Latest posts
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The House of Atreus: The Curse That Became Greek Tragedy
No family in Greek myth is as thoroughly damned as the house of Atreus, and no curse in the literature does as much work. It begins with a man who tried…
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The Brontë Sisters: One Family, Seven Novels, and a Myth
Read on its own, Wuthering Heights looks like a book that fell out of the sky — a work of such concentrated strangeness that it seems to have no…
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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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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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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…