Latest posts
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Homeric Hymns: The Gods in Their Own Voices
In the Iliad and the Odyssey, the gods are supporting players in a human drama. They lean down out of the bright air to nudge a spear, save a favorite,…
-
Alexandre Dumas: The Complete Novels, Beyond the Musketeers
Ask a reader to name an Alexandre Dumas novel and you will get one of two answers, sometimes both: The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.…
-
Manufacturing an Enemy: How Propaganda Dehumanizes
Propaganda did not kill six million people. Police killed them, and soldiers, and bureaucrats who stamped the forms, and the railwaymen who drove the…
-
‘Song of Myself’: A Guide to Whitman’s Great Poem
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” the poem begins, and a reader meeting it for the first time can be forgiven for flinching at the apparent vanity.…
-
Anne of Green Gables: Why Montgomery’s Orphan Still Matters
When Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert send to the orphan asylum for a boy to help work their Prince Edward Island farm, what arrives instead, in the spring of…
-
The Invention of the Western: Owen Wister and the Birth of a Genre
Every genre has a founding document, a single book in which the conventions that will harden into formula are first assembled and made to seem inevitable.…
-
Penelope and the Women of the Odyssey
Three thousand years before the novel learned to look inside a woman’s mind, Homer built an epic whose hero spends ten years trying to get home to his…