Episodes

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and where did he innovate? In this episode, Jacke talks to Shakespeare scholar Rhodri Lewis about his new book Shakespeare's Tragic Art , a new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world. PLUS Joel Warner ( The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Not...

Inspired by an email (from a listener?) with mysterious origins, Jacke takes a look at the brief narrative form the parable. How did parables get their name? What are their key features? Why did Jesus rely on them so heavily to communicate to his listeners? And what meaning does "A Parable" have for us today? Additional listening: 634 The Bible: A Global History (with Bruce Gordon) 368 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) 41 The New Testament (with Professor Kyle Keefer) The music i...

What happens when a woman becomes obsessed with Herman Melville during the pandemic? What if the process of sorting fact from fiction in Melville's work inspires a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition? And what if she (a poet) and her husband (a novelist, by the way) write a book about all of it? Well, the result would be something like Dayswork: A Novel , which has been called "a supremely literate achievement that wears its erudition lightly." In this episode, Jacke talks to th...

When the U.S. joined the war in the 1940s, it had a problem: its military had virtually no intelligence service. Enter the librarians! In this episode, Jacke talks to Elyse Graham about her work Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II , which tells the story of the efforts to recruit academics and train them for espionage. PLUS a look at some of the upcoming festivities being planned for Jane Austen's 250th birthday. Additional listening: 444 Thrill...

Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) grew up in unusual circumstances: her father was an English merchant who traveled to China on business, and her mother was a formerly enslaved tightrope walker and human knife-throwing target who traveled all over the world with an acrobatic troupe. The eldest daughter among fourteen children, Eaton mostly grew up in Montreal, then relocated to America, where she became famous under the pen name Sui Sin Far. Today, her journalism and fiction, mostly chronicling the ...

First published in December of 1922, "Winter Dreams" was one of the short stories known as the "Gatsby cluster," as F. Scott Fitzgerald worked out the characters, themes, and prose style that would later make his famous novel The Great Gatsby (1925) an American classic. Telling the story of Dexter Green, a Midwestern golf caddy who becomes a wealthy - but not wealthy enough - suitor to a rich young heiress Judy Jones, "Winter Dreams" works out some of Fitzgerald's own nostalgia and regret for hi...

In 1819, John Keats quit his job as an assistant surgeon, abandoned an epic poem he was writing, and focused his poetic energies on shorter works. What followed was one of the most fertile periods in the history of poetry, as in a few months' time Keats completed six masterpieces, including such celebrated classics as "To Autumn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Now, two hundred years later, an American scholar has written an exciting new book called Keats's Odes: A Lover's D...

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the second half of the classic James Joyce short story "The Dead." [ This episode was originally released on December 22, 2017 .] Additional listening: 368 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) 172 Holiday Movies (with Brian Price) 407 "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate . The History of Literature Podcas...

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the first part of the the classic James Joyce holiday story, "The Dead." [ The full version of this episode was originally released on December 19, 2017 .] Additional listening: 123 James Joyce's The Dead (Part 1) [Full Version] 72 The Best Christmas Stories in Literature 577 'Twas the Night Before Controversy - The Raging Dispute Over a Classic Christmas Poem 470 Two Christmas Days - A Holiday Story by Id...

Generally speaking, a common conception of U.S. race relations in the mid-twentieth century runs like this: segregation was racist and bad, the doctrine of "separate but equal" masked genuine inequality, and the racial integration brought about by the famous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a long-awaited triumph. But is the story as neat as that? What did writers - and in particular Black women writers - think about segregation in the 1930s-1950s? Did they view racial i...

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. Inspired by the illumination and insight in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain , Tóibín would soon become a lifelong fan. In this episode, Tóibín tells Jacke about that original encounter, the qualities he most admires in Baldwin's work, Baldwin's spiritual relationship to the works of Henry James, and more. He also tells Jacke about his new book On James Baldwin , which the Sunday Independent calls "luc...

Before his marriage, before meeting Herman Melville, and before the publication of The Scarlet Letter , Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in near seclusion, writing the stories that formed his first collection Twice-Told Tales . Edgar Allan Poe was impressed: "His tone is singularly effective," he wrote, "wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes...We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth." In this episode, Ja...

A legendary king, knights of the round table, magic and myths and valiant quests - the stories of King Arthur (also known as the "Matter of Britain") have captivated readers since the Middle Ages. It's potentially rich material for a contemporary novelist, but as Lev Grossman found, some of the Arthurian world's lesser-known characters can be just as compelling. In this episode, the bestselling author of the Magicians Trilogy tells Jacke about his new take on an old legend in his novel The Brigh...

