Literature

Opposing narratives of success in politics

Stephanie Li
While our presidential candidates are known far in advance of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, party conventions remain intriguing spectacles for the kind of human detail they offer about the men who aspire to the Oval Office. Every four years pundits and political commentators observe that conventions have become increasingly scripted affairs that lack the spontaneity of times past, but party conventions serve to present individual narratives as much as specific policy positions.

New BBC drama ‘The Paradise’ & Oxford World’s Classics

Tonight sees the start of a major new drama series on BBC 1, The Paradise. Adapted from Zola’s novel The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) and set against the backdrop of the spectacular rise of the department store in the 1860s and 70s, the story follows the fortunes of a young girl from the provinces who starts work as a salesgirl in the shop, and her entanglement with the charismatic owner. Oxford World’s Classics is delighted to publish the tie-in edition of Zola’s novel, in a compelling translation by Brian Nelson.

Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age camel

On 24 September 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald was born. While remembered today for his masterpiece The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald made his living off short stories. He chronicled life of the 1920s and 30s with unparalleled versatility, whether as parody, tragedy, fantasy, or romance. His attitude to the charisma and vices of America’s privileged was complex and often ambivalent. This dichotomy is reflected in the following from “The Camel’s Back.”

What’s in a literary name?

By Alastair Fowler
Names and naming are topics of perennial interest, but until recently there were few general discussions of names as a literary feature. This is strange, since questions about names keep coming up in criticism. How are character names chosen? Are literary names always meaningful, or are some characters named quite casually? Does each genre have a list of first names available only for that sort of writing?

Theirs to reason why? Literature, philosophy, and war

By Cécile Fabre
On the eve of the battle of Borodino, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, one of the main characters in War and Peace and, in that scene at least, Tolstoy’s mouthpiece, describes war as follows: ‘But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare?…’

Grandfather Erasmus Darwin: written out of history

By Patricia Fara
Darwin and evolution go together like Newton and gravity or Morse and code. The world, he wrote, resembles ‘one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice.’ Competitive natural selection in a nutshell? Yes – but that evocative image was coined not by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), but by his grandfather Erasmus (1731-1802). Although Charles Darwin is celebrated as the founding father of evolution, his neglected ancestor was writing about evolution long before he was even born.

Why did Milton write his theology in Latin?

By John Hale
John Milton wrote his systematic theology, De Doctrina Christiana, his “dearest possession,” in Latin — a usual choice for a theological work, but with many unusual aspects. Language was a choice, not a foregone conclusion. Continental theologians could be rendered into English (for instance, the work by Johannes Wolleb).

The literary and scientific Galileo

By John L. Heilbron
Galileo is not a fresh subject for a biography. Why then another? The character of the man, his discovery of new worlds, his fight with the Roman Catholic Church, and his scientific legacy have inspired many good books, thousands of articles, plays, pictures, exhibits, statues, a colossal tomb, and an entire museum. In all this, however, there was a chink.

Oxford Scholarly Editions Online launches today: but why?

By Sophie Goldsworthy

Today sees the launch of a major new publishing initiative from Oxford University Press – Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO). OSEO will provide trustworthy and reliable critical online editions of original works by some of the most important writers in the humanities, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as well as works from lesser-known writers such as Shackerley Marmion.

The life of Ford Madox Ford

By Max Saunders
This year’s televisualization of Parade’s End has led to an extraordinary surge of interest in Ford Madox Ford. The ingenious adaptation by Sir Tom Stoppard; the stellar cast, including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, Alan Howard, Rupert Everett, Miranda Richardson, Roger Allam; the flawlessly intelligent direction by award-winning Susanna White, have not only created a critical success, but reached Ford’s widest audience for perhaps fifty years.

Textual Variants in the Digital Age

By Christopher Cannon
The editing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the form in which we now read it took many decades of work by a number of different scholars, but there is as yet no readily available edition that takes account of all the different versions in which the Canterbury Tales survives. Some of this is purely pragmatic. There are over 80 surviving manuscripts from before 1500 containing all or some parts of the Tales (55 of these are complete texts or were meant to be).

How and why do myths arise?

It is trite to say that one’s pet subject is interdisciplinary. These days what subject isn’t? The prostate? But myth really is interdisciplinary. For there is no study of myth as myth, the way, by contrast, there is said to be the study of literature as literature or of religion as religion. Myth is studied by other disciplines, above all by sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy, literature, and religious studies.

Understanding ‘the body’ in fairy tales

By Scott B. Weingart and Jeana Jorgensen
Computational analysis and feminist theory generally aren’t the first things that come to mind in association with fairy tales. This unlikely pairing, however, can lead to important insights regarding how cultures understand and represent themselves. For example, by looking at how characters are described in European fairy tales, we’ve been able to show how Western culture tends to bias the younger generation, especially the men.

Young Goethe

By David Constantine

By David Constantine
Goethe was born almost dead on 28 August 1749. He opened his eyes, he lived, only when the midwife rubbed his heart with wine. Perhaps that uncertain start awoke a determination in him to stay alive as long as possible. There’s a wry saying in German: Alle Menschen müssen sterben — ich auch, vielleicht (All men must die — me too, perhaps). And that’s how Goethe lived, cannily keeping out of the way of death, cramming as much life as he could into the time allowed.

Edgar Allan Poe and terror at sea

The wife of Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Clemm Poe, was born 15 August 1822. She lived a brief life, marrying Poe at 13 (he was 27) and dying of tuberculosis at 24. Poe worked hard to support their marriage and in 1838, three years into their marriage, Poe wrote his only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. While many of Poe’s works after his wife’s death were marked by the deaths of young women, terror clearly fascinated him from an early stage. Here Arthur Gordon Pym recounts a frightening incident at sea.

15 August 1040: Macbeth kills King Duncan I of Scotland

By Daniel Swift
Susan Sontag wrote that having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a piece of the True Cross. We don’t have a photograph, of course, and even the portraits that we do have are unreliable, but in his plays he left snapshots of a different kind.