Literature

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.

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.

Vampyre Rising

By Robert Morrison

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

By Susan Ratcliffe

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’.

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.

The limits of empathy in Toni Morrison’s ‘Home’

By Mary Dudziak
Toni Morrison’s new novel Home, about a Korean War veteran’s struggles after the war might seem perfectly suited to an impending cultural turn. The close of the U.S. combat mission in Iraq and an anticipated draw-down of American troops in Afghanistan, might signal the end of a war era and a renewed focus on what we now call the homeland. Perhaps we can turn to Morrison’s beautiful and brief narrative to understand the journeys of our generation’s soldiers as they, like Frank Money (the protagonist), try to find their way home.

Welcome to the house of Count Dracula

Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the world, an ancient creature bent on bringing his contagion to London, the very heart of the British Empire. Only a handful of men and women stand between Dracula and his long-cherished goal, but they are vulnerable and weak against the cunning and supernatural powers of the Count and his legions. As the horrifying story unfolds in the diaries and letters of young Jonathan Harker, Lucy, Mina, and Dr Seward, Dracula will be victorious unless his nemesis Professor Van Helsing can persuade them that monsters still lurk in the era of electric light. Here, in one of Jonathan Harker’s diary entries, he meets Dracula for the first time…

Why read Faulkner?

By Philip Weinstein
Faulkner’s best novels show what it is like to live through baffling experience — experience that you can’t sort out while it is happening to you (crashing into you). They do more than “show” this; they enact it on the page. Attending to him responsively creates a kindred experience of bafflement, then of bafflement brought to order. But not brought to order before it registers on you, longer than you like.

A house of judgment for Oscar Wilde

On 25 May 1895, at the Old Bailey Courthouse, Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour. A warrant for his arrest on this charge had been issued immediately after losing a libel case against the Marquess of Queensbury, which had also left him bankrupt. While imprisoned at Pentonville and then Wandsworth Prison, his health declined sharply, and following his release, he fled to France. A poet, playwright, novelist, short story writer, and wit, Wilde lost the joy of writing in his final years. Whether or not it be “the love that dare not speak its name,” Oscar Wilde’s “The House of Judgement” shows he was no stranger to examination and judgement before his trial.