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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner—who was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace—about what it means to write a usage dictionary.
The American author James Purdy has long been considered a “lost” figure in literary studies, but he has always enjoyed a certain cult following among artists and writers interested in the fringes of society. Michael Snyder details how Purdy began making the connections that would carry him through his career.
Reading literature has us think differently, with a subtler emotional lexicon. Explore three case studies into reading for identity, expression, and mental health from the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature, and Society (CRILS).
In the first half of the century, the three great killers among endemic diseases—smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis—raging around the world (we think today of malaria as a tropical malady but in the 1920s there were outbreaks as far north as Siberia) were each responsible for more deaths than the 80 million who died in both world wars. Innovations stemming from the Second World War, an immense hothouse of technological progress, made it possible to contemplate combatting infectious disease on a global scale.
A Winter Breviary is a triptych of carols that tells the story of a person walking in the woods on solstice night. This pilgrim—she, he, they—searches for hope, the hope they cannot name, or hear or see. And still, they walk deeper and deeper into the dark.
Sometimes the meeting of an actor and a role produces a rare kind of alchemy that forever bonds the two… and sometimes the opposite happens. The former occurred when twenty-one-year-old Barbra Streisand was cast as famed comedienne Fanny Brice in the 1964 musical Funny Girl.
When people ask me about the Salvator Mundi, just like Google, I can predict the questions they will “also ask.”
European state-formation would have looked very different if rulers did not constantly have to negotiate with a strong clergy, independent townsmen, and the nobility over, inter alia, the wherewithal for warfare, succession and public peace. But the medieval Church shaped European societies in other ways than this. It was the one institution of late antiquity that survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and it carried the torch of the Roman world after the Empire collapsed.
Discovering the provenance of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi formed a significant part of the book that I co-authored with Margaret Dalivalle and Martin Kemp. Determining which records and references pertained to the original and which to the many copies and derivations of the painting required the unraveling of dozens of documentary threads, intertwined and occasionally knotted, stretching across the centuries.
There is little doubt that “Narnia” has effectively entered the English language and that references to a “wardrobe” or “wardrobe door” have been given additional meanings by C. S. Lewis: any reference to it requires no explanation simply because everyone knows.
Now I’ve read my Gandhi and while I’ve always found his writing incredibly coherent and often inspired, I haven’t necessarily thought of it as lyrical. I realise now that this is because I had not known where to look.
What does “SM” stand for in the context of Leonardo da Vinci? Our visual engagement with the painting has been skewed by fictionalised stories, lurid journalism, and attributional vitriol. For me, SM now stands for “Sensationalised Mess.” How the painting actually works as a devotional image, what it means, and how it embodies Leonardo’s science and art have become lost.
At OUP, we are the largest university press publisher of SHAPE disciplines. Back in 2021, we joined the SHAPE initiative along with the British Academy, LSE, the Arts Council, and other key partners to show our support and advocacy for these vitally important areas of research and scholarship.
Adrastos Omissi argues that the collapse of the West Roman Empire in the fifth century AD was caused not, primarily, by invasions of external “barbarians” from Germanic Europe, but was rather a product of the endemic civil wars that sprang up in the Roman Empire from the third century AD onwards.
Some of the most acclaimed films to come out of the horror mini-boom of the past decade mix history and horror in disconcerting ways. Of course, these are not the first scary movies or stories do this. But when, and how, did horror first get historical?
As a not-for-profit university press which publishes over 75% of its journals on behalf of scholarly societies and other organisations, OUP is committed to a transparent approach to OA. The transition to OA can appear opaque, steeped in jargon and complexity, and we see a major part of our role in the move to OA as being as open and clear as possible.