Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Peter Brown
If Prince William and Catherine Middleton took to heart the wedding sermon delivered in Westminster Abbey by Richard Chartres, bishop of London, then Chaucer is on the royal reading list. The good bishop quoted two lines from the Franklin’s Tale to emphasize that successful relationships should be based on ‘space and freedom’ rather than coercion: ‘Whan maistrie [mastery] comth, the god of Love anon | Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon’.
By Alan Jacobs
While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that’s to be expected. Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit, a fact that has been obscured in the past half-century, especially in the United States, by the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population attending college, and by the idea (only about 150 years old) that modern literature in vernacular languages should be taught at the university level.
By Stanley Wells
In 1979 Oxford University Press appointed me as the founding head of a Shakespeare department. The Oxford Shakespeare, first published in 1891, had been rendered seriously out of date by advances in scholarship.
By Peter Hunt
Captain Frederick Marryat, an experienced Naval Officer, was a pioneering writer of sea-and-island adventure stories, such as Peter Simple (1834) and Mr Midshipman Easy (1836). One day his children asked him to write a sequel to The Swiss Family Robinson, Johann Wyss’s extravagant embroidering of the Robinson Crusoe story, which had found its circuitous way into English via William Godwin’s translation of a French version in 1816. Marryat was not amused.
After 1951, if a person wanted to be a rebel she could just read the book. Later there would be other things to read—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. But J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was the first best seller to imagine a striking shift in the meaning of alienation in the postwar period, a sense that something besides Europe still needed saving.
By David Bevington
How could I tell this story in relatively brief compass, taking also into account the many depictions of important scenes by artists like Joshua Reynolds and John Everett Millais, parodies and spoofs, Spaghetti westerns, meditations on Hamlet in the fiction of George Eliot and James Joyce and others, and Hamlet’s impact on the very language we speak without collapsing into a welter of information lacking critical direction? What is this story all about?
Even today, Truman Capote remains one of most America’s most controversial authors. Following early literary success his flamboyant became well-documented at the many parties and restaurants he frequented. Always claiming to be researching his next book, Capote was a social celebrity and may have had just as many strong opinions about other people as they had about him.
In the quiz below, you’ll find a series of quotes from
By Helen Small
Pathological lying, the philosopher Sissela Bok tells us, ‘is to all the rest of lying what kleptomania is to stealing’. In its most extreme form, the liar (or ‘pseudologue’) ‘tells involved stories about life circumstances, both present and past’.
“The best Victorian poetry is complex, challenging, and experimental,” Hughes says, and it enjoyed a wide readership as part of “the first era of mass media.” As literacy increased and printing technology advanced, the Victorians witnessed a media explosion during which more books, journals, magazines, and newspapers were published and read than ever before. The Victorian period, in this sense, was a forerunner to the Information Age, and much of the excitement, empowerment, bewilderment, and concern they felt as a result of revolutions in communication resembles our own.
By John Sutherland
We can never know the Victorians as well as they knew themselves. Nor–however well we annotate our texts–can we read Victorian novels as responsively as Victorians read them. They, not we, own their fiction. Thackeray and his original readers shared a common ground so familiar that there was no need for it to be spelled out. The challenge for the modern reader is to reconstruct that background as fully as we can. To ‘Victorianize’ ourselves, one might say.
This past weekend saw Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day take place, featuring lots of Alice in Wonderland themed events and exhibitions. With that in mind, today we bring you two videos of Simon Winchester talking about Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) and both his love of photography and his relationship with Alice Liddell and her family.
I’d like to take this moment and introduce you all to Frannie Laughner, this summer’s intern extraordinaire. She and I were discussing William Todd Schultz’s Tiny Terror: Why Truman Capote (Almost) Wrote Answered Prayers, and the conversation somehow collided with The Oracle of Bacon. An idea was born. Frannie seemed up to the challenge, so I told her I would pick three public figures at random and she had to connect them to Truman Capote in seven degrees or less.
By Dennis Baron
There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.
By Ian Ker
The only reason I have for writing the lives of writers and thinkers like Newman and Chesterton is because I think they are important writers and thinkers and I assume that is, if not the only, certainly the, or a major part of, the reason why anyone would wish to read their biographies. I therefore do attempt to bring to life both their thought and their writings for the reader. A reader of a biography of Jane Austen, say, can be assumed to have read all the relatively few novels she wrote, but very few readers of a biography of Newman and Chesterton can be assumed to have read anything more than a tiny portion of their voluminous works.
It’s a holiday for James Joyce fans, a holiday known as Bloomsday. Joyce’s seminal 1922 novel Ulysses spans only a single day in Dublin (1904), and now we know every 16th of June as Bloomsday, so named after the novel’s protagonist Leopold Bloom. Typical Bloomsday activities involve including Ulysses-themed pub crawls, dramatizations, and readings. Some committed fans even hold marathon readings of the entire book.
By Louis René Beres
Israel, after President Barack Obama’s May 2011 speech on “Palestinian self-determination” and regional “democracy,” awaits a potentially tragic fate. Nonetheless, to the extent that Prime Minister Netanyahu should become complicit in the expected territorial dismemberments, this already doleful fate could quickly turn from genuine tragedy to pathos and abject farce.