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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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Religion versus science…

Intellectual debates which command rock-star levels of mass appeal are rare, to say the least – but ‘religion versus science’ can still pull in the crowds like the best of the old stadium bands. It goes without saying that an Oxford debate between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Richard Dawkins in February this year was packed out on the day, but it’s now also currently near 30,000 hits on YouTube.

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The Crowd in the Capuchin Church

Today in 1775, Matthew Lewis, author of The Monk, was born. Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt.

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Edmund Spenser: ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet?’

Edmund Spenser’s innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England’s ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx’s words, ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’– a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted.

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Alice in Wonderland in Psychiatry and Medicine

By Susan Bélanger and Edward Shorter
Written by Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published on 4 July 1865. The book has remained in print ever since, becoming one of the most popular and influential works in all of literature. Alice has been translated into nearly a hundred languages, appeared in countless stage and screen adaptations, and continues to resonate throughout both academia and popular culture.

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10 facts and conjectures about Edmund Spenser

By Andrew Hadfield
A particular anxiety/curiosity of any author who undertakes a work of biography is whether they have discovered anything new about their subject. I’m not sure that I have any ‘smoking gun’ for Edmund Spenser (1554?-1599) that conclusively proves something that no one knew before, and there is no one single archival discovery that can be trumpeted as a particular triumph. But I think I have rearranged and rethought Spenser’s life and its relationship to his work in some new ways. Here is a list of my top ten favourite Spenser facts and conjectures, some known, some less well known.

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10 questions for Bradford Morrow

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selection while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 26 June, Bradford Morrow leads a discussion on My Antonia by Willa Cather.

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Vampyre Rising

“The ghost-stories are begun by all but me,” John William Polidori wrote from Geneva on 17 June 1816 as one of five participants in perhaps the most famous literary competition of all time. Polidori was the handsome, arrogant, and often quick-tempered outsider in a group that also included Percy Shelley, radical poet and thinker, and a married man; his lover, Mary Godwin, the only child of the philosopher William Godwin and the passionate advocate of women’s rights, Mary Wollstonecraft; Lord Byron, the most celebrated (and then notorious) literary figure of the age; and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister and Byron’s newest mistress.

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10 questions for Lynn Neary

Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. The Bryant Park Reading Room offers free copies of book club selection while supply lasts, compliments of Oxford University Press, and guest speakers lead the group in discussion. On Tuesday 12 June, NPR arts correspondent Lynn Neary leads a discussion on Wuthering Heights.

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Where is Heidi?

On 12 June 1827, a Swiss writer named Johanna Spyri was born. While living in Zurich, she began to write about life in the Swiss countryside. It is there in the Alps that her most famous character Heidi lives. While Heidi has captured the hearts of readers around the world, it is first her abrasive grandfather that she must charm.

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From Dante to Umberto Eco: why read Italian literature?

By Peter Hainsworth
Most English-speakers who read literature have heard of Dante. Eliot, Pound and a host of other modern poets, critics and translators have made sure of that, though it’s a moot point whether many readers have followed Dante very far out of his dark wood. When it comes to other classic Italian writers, the darkness thickens.

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Elizabeth Bowen in European modernism and the awakening of Irish consciousness

By Stephen Regan
Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin on 7 June 1899. She grew up in an elegant Georgian house on Herbert Place, close to the Grand Canal, hearing the busy rattle of trams going over the bridges and the lively bustle of barges carrying timber to a nearby sawmill. Her memoir of early childhood, Seven Winters (1942), recalls the sights and sounds of Dublin city life with striking clarity and immediacy. It both registers the unique and specific details of the author’s early years and takes up its place in a marvelously rich tradition of Irish memoir and autobiography.

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To sell a son… Uncle Tom’s Cabin

On 5 June 1851, the abolitionist journal National Era began running a serial by the wife of a professor at Bowdoin College. A deeply religious and well-educated white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe was an ardent opponent of slavery. As she wrote to the journal editor, Gamaliel Bailey: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” The work, eventually titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or Life Among the Lowly, became a national sensation.

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Innocence and Experience: Childhood in Kafka

By Ritchie Robertson
Some of the great modernists have written evocatively about childhood. At first glance, Kafka may not seem to be among them. The minutely detailed recollection of childhood that Proust provides in Swann’s Way, or Thomas Mann’s account of a school day in the life of young Hanno Buddenbrook, lack counterparts in Kafka. His world-famous and compelling fantasies are about inscrutable authorities, such as the Court and the Castle, and their victims are doomed at worst to inexplicable punishment, at best to frustration. Kafka would seem to deal with experience rather than innocence.

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When Phileas Fogg met Passepartout

A £20,000 wager is yet to come for the exceedingly precise, regular, and upright gentleman Phineas Fogg. In Around the World in Eighty Days — the latest addition to our Oxford Children’s Classics series — a retiring English gentleman must leave his home on Savile Row. But no gentleman is without a trusty valet.

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‘The glory of my crown’: royal quotations past and present

With the celebration of Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee only a few days away, it is perhaps a good moment to look back at some other long-serving monarchs of the British Isles. Inevitably, those who rule for a long time come to the throne early: Queen Victoria was 18 at her accession, and was described by Thomas Carlyle on her Coronation as ‘Poor little Queen! She is at an age when a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself, yet a task is laid on her from which an archangel might shrink.’ After her reign of 63 years, H. G. Wells thought differently: ‘Queen Victoria was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’.

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Scholarly citation and the value of standard editions

By Gordon Campbell
A personal library represents the intellectual history of its owner. The earliest volumes tend to be those bought as an undergraduate; in their margins there are scribbled notes that are now embarrassing. Another stratum of the library represents books bought for teaching and research; in my case, many of these came from second-hand bookshops.

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