Latest posts
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The Greek Underworld: What the Dead Taught Odysseus
Halfway through the Odyssey, the most resourceful man in Greek poetry does the one thing no living man is supposed to do: he sails to the edge of the…
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Karl May’s Orient Cycle: Old Shatterhand Goes East
The strangest fact about Karl May, the most widely read German author of the past century and a half, is that he wrote with photographic confidence about…
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The Art of Rhetoric: How to Win an Argument the Classical Way
Watch any televised debate to its final seconds and you will see a curious thing: a candidate who has been thoroughly refuted, whose figures were wrong…
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Cranford and the Comedy of Small-Town England
There is a moment early in Cranford when a cow, having tumbled into a lime-pit and lost most of her hair, is dressed by her devoted owner in a flannel…
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Monsters of the Odyssey: Cyclops, Sirens, and the Map of Fear
Trace Odysseus’s voyage home on a map and you get nonsense: a Mediterranean stretched into a fairy-tale ocean where an island of cannibal giants sits a…
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D. H. Lawrence: The Body’s Truth in Four Major Novels
At the close of Sons and Lovers, a young man walks at dusk toward the lights of a town, away from the house where his mother lies dead, and the novel’s…
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Political Violence in America: A Long, Recurring Shadow
On the morning of July 11, 1804, the sitting Vice President of the United States rowed across the Hudson to a ledge in Weehawken, New Jersey, and shot the…
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The American Renaissance: How a Nation Found Its Literature
In 1850 the United States was seventy-four years old and had, by the lights of European critics, produced almost no literature worth the name. Sydney…
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Brontë, the Boldest Sister
For a century and a half the verdict on Anne Brontë held firm: she was the quiet one, the lesser sister, the third Brontë who never quite reached the heat…
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Cowboys: The Myth, the History, and the Novels in Between
The cowboy is the most successful fiction the United States ever produced — so successful that most people cannot tell where the history ends and the…