Latest posts
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Rome and the Fall: Reading the Histories of the Barbarian Age
Everyone thinks they know what Edward Gibbon said about the fall of Rome. He blamed the Christians. The barbarians at the gate, the soft and praying…
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E. M. Forster and A Room with a View: The Edwardian Heart
A young Englishwoman stands at her pension window in Florence and complains that her room looks onto a courtyard instead of the Arno. A stranger across…
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Arsène Lupin: The Gentleman Thief Who Mocked Sherlock Holmes
At the end of his great duel with the English detective, Arsène Lupin loses. The case is decided against him; the master of method has, on points,…
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The Invention of Poe: How a Genius Was Slandered Into Myth
On October 9, 1849, two days after Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital under circumstances no one has ever fully explained, the New-York Daily…
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Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter: Guilt and the Puritan Shadow
The most subversive thing about The Scarlet Letter is that its heroine never repents. Hester Prynne wears the embroidered “A” that her Puritan neighbors…
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George Eliot and Middlemarch: The Greatest English Novel?
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and the backhanded compliment still stings because it is…
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B. M. Bower: The Woman Who Wrote the West Behind a Man’s Initials
Near the close of Chip, of the Flying U — the 1904 novel that launched B. M. Bower’s career and a series that would feed her for thirty years — a cowboy…
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Homer: The Complete Works — Why Read All of Homer in One Volume
There is a moment in the twenty-second book of the Iliad, just after Achilles has run Hector down beneath the walls of Troy, when the narrative pauses to…
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Stream of Consciousness: How the Death of the All-Knowing Narrator Remade the Novel
Stream of consciousness wasn’t a technique — it was what the novel did when the all-knowing narrator died. A deep essay on modernism, Woolf, and Joyce.
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Huckleberry Finn and the American Voice
Why is Huckleberry Finn important to American literature?