Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Katherine Stileman
While we regularly bring you the thoughts and insights of Oxford University Press (OUP) authors and editors, we rarely reveal the people who work behind the scenes. I sat down with Oxford University Press Digital Development Editor, Sarah Brett, to find out more about her history with OUP.
Celebrate Halloween with Shakespeare and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO)! Test your knowledge on which characters disguise themselves, what the witches say around their cauldron, why ghosts haunt the living, and who plays tricks in the night …
Four hundred and twenty years ago, on Wednesday 30 May 1593, Christopher Marlowe was famously killed under mysterious circumstances at the young age of 29. Test your knowledge on this enigmatic figure of history. Do you know when Marlowe was born? Who killed him and why? Find out answers to these and much more in our quiz. Good luck!
We are celebrating Shakespeare’s 449th birthday with a quiz! Test your knowledge on the famous bard. Can you tell your poems from your plays? Do you know who his twins were named after, or his exact birthdate? Find out answers to these and much more in our quiz. Break a leg!
The New York office’s 13th floor conference room — a quiet, large space with no outside light — functions surprisingly well as miniature studio. Within a few hours of the film crew arriving, the office chairs and table have been removed, a green screen unfurled, camera, lights, and mic all assembled, and the Publisher of Scholarly and Online Reference is sitting in the spotlight, prepped for his interview.
By Christopher Cannon
The editing of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the form in which we now read it took many decades of work by a number of different scholars, but there is as yet no readily available edition that takes account of all the different versions in which the Canterbury Tales survives. Some of this is purely pragmatic. There are over 80 surviving manuscripts from before 1500 containing all or some parts of the Tales (55 of these are complete texts or were meant to be).
By Andrew Zurcher
The “Februarie” eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s pastoral collection, The Shepheardes Calender, was first published in 1579. It presents a conversation between two shepherds, a brash “Heardmans boye” called Cuddie and an old stick-in-the-mud named Thenot.
Try this short quiz to test your knowledge and learn more about famous twentieth-century texts!
Do you need some inspiration for your New Year’s resolutions? If you’re in a resolution rut and feeling some of that winter gloom, then you’re not alone. To help you on your way to an exciting start to 2017, we’ve enlisted the help of some of history’s greatest literary and philosophical figures–on their own resolutions, and inspiring thoughts for the New Year.
The Melford Hall Manuscript is a large, expensively bound manuscript volume containing previously unknown witnesses of nearly 140 poems by John Donne (1572-1631), one of the most outstandingly significant poets and preachers of the early modern period. Discovered by Gabriel Heaton of Sotheby’s during a routine survey of Melford Hall in Suffolk, and restored by sale by the prestigious […]
We have long assumed that medieval sermons were written for the laity, that is, those with no Latin and probably minimal literacy. But most of the sermons that survive in English contain a significant amount of Latin. What did a medieval lay person understand when he or she heard a sermon?
The poet laureate has held an elevated position in British culture over the past 350 years. From the position’s origins as a personal appointment made by the monarch to today’s governmental selection committee, much has changed about the role, but one thing hasn’t changed: the poet laureate has always produced poetry for events of national […]
The English-language heyday of classical verse translation, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, produced works that people still read, enjoy, and study today. Translation has been central in what we now call the reception of ancient poetry through the ages.
Who doesn’t like a centenary? Whether solemn, festive, or celebratory, a centenary can be very instructive, whether conducted individually or collectively. It is a way of acknowledging—often honouring—the past and, at the same time, reassessing the present and imagining the future in the context of the previous event or exemplary person.
Emily Brontë, born 200 years ago on 30 July 1818, would become part of one of the most important literary trinities alongside her sisters, Charlotte and Anne. Emily’s only novel, Wuthering Heights, polarised contemporary critics and defied Victorian convention by depicting characters from “low and rustic life.”
Given his near half-century career, the Romantic-era publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) left behind a notably small archive. We know from a letter he wrote on today’s date in 1799 that he destroyed some of his correspondence and business documents while serving a two-year sentence for seditious libel in King’s Bench Prison (imprisonment was a fate that progressive publishers were all too familiar with during the 1790s).