Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Trevor Naylor
The written word has always played its part in the spreading of revolutionary ideas and in the recording of historical events. Until the Internet, this was done principally by the bookshops of the world, nowhere more so than across the countries of Asia and the Middle East, where the humble corner bookshop sells not just books, but newspapers, magazines, stationery, and all manner of things to keep its daily customers up to date.
By David Bradshaw and James Smith
The extent of Ezra Pound’s involvement with Italian fascism during the Second World War has been one of the most troubling and contentious issues in modernist literary studies.
In celebration of the anniversary of the first burlesque show in New York City, I reread a fun murder mystery, The G-String Murders, by Gypsy Rose Lee. “Finding dead bodies scattered all over a burlesque theater isn’t the sort of thing you’re likely to forget. Not quickly, anyway,” begins the story.The editors at Simon & Schuster liked the setting in a burlesque theater and appreciated Gypsy’s natural style, with its unpretentious and casual tone. Her knowledge of burlesque enabled her to intrigue readers, who were as interested in life within a burlesque theater as in the mystery.
By Laura Davis
You know that stress dream that everyone has at one time or another? The one where you’re standing up in front of a giant group of people and something goes horribly wrong? You forget your speech, your voice cracks, you’re not wearing pants.
Between Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the detective story with ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story ‘A Study in Scarlet’ in 1887, chance and coincidence played a large part in crime fiction. Conan Doyle resolved to be different in future.
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 Alyn Shipton
When Harry Nilsson took a call on 7 September 1978 to tell him that the Who’s drummer Keith Moon had been found dead in Nilsson’s London apartment, it was a shock for two reasons.
On Saturday 7 September 2013, lovers of classical music will gather together once again for the final performance in this year’s momentous Proms season. Alongside the traditional pomp and celebration of the Last Night, with Rule, Britannia!, Jerusalem, and the like, we are promised a number of more substantial works, including Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and the overture to Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg.
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.
One of the fascinating things about being a musician is that I can perform the same Chopin piece that has been played by thousands of pianists for almost two centuries and breathe life into it in a way that no one has ever done before. Tomorrow, I will play the same piece and know it will be different again.
By Richard Payne Of late, scholars have increasingly called into question the utility of the nation-state as the default category for the study of Buddhism. In terms of the way Buddhism is academically apprehended, the implication of Johan Elverskog’s argument in “The Buddhist Exchange: Irrigation, Crops and the Spread of the Dharma” — that Buddhism […]
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.
Earlier this year, Oxford University Press (OUP) published The Throne of Adulis by G.W. Bowersock, as part of Oxford’s Emblems of Antiquity Series, commissioned by the editor Stefan Vranka from the New York office. It was especially thrilling that Professor Bowersock agreed to write a volume, as it represents a homecoming of sorts for the noted classics scholar, who began his career with OUP in 1965 with the monograph Augustus and the Greek World.
Harriet Cohen (1895-1967) was one of the leading British pianists of her age, but her unusually small hands (“I cannot normally cover more than eight notes with each hand”) led her naturally to specialize in intimate classical and pre-classical works, rather than in any thundering octaves of nineteenth-century piano music.
In 1971, when Representative Bella Abzug introduced a joint resolution to Congress creating Women’s Equality Day, she wasn’t likely thinking about women in popular music. After all, the subject is seemingly silly compared to what Women’s Equality Day commemorates.
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.