Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By John Carlos Rowe
As we anticipate the public release this year of Scot McGehee’s and David Siegel’s film, What Maisie Knew, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on 7 September 2012, I wonder once again what drives popular fascination with Henry James’s fiction in our postmodern condition? Of course, I love Henry James and have spent much of my scholarly career reading, teaching, and writing about his works.
By Jane Garnett
Matthew Arnold is probably now most recalled for one phrase, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in his poem “Dover Beach” (first published in 1867), and for having written the lectures which were published serially and then in book form (1869) as Culture and Anarchy. Both are cited more than considered, and the nature of Arnold’s cultural project is often misunderstood.
By James F. O’Brien
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed that he wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories while waiting in his medical office for the patients who never came. When this natural teller of tales decided to write a detective story, he borrowed the concept of a cerebral detective from Edgar Allan Poe, who had “invented” the detective story in 1841 when he wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue.
On the day before a yearly celebration of Scottish heritage (Tartan Day), Robert Burns brings us the first Duan (division) of his poem The Vision, an extract from Selected Poems and Songs.
Feste is a fool for the Countess Olivia and seems to have been attached to the household for some time, as a “fool that the Lady Olivia’s father took much delight in”. Feste claims that he wears “not motley” in his brain, so even though he dresses the part of the fool, he is not an idiot, and can see through the other characters.
The long-awaited third season of Game of Thrones premiers on HBO 31 March 2013 and Oxford University Press has everything you need to get ready, whether you’re looking to brush up on your dragon lore, forge your own Valyrian steel, or learn about some of the most dramatic real-life succession fights culled from our archives.
By Janet Gezari
Her death followed a debilitating illness and occurred almost exactly nine months after her marriage to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. The death certificate states its cause as “Phthisis” or acute tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Emily and Anne.
By Richard Dowden
A conversation with Chinua Achebe was a deep, slow and gracious matter. He was exceedingly courteous and always listened and reflected before answering. In his later years he talked even more slowly and softly, savouring the paradoxes of life and history. He spoke in long, clear, simple sentences which often ended in a profound and sad paradox
What can the reader expect of the Chronicles of Narnia series to reveal about Christianity? According to Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Narnia series serves as a refreshing take on what it means to experience the divine in daily life. Christianity is portrayed in a more humanizing light through C.S. Lewis’s imaginative interpretation of Christian doctrine. In the following excerpt from The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, Williams examines the portrayal of female characters in the Narnia series.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and named after his second cousin three times removed, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. He went to Princeton University, but dropped out, eventually joining the Army in 1917. In honor of the anniversary of the publication of This Side of Paradise on 26 March 1920, we dug up this excerpt from this great novel.
By Jerome Loving
Walt Whitman died 121 years ago today. The Bruce Springsteen of his age, he sang about and celebrated what he called “the Divine Average”. And it was always on equal terms, the woman the same as the man, as he suggests in “America”.
By David Leopold
William Morris (1834-1896) is widely recognized as the greatest ever English designer, a poet ranked by contemporaries alongside Tennyson and Browning, and an internationally renowned figure in the history of socialism. However, since the year 2013 offers no ‘big’ anniversary as a pretext to survey these various major achievements, I will instead use 24 March (his birthday) as an excuse to look at how Morris actually spent some of his own birthdays.
Oxford University Press is sad to hear of the passing of Chinua Achebe. The following is an excerpt from The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by John Gross.
By Robert Morrison
According to Gerard Manley Hopkins, when Thomas De Quincey was living in Glasgow in the mid-1840s he “would wake blue and trembling in the morning and languidly ask the servant ‘Would you pour out some of that black mixture from the bottle there.’ The servant would give it him, generally not knowing what it was. After this he would revive.” What “it” was, of course, was opium, the drug that De Quincey became addicted to in 1813 — two hundred years ago this year.
By Ian Donaldson
Some years ago, while I was working in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, I was about to give a lecture on Ben Jonson when the telephone rang. It was the Canadian High Commission on the phone. A small delegation (I was told) was just setting out to hear the lecture, and wanted more precise directions to the place where I’d be speaking.
The 18th century novelist Laurence Sterne died on March 18 1768. During a recent trip to OUP’s out of print library in Oxford, we came across the 1928 Oxford World’s Classics edition of his novel A Sentimental Journey, which included an introduction by none other than Virginia Woolf.