance, as proper and tame. Even some of her greatest works, devotional poems and verses for children, strike us as just the kind of art a fine upstanding moralist might generate. But there was more to Christina Rossetti than that - and in fact, she produced some of the most passionate and idiosyncratic poems of her era. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at her lo...

Money. Sex. Power. Family. Those are the conceits at the heart of Henry James's late-period masterpiece, The Golden Bowl. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Dinitia Smith, whose new novel The Prince reinvigorates this classic story of a wealthy American widower, his doting daughter, her charismatic foreign husband, and the childhood friend whose secret love affairs threaten to jeopardize multiple marriages. Additional listening suggestions: 340 Forgotten Women of Literature 5 - Consta...

In this episode, we resume our look at Walt Whitman's life and body of work, focusing in particular on the years 1840-1855. Did Whitman's teaching career end with him being tarred and feathered by an angry mob, as has long been rumored? What happened during his three months in New Orleans? And how did this printer and hack writer wind up writing the twelve poems in Leaves of Grass (1855), thereby becoming the "true poet" that Ralph Waldo Emerson had been searching for? Additional listening id...

In this best-of History of Literature episode, Jacke revisits the topic of war and literature with three guests: Professor Elizabeth Samet (Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point), who teaches literature to military officers in training; Matt Gallagher (Empire City and Youngblood), a veteran who served in Iraq; and Tom Roston (The Writer's Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five), who places Kurt Vonnegut's writing in the context of his P...

In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a new poet who would reflect the spirit and potential of America. In 1855, a then-unknown poet named Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his attempt to fulfill Emerson's wish. In this episode, Jacke looks at Whitman's early life and career, contrasting Leaves of Grass with the works of a pair of poets that Emerson may have had in mind when he railed against "men of poetical talents...of industry and skill in meter" who nevertheless failed to be what Em...

America, America, America... a continent, a nation, a people, and a whole lotta books. But how does America define itself? Who defines it? Where did the idea of American exceptionalism come from? And how does literature fit into any of this? In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Ilan Stavans about his new book, What Is American Literature? ILAN STAVANS is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and th...

In our last look at Søren Kierkegaard, we left our hero after he had just left the love of his life, Regine Olsen, in favor of a life devoted to God and philosophy. In this episode, Jacke looks at one of the great products of that seismic schism: Fear and Trembling, or Kierkegaard's analysis of God's command that Abraham should sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. How does Abraham's decision fit into moral and ethical principles? And if it doesn't fit, what does that mean for our society - or for Ch...

Do not go gentle into this good episode! Rage, rage against the dying of the... well, things fall apart there, don't they? (Because we're not gifted poets like Dylan Thomas!) In this episode, Jacke talks to producer, playwright, and performer Scott Carter about his lifelong passion for the Welsh bard who took the U.K. by storm in the mid-twentieth-century and America by even stormier storm soon thereafter. Which poems are best? What's good about them? How did they feed into the mythic reputation...

Elizabeth Gaskell had only written one novel when Charles Dickens started publishing her work in his journal Household Words. But soon she would become famous as the author of Cranford and North and South, two of the best novels of the Victorian era. Dickens proved to be a generous and artist-friendly editor, offering suggestions but allowing Gaskell to have the final say over her work (with one exception). In this episode, Jacke looks at the ghost story that Dickens asked Gaskell to write, alon...

Novelist Beverly Gologorsky joins Jacke for a discussion of the tumultuous years from 1967 to 1971, which provides the background for her new novel. In Can You See the Wind?, a working-class family in the Bronx struggles to make a better world, even as the world spins into chaos. Columbia professor (and friend of the podcast) Farah Jasmine Griffin says "Beverly Gologorsky brings a clarity of vision and purpose to this extraordinary novel—a story about the complexities and love that both bring...

The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is well known as the father of existentialism and one of the great Christian thinkers of all time. But it is in his relationship with Regine Olsen - his love for her, their brief engagement, and the horrible breakup, in which he left her for a life devoted to the pursuit of knowledge - where we see his true literary gifts. In this episode, Jacke looks at Kierkegaard's life and writing, with a special focus on the agonizing r...

