Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Thomas Keymer
One doesn’t associate Samuel Johnson, whose death 228 years ago today ended his lengthy domination of the literary world, with the history of aviation. But ballooning was a national obsession in Johnson’s last year, and he was caught up in the craze despite himself.
By Gregory Tate
This year marked the bicentenary of the birth of the Victorian poet Robert Browning in 1812, although this news might come as something of a surprise…
By Marilyn Deegan
The new discoveries of the Mars rover Curiosity have greatly excited the world in the last few weeks, and speculation was rife about whether some evidence of life has been found. (In actuality, Curiosity discovered complex chemistry, including organic compounds, in a Martian soil analysis.) Why the excitement?
By Robert Morrison
Two hundred and one years ago this month, along the Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of London, seven people from two separate households were brutally murdered. News of the atrocities quickly spread throughout the country, generating levels of terror and moral hysteria that were not seen again until three-quarters of a century later when Jack the Ripper launched his savage career in a neighbouring East End district. Britain had no professional police force until 1829, and so the task of apprehending the killer (or killers) fell to an ill-coordinated group of magistrates, watchmen, and churchwardens who were woefully unprepared for the pressures of a major murder investigation,
By David Seed
Although there had been interest in Mars earlier, towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a sudden surge of novels describing travel to the Red Planet. One of the earliest was Percy Greg’s Across the Zodiac (1880) which set the pattern for early Mars fiction by framing its story as a manuscript found in a battered metal container. Greg obviously assumed that his readers would find the story incredible and sets up the discovery of the ‘record’, as he calls it, by a traveler to the USA to distance himself from the extraordinary events within the novel.
Perhaps Dickens’s best-loved work, Great Expectations tells the story of young Pip, who lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith. He has few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past — the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella — and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart. Here is a sequence of podcasts with Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Great Expectations.
St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, is rather a mysterious figure; very little is actually known about his life. Meanwhile, St Andrew’s Day, on 30th November, is well-established and widely celebrated by Scots around the world. The bestselling Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations include quotes from a wide-range of people, on an even wider-range of subjects. Here are some contributions from some of Scotland’s most treasured wordsmiths.
By John Fletcher
In 1744 Voltaire produced for an edition of Mérope a “Lettre sur l’esprit”, which he later incorporated after corrections in later editions of the Dictionnaire philosophique under the article “Esprit.” In it he attempted to define the nature of wit in the following terms: Ce qu’on appelle esprit est tantôt une comparaison nouvelle, tantôt une allusion fine:
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina sets the impossible and destructive triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky against the marriage of Levin and Kitty, thus illuminating the most important questions that face humanity. A new film adaptation of the novel, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, opens today in the United States. We’ve paired a scene from the film with an excerpt of the novel below.
Jason Haslam
October 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the first publication, in the pulp-fiction magazine All-Story, of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ best known novel, Tarzan of the Apes. The complete novel published in the October 1912 issue, was given the cover image (where it was described as “A Romance of the Jungle”), and became an immediate hit among the All-Story’s readers. In the months following Tarzan’s appearance, dozens of readers’ letters were published, many of which asked for (or even demanded) a sequel, a request Burroughs would fulfill, eventually writing over two-dozen Tarzan novels.
By Daniel Swift
“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” instructs the old nursery rhyme, and offers a useful summary: “Gunpowder, treason and plot.” But we have never been sure quite what, or how, we should be remembering. On 5 November 1605 a small gang of Catholics and minor noblemen plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, during the State Opening at which King James I would be present. One of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was caught with the gunpowder before he set it off. The other plotters were soon caught, and all were executed.
Looking for a fright ? The ghost stories of M.R. James, considered by many to be the most terrifying in English, have lost none of their power to unsettle and disturb. So we’re presenting an extract from ‘Casting the Runes’ in the Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, edited by Darryl Ince, to get you in the mood for Halloween.
By Martin Sorrell
Among the enfants terribles of literature, Rimbaud holds a pre-eminent place. But he’s been made famous against his will. If he had his way, everything he wrote — save perhaps his factual letters from Africa and elsewhere about trade and the dodgy deals he was trying to clinch – would have been destroyed. All the astonishing poetry that has made him an icon burnt on a bonfire of vanities, but fortunately it was saved.
By George Cotkin
Moby-Dick draws readers into it. And many of its more creative readers have sought to capture its grandeur on film and stage. From the first film in 1926 to the present, these attempts have taken liberties with the novel, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill. But that is the challenge that Moby-Dick offers its readers, a text that is deep and wide, an ocean of issues and concerns that we must all, in some fashion, navigate
By Jeffrey J. Williams
The academic novel is usually considered a quaint genre, depicting the insular world of academe and directed toward a coterie audience. But it has become a major genre in contemporary American fiction and glimpses an important dimension of American life. In the past twenty years, many prominent American novelists have contributed their entries, including Paul Auster, Ann Beattie, T. C. Boyle, Michael Chabon, and Percival Everett.
By Gregory Tate
2012 has been a good year for the Victorian novel. The dizzying number of adaptations, exhibitions, and readings which have been organised to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens testify to the ongoing popularity of nineteenth-century fiction, and of this most famous of Victorian novelists in particular.