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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What to do on a summer afternoon in London? Around 1600 you could cross the Thames by bridge or boat and take in a show in Southwark, the Elizabethan entertainment district. Once there, you had a choice. You could either see the latest play by Shakespeare, Dekker or Jonson or watch bears with names like Sackerson, Harry Hunks, Nan Stiles or Bess of Bromley be chained to a stake and set upon by specially trained mastiff dogs.
Have you heard the Word…for Word? Oxford University Press is proud to partner with the Bryant Park Reading Room in support of the Word for Word Book Club. The series kicks off today, with six more Clubs scheduled for the summer. Be sure to stop by the Reading Room early for a FREE* copy of the book club selections.
The most famous of all vampire stories, Dracula is a mirror of its age, its underlying themes of race, religion, science, superstition, and sexuality never far from the surface. Here is a sequence of podcasts with Roger Luckhurst, who has edited a new edition of Dracula for Oxford World’s Classics, recorded by George Miller of Podularity.
By David Wallace
Jewish and Christian traditions alike praise the strong woman, a colossus of work and ingenuity who, according to Proverbs 31, rises early and prepares food, plants vineyards, conveyances land, feeds the poor, manufactures and sells linen garments, weaves tapestries, and speaks wisdom.
By Peter Hunt
The fact that The Secret Garden taps into such a powerful theme does not mean that the book is not profoundly a product of its time – and for us to ignore the more immediate sources and stimuli of the book is to miss a lot of its richness. The book – like all classics – needs to be appreciated and understood in its contemporary terms if it is to be savoured.
Summer heralds many important things: 3D movies, involuntary camping trips, and sidewalk distribution of ice cream samples in tiny disposable cups. But the greatest tradition of all is, of course, book club (or your local library’s summer reading program). If, like me, you’re the weakest link in your coterie, you’re probably looking to contribute more than, “The ending was awesome,” or “Favorite character. Ok…go!”
I’m delighted at how many readers have sent in Royal Wedding poems, proving that they are up to the challenge. Please keep sending them, and remember you can also enter to win Oxford World’s Classics by simply tweeting.
Here are just a few I’d like to share today, but now that you’ve all watched the ceremony (with undivided attention, of course) I expect many more to come.
National Poetry Month, is nearing its end, and the royal wedding is just around the corner, so let’s write poems about it. I’ve made some suggestions below, but all forms are welcome. (If you really want to win me over, I suggest attempting my favorite poetic form, the sestina.) Send your poem to me care of [email protected] and I’ll post what I can tomorrow. (Keep it clean, please. Humor, satire and effusive excitement are welcome, insults are not.)
On a summer’s day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church, Oxford, Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding Camera, recently purchased in London. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the resulting image as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of literature. In the short excerpt from the book, below, Winchester writes about the pictures of children he took in the years before he photographed Alice Liddell.
How do you write a smash first novel? Author (and OUP Law Editor) Matthew Gallaway comes to Oxford book club to discuss his book The Metropolis Case (Crown Publishers). Topics include: Pittsburgh, advice for writers…and what’s up with the incest scene?
My favorite poetry form is the sestina. I like them, I think, because they are incredibly difficult to compose and require a fair bit of calculation. This being National Poetry Month, I thought I’d challenge you all to write one.
Not sure what a sestina is?
By Robert Cowan
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” So wrote Salman Rushdie and he should know. Certainly free speech is routinely held up, often unreflectively, as an unambiguous, uncontroversial good – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, the right for which Voltaire would famously die, even if he disapproved of what was being said. In the age of WikiLeaks, the freedom to disseminate information and its corollary, the freedom to know what those in power have said or done in secret, have found ever more vigorous proponents, but also those who ask whether it has its limits.
In the name of giving credit where it’s due, I’d like to do something a little different today and highlight some quality content on other university press blogs. Long live academic publishing!
Kirsty Doole has been part of the OUPblog team since…possibly forever, and yet I don’t know that we’ve ever properly introduced her to all of you. Formerly known as the ‘UK Early Bird,’ she is our UK Contributing Editor and keeps me on my toes at every turn. To my great delight, she’s also joined me on the @OUPblog twitter account! Without further adieu, I present this (fantastic) Q&A.
By Ann Saddlemyer
It doesn’t seem that long since a friend chastised me for writing a long, newsy, e-mail. ‘It’s not meant to be a letter, you know – it’s just an instant message.’ Yet another friend insists on a genuine hand-written letter; texting or e-mailing simply won’t do. In an earlier age, I can recall when one apologized for typing rather than writing by hand. Condolences could not be sent any other way.
By Bernard Schweizer
There’s a lost tribe of religious believers who have suffered a lasting identity crisis. I am referring to the category-defying species of believers who accept the existence of the creator God and yet refuse to worship him. In fact they may go so far as to say that they hate God.
No, I’m not talking about atheists. Non-believers may say contemptuous things about God, but when they do so, they are