The Making of The Oxford Canon: Part One
David Lehman writes about the making of the Oxford Canon.
A Few Questions for Michael and Diane Ravitch
A few questions about The English Reader, an interview with Michael and Diane Ravitch.
A few questions for phyllis tickle
Phyllis Tickle, founding editor of the Religion Department at Publishers Weekly, is a highly respected authority on religion in America. She has recently written a new book, ‘The Night Offices: Prayer for the Hours from Sunset to Sunrise’, and was kind enough to answer a few questions on the book.
A Few Questions For Robert Beisner
A Q and A with author Robert Beisner.
Women in Literature: Gwendolyn Brooks
A profile of Gwendolyn Brooks.
Women and Literature:
In this article from Black Women in America, Second Edition, Jacquelyn Y. McLendon profiles the new generation of fiction writers.
Happy Birthday Upton Sinclair!
OUP wishes Upton Sinclair a happy birhtday.
Women and literature: the dual tradition of African American fiction
The prevailing wisdom of most African Americanists, is that due to the distinctive history and acculturation of Africans in the British colonies in North America, African-American literature is most meaningfully assessed in the context of multiple geographical, oral, and literary heritages.
Origins of hip hop: Ice-T and “Cop Killer”
In this post, we look at rapper Ice-T, and his influence on the development of hip hop. A prolific and outspoken Rap artist, Ice-T helped pioneer the ‘gangsta’ musical style, in which the turmoil of urban street life is exposed through blunt, explicit lyrics and a bass-heavy, fluid musical style.
STANLEY KUNITZ (1905– 2006)
Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. During World War II he served in the Air Transport Command of the U.S. Army. He taught for many years at Columbia University, where his students revered him. As judge of the Yale Younger Poets series he chose the first books of Robert Hass […]
Serial Traveling: Johnson & Boswell in Scotland
Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775); James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1773; ed. F. A. Pottle, 1961) A young and enthusiastic James Boswell befriended Samuel Johnson (1709-84), England’s most famous man of letters, in London in 1763. Soon Boswell was urging […]
What is “American” in American art?
Thoughts on the Whitney Biennial
by Barbara Novak The Whitney Biennial has been notably challenged lately for including European artists in a show at a Museum of American Art. But such critiques misunderstand the nature of the question “What is American in American Art?” “American” is not a nationally distilled “ingredient” injected into our art by virtue of birth or […]
Song of Myself, I, II, VI & LI
by Walt Whitman
I I Celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, […]
Etymology and the Outside World
There was a time when historical linguistics was one of the most prestigious disciplines in the humanities. At school, Latin and Classical Greek were shoved down young boys’ unwilling throats, and it seemed natural to look at languages with the eyes of a historian. Early in the 19th century, regular sound correspondences between languages were […]
More from Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman took a breather from the ‘Narnia-gate’ media frenzy yesterday to respond to the other big literature-goes-to-Hollywood story of last week: Paradise Lost will be coming to a theatre near you in 2007! “There have been rumours about a film of Paradise Lost for a long time,” Pullman says. “There was even talk of […]
Philip Pullman on Paradise Lost
The question, “Where should my story begin?’ is, as every storyteller knows, both immensely important and immensely difficult to answer. ‘Once upon a time’, as the fairy-tale formula has it; but once upon a time there was – what? The opening governs the way you tell everything that follows, not only in terms of the […]