Author Robin Hemley joins Jacke for a discussion of Kafka, writerly ambition, and his new novel Oblivion: An After Autobiography, which tells the story of a midlist author who finds himself in the posthumous world where authors fade from obscurity into the world of Oblivion...unless they can manage to write their way out. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 349 - Kafka's Metamorphosis (with Blume) Episode 139 - A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka Episode 134 - The Greatest Night of Franz...

Mysteries! In this best-of episode, Jacke revisits conversations with three guests for three different angles on this popular and enduring literary genre. First, Jonah Lehrer (Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution) discusses what exactly makes mysteries so compelling. Then, novelist Christina Kovac, author of the mystery The Cutaway, joins Jacke for a discussion of setting a mystery in the world of television news. Gillian Gill, author of Agatha Christie: The Women and Her Mysteries, stop...

Introducing "The History of Literature"

After being given $700 in Spanish gold by some newspapers, a 25-year-old Stephen Crane set out for Florida, where he planned to travel by boat to Cuba and cover the impending Spanish-American War as a war correspondent. But the steamship he boarded capsized after hitting some sandbars, forcing Crane and 28 shipmates - most of them arms runners friendly to the Cuban insurrectionists - into lifeboats and head into the open sea. Crane was one of the last to leave, and he wound up sharing a dinghy w...

Jacke takes a look at the first work of literature by an African American author, courtesy of Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts by Uli Baer and Smaran Dayal. Then he turns things over to Storybound, a Podglomerate podcast, for a conversation with author Melissa Chadburn and excerpts from her essay "The Throwaways." Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYRB, Longreads, Paris Review online, and dozens other places. Her essay on food insecurity was publ...

Celebrating 400 episodes of The History of Literature, Jacke and Mike respond to a listener poll and choose the Top 10 Episodes We Must Do in the Future. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 83 - Overrated! Top 10 Books You Don't Need to Read Episode 149 - Raising Readers (aka the Power of Literature in an Imperfect World) Episode 92 - The Books of Our Lives Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a memb...

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) lived fast, died young, and impressed everyone with his prose style and insight into the human condition. While he's best known today for his novels The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (along with some classic short stories like "The Open Boat," "the Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"), his literary fame during his life was supplemented by his notorious exploits. Shipwrecks, romance, scandal, and high-profile court cases - and he som...

Questioning the nature of the self is a standard trope in literature and one of the hallmarks of the Modernist movement. But no one pushed this to the extreme like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). While the use of a pseudonym or two is common enough, Pessoa wrote poems as more than a hundred "heteronyms" (as he called them), giving many of them their own richly developed biographies, writing styles, and distinct subject matter. The wild cast of characters, who sometimes argued with o...

In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat to a Canadian poet and his wife, the beautiful, accomplished, and slightly mysterious Assia Wevill. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began having an affair. Within a year, Assia was pregnant with Ted's child and Sylvia, after years of suffering from depression, had committed suicide. Six years later, Assia would do the same. It's a horribly tragic tale, like something out of Shakespeare, with genius and artistic ambition and love and s...

Ultimately, the marital relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was filled with pain and ended in tragedy. At the outset, however, things were very different. Within months of their first meeting at Cambridge, they had fallen in love, gotten married, and started having children - all while writing poetry and supporting one another's art. What did they see in each other as people and as poets? How did they inspire and encourage one another? In this episode, Jacke talks to Plath's biographer H...

Jacke plays a clip from Nabokov discussing his famous novel Lolita, in which the frantic narrator Humbert Humbert recounts his passionate (and illegal, immoral, and illicit) love for a young girl. After hearing from the author, Jacke plays clips from three History of Literature Podcast interviews: Jenny Minton Quigley, Jim Shepard,, and Joshua Ferris. Additional listening: Episode 318 - Lolita (with Jenny Minton Quigley) Episode 96 - Dracula, Lolita, and the Power of Volcanoes (with Jim S...