Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
By Patricia Fara
The world, wrote Darwin, resembles ‘one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’ Unexpectedly, that fine image of competitive natural selection was created not by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), but by his grandfather Erasmus (1731-1802)
By Greg Woolf
Romans measured time in months but not in weeks. The Ides simply meant the middle day of a month and it functioned simply as a temporal navigation aid — one that looks clumsy to us. So one might make an appointment for two days before the Ides or for three days after the Kalends (the first day of the month) and so on.
By Simon Macdonald
During the French Revolution many of the losers in the process of regime change found their property, including their private papers, snapped up by the new authorities. For historians, some of the richest pickings among this material relate to people whose lives, had they not collided with the revolutionary state, might otherwise have gone unrecorded. While exploring these archives a few years ago, I came across a remarkable cache confiscated from an Englishman who had been living in revolutionary Paris.
By Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos
When George Steiner was musing in 2002 (in his review of Logue’s War Music) on the shapes and forms that responses to Homer seemed likely to take in the new millennium, he welcomed the work of Louise Glück and Jorie Graham as the first shoots of a female reworking of Homer. In Glück’s Meadowlands (1998) we find a lyric Odyssey in the depiction of a modern marriage disintegrating, while in The End of Beauty (1987) Graham’s Penelope delights in unravelling and thereby deconstructing earlier poetic forms. The fact that both writers draw on the Odyssey rather than the Iliad appears to lend substance to Samuel Butler’s conviction, remembered by Steiner, that the Odyssey is ‘woman’s work.’
By Kirsty Doole
March is International Women’s History Month, so what better time to suggest some feminist-friendly classics from our Oxford World’s Classics series? Below you’ll find a mixture of fiction, politics, and religion, and while some will probably be familiar, I’ve thrown in a couple of less conventional choices for a feminist list. Agree with these choices? Disagree? What have I missed out? Let us know in the comments.
To celebrate World Book Day this week, we take a look at what John Sutherland thinks about why we read bestsellers and what they say about the age in which they were published, in his Very Short Introduction to Bestsellers.
Along with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 bc) was one of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, and in the view of many he was the greatest philosopher of all time. His Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written and is a founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism. We present a brief extract from Republic, Books Two and Three.