Latest posts
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The King James Bible as English Literature
Read these words aloud: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” Eleven words, ten of them of one syllable, the eleventh borrowed for an…
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Paradise Lost: Milton’s Satan and the Problem of Evil
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” It is the most quoted line John Milton ever wrote, and very nearly everyone who quotes it has the speaker…
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Banned and Burned: The Classics That Scandalized Their Age
In January 1857, a public prosecutor named Ernest Pinard stood before a Paris court and accused a novel of an offense against public morals and religion.…
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Dark Originals
The stepsisters in the Grimms’ Cinderella do not merely fail to fit the slipper. They take a knife to themselves. The mother hands the first one a blade…
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Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Dare to Know
In December 1783, a Berlin clergyman named Johann Friedrich Zöllner published an essay arguing that couples should be married in church, and dropped into…
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Robinson Crusoe: The First English Novel and the Self-Made Man
In 1719 a sixty-year-old Londoner with a long career as a merchant, a spy, a pamphleteer, and a bankrupt published a book whose full title ran to a…
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The Communist Manifesto: Reading Marx Without the Caricature
Few documents have been more thoroughly read about and less thoroughly read than the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the slim pamphlet Karl Marx and…
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Alice in Wonderland: The Logic of Nonsense
On a golden afternoon in July 1862, a shy Oxford mathematics don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three young daughters of the college dean rowing…
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The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…
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Thoreau’s Walden: The Case for Living Deliberately
On the Fourth of July, 1845 — Independence Day, and Thoreau chose the date on purpose — a Harvard-educated handyman and sometime schoolteacher moved into…