Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Peter Miles
First, a word to Google. Dead people do not have birthdays. I hate to be a party-pooper in the eyes of any zombies still celebrating Halloween, but Google will insist on informing me that today is Nietzsche’s 169th birthday or the 143rd birthday of the chap who first put a metal strip in a banknote or the 158th birthday of the Czech inventor of the bicycle seat — when it never is.
Fancy a spot of ghost hunting? Try to ignore the hairy hand in the corner of your eye and curl up with M.R. James this Halloween. Darryl Jones, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James, provides an excellent guide to his strange imagination and menace. Join Jones in the Trinity College Dublin Library to discuss James’s life and work.
By Lizzie Shannon-Little
What better way to send shivers down your spine this Halloween than to curl up with a spooky tale? These Classics have been putting the frighteners on people for quite some time, and we’ve got the collywobbles just thinking about them.
By Jerome Loving
More than a century ago, on October 25, 1902, we lost a major novelist by the name of Frank Norris, author of McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899). Like Stephen Crane, he died in his prime, but not before writing at least one of the great American novels in the naturalist tradition of Thomas Hardy and Theodore Dreiser.
By Claude Rawson
Jonathan Swift, whom T. S. Eliot called “colossal,” “the greatest writer of English prose, and the greatest man who has ever written great English prose,” died on 19 October 1745.
By Jill L. Levensen
In its fall preview issue for 2013 (dated 2-9 September), New York magazine lists Romeo and Juliet with other films opening on 11 October 2013, and it comments: “Julian Fellowes (the beloved creator of Downton Abbey) tries to de-Luhrmann-ize this classic.” The statement makes two notable points.
By Eleanor Ty
In the early 1790s, Mary Hays was a rising writer who had published an Oriental tale, an essay on the usefulness of public worship, and, with her sister, produced a collection of essays on miscellaneous topics: romances, friendships, and improvements to female education. She admired and had befriended radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and was introduced to the circle of London intellectuals in the 1790s.
By Judith M. Brown
The global media has, in recent months, brought to the attention of a world audience the prevalence of violence against women in India. The horrific rape of a woman student, returning home after watching an early evening showing of The Life of Pi, in Delhi in December 2012, and the subsequent trial and conviction of her drunken and violent attackers, has led to considerable comment about violence against women.
By Brian Nelson
Émile Zola’s main achievement was his twenty-volume novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–1893). The fortunes of a family, the Rougon-Macquart, are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola examines methodically the social, sexual, and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century.
By Michael Newton
“The trouble with you,” an old friend recently declared to me, “is that you have always been a conformist.” He meant that I had never undertaken that necessary radical break with my parents and their ideals and interests. Without such a generational rupture, it seemed to him, nobody could claim to be a fully independent, realised person. While he had been dropping acid and dropping (temporarily) out of college, I’d been reclining under a tree with John Keats. And surely there was nothing rebellious in that.
By John McWilliams
Cooper’s daunting, lifelong energies led him to venture down still other fictional paths, nominally imaginary but rendered realistic through trenchant social commentary. He experimented with unreliable first person narrative, with the biography of an inanimate object, with urban satire, with the beast fable (The Monikins), and with dystopian fiction (The Crater).
By Jessica Harris
This month our Oxford World’s Classics reading list is on folk and fairy tales. Many of these stories pre-date the printing press, and most will no doubt continue to be told for hundreds of years to come. How many of these have you heard of, and have we missed out your favourite?
By Gus Gallagher
In the Autumn of 2011 I found myself at something of a loose end in the beautiful city of Tbilisi, Georgia, working with the Marjanishvili Theatre there on a production of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Unsure of what my next project might be, my attention turned to an old love, Shakespeare’s Henry V.
By D. Gareth Walters
It is apt that Spain’s best-known poet, Federico García Lorca, should have been born in Andalusia. Castile may claim to be the heart and the source of Spain, both historically and linguistically, but in broad cultural terms Andalusia has become for many non-Spaniards the very embodiment of Spain. Lorca’s poetry abundantly reflects this perception.
Each summer, Oxford University Press USA and Bryant Park in New York City partner for their summer reading series Word for Word Book Club. On Tuesday 27 August 2013, writer David Gilbert leads a discussion on Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis.
By Ian Duncan
One of Sir Walter Scott’s creations has been much in the news lately: his country house at Abbotsford was formally reopened to the public by Her Majesty the Queen on 3 July 2013, following a £12 million restoration.