Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
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.
By Matthew Beaumont
Pater’s most celebrated and controversial book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) is about the distant past, superficially at least, and therefore risked seeming irrelevant even in his own time. It could not however have inspired a generation of undergraduates, including Oscar Wilde, to embrace aestheticism, and a cult of homoeroticism, as his critics claimed, if it had not also been a coded polemic about the present.
The Mabinogion is the title given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c.1400). They were never conceived as a collection—the title was adopted in the nineteenth century when the tales were first translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest.
By Thorstein Veblen
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. It needs no argument to enforce the generalisation that the more elegant styles of feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does the man’s high hat.
We wish a happy birthday to Alexandre Dumas today with the musketeers. In the 1620s at the court of Louis XIII, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis with their companion, the headstrong d’Artagnan, are engaged in a battle against Richelieu, the King’s minister, and the beautiful, unscrupulous spy, Milady. Behind the flashing blades and bravura, Dumas explores the eternal conflict between good and evil. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 27, The Wife of Athos.
By Carolyne Larrington
In his masterpiece, Wagner synthesised stories from across the Old Norse – Icelandic collection of poems known as the Poetic Edda. He had long been mulling over an opera based on the German epic, Das Nibelungenlied, but he realised that he needed more material and more inspiration. Wagner knew where he might find it: “I must study these Old Norse eddic poems of yours; they are far more profound than our medieval poems”, he remarked to the Danish composer Niels Gade in 1846.
By David Roberts
Praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching `the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters reflect the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift.
The relatively short reign of Alexander (336 to 323 BC) marked one of the major turning-points in world history. The Greek city states continued to function after his death, but the world order had changed and a new era began, which came to be labelled the Hellenistic period. For Alexander, like many an autocrat, departed without leaving a viable succession plan.
Despite its controversial history, the Book of Common Prayer is an influential religious text and one of the most compelling works of English literature. How has this document retained its relevancy even after numerous revisions? What can it teach us about British history and the English language? We spoke with Brian Cummings, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer, about the importance of this text.
The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.
By Gary Kelly
A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’.
By David Roberts
Defoe is often described as a realist. Ian Watt’s seminal book, The Rise of the Novel, went so far as make his ‘realism’ a pre-condition for the development of the novel. But when it came to cities, and to London in particular, Defoe was often drawn to ghosts and shadows: to dreams of emptiness as much as crowds and the great business of daily life. As Edward Hopper found the essence of New York in stray people hunched over night-time drinks amid darkened streets, so the London of Defoe’s writing often turns out to be an inversion of the place his readers knew, perhaps because he knew it better than anyone else.
By Jane Garnett
Matthew Arnold is probably now most recalled for one phrase, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in his poem “Dover Beach” (first published in 1867), and for having written the lectures which were published serially and then in book form (1869) as Culture and Anarchy. Both are cited more than considered, and the nature of Arnold’s cultural project is often misunderstood.
By Janet Gezari
Her death followed a debilitating illness and occurred almost exactly nine months after her marriage to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. The death certificate states its cause as “Phthisis” or acute tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Emily and Anne.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and named after his second cousin three times removed, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. He went to Princeton University, but dropped out, eventually joining the Army in 1917. In honor of the anniversary of the publication of This Side of Paradise on 26 March 1920, we dug up this excerpt from this great novel.
Along with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 bc) was one of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, and in the view of many he was the greatest philosopher of all time. His Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written and is a founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism. We present a brief extract from Republic, Books Two and Three.