After taking a look at a wintry poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay, Jacke talks to editor John McMurtrie about his new book Literary Journeys Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature , which celebrates passages of literature that have sent readers to the ends of the earth from Ancient Greece to today. Additional listening: 157 Travel Books (with Mike Palindrome) 579 New Year New You! Conversations with Bethanne Patrick and Aislyn Greene 95 Runaway Poets: The Triumphant ...

From the beginning of his career as a poet, W.H. Auden wrestled with the meaning of Englishness. He came out with a collection of poems entitled On This Island , but what exactly was this island? A world in ruins? A beautiful (if morally compromised) haven? In this episode, Jacke talks to Nicholas Jenkins ( The Island: War and Belonging in Auden's England ) about Auden's relationship with the land of his birth, including his preoccupations with the vicissitudes of war, the trials of love, and th...

By listener request, Jacke presents a conversation with Nigerian-born novelist Chigozie Obioma ( The Road to the Country , The Fishermen , An Orchestra of Minorities ). Obioma, hailed by the New York Times as "the heir to Chinua Achebe," tells Jacke about his childhood in Nigeria, the moment he knew he wanted to be a storyteller, what he values in literature, and more. Special attention is paid to one of Obioma's favorite books, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. [This is an HOL Encore pe...

Guilty pleasures! We use the phrase all the time, but what does it really mean? Can reading a book ever be a guilty pleasure? A listener suggests that it can - and Jacke invites two frequent History of Literature guests to test the theory. For this day-before-Thanksgiving special treat, Laurie Frankel ( This Is How It Always Is , Family Family ) and Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, help Jacke find some guilty pleasures, in literature and life. PLUS Jacke gives hi...

Troubled patron saint of confessional poetry? Quintessential literary sad girl? Genius poet rightfully viewed as the heir to Emily Dickinson? In her tragically brief life, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) somehow managed to inspire all of these images and more. In this episode, Jacke talks to Emily Van Duyne about her book Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation , which delivers a nuanced, passionate exploration of the life and work of one of the most misunderstood writers of the twentieth century. Additiona...

He's best known as the author of The Catcher in the Rye , one of the great publishing and cultural successes of the twentieth century. But there was more to the Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) story than a single book. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Salinger's childhood and education, his youthful romance thwarted by an unlikely turn of events, his war and postwar experiences as a soldier and special intelligence investigator, his flurry of almost unbelievable success as a writer, and ...

Jacke talks to award-winning novelist and short story writer Charles Baxter about his new book, Blood Test: A Comedy , which the New York Times says "provides a snapshot of a troubled America, disguised as a speculative comedy...a quiet masterpiece." PLUS Bill Eville ( Washed Ashore: Family, Fatherhood, and Finding Home on Martha's Vineyard ) stops by to discuss his choice for the last book he will ever read. Additional listening: 63 Chekhov, Bellow, Wright, and Fox (with Charles Baxter) 612 Fam...

In 1949, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces posited the existence of a "monomyth," a universal pattern that formed the basis of heroic tales in every culture. But although he maintained that more often than not the young heroes followed an archetypal journey--which in addition to ancient myths can be seen in everything from Star Wars to Harry Potter--Campbell acknowledged that heroines seemed to have a different story arc, but not one that he had taxonomies. In other words, female hero...

Written in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy has been an essential component of Western literature for more than 700 years. In this episode, Jacke talks to Joseph Luzzi about his book, Dante's Divine Comedy: A Biography , which gives an intimate portrait of the work that has challenged and inspired generations of readers. Additional listening: 131 Dante in Love (with Professor Ellen Nerenberg and Anthony Valerie) 589 Dante and Friendship (with Elizabeth Coggeshall) 327 Natalia Gin...

It's a Literary Feast Day at the History of Literature Podcast! First, Jacke talks to old friend Mike Palindrome about his love for A Moveable Feast , Hemingway's late-in-life recollection of his salad days (Pernod days?) in Paris. Then Collin Jennings ( Enlightenment Links: Theories of Mind and Media in Eighteenth-Century Britain ) explains how his application of computational methods to eighteenth-century fiction, history, and poetry shed new light on the Enlightenment - and what it means for ...

Throughout the 1930s, Ernest Hemingway was in the public eye as a journalist, short story writer, activist, and one of the most famous writers on the planet. But his 1937 novel To Have and Have Not fell flat, and critics wondered if the Hemingway who could write a novel on the level of The Sun Also Rises (1926) or A Farewell to Arms (1929) still existed. All that changed with the publication in 1940 of For Whom the Bell Tolls . Widely read and widely acclaimed, the story of the idealist Robert J...