Latest posts
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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,…
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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.…
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‘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.…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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The Invention of Jesus: From Galilean Preacher to God
Somewhere around the year 30 of the common era, an itinerant Jewish preacher from the Galilean hills was executed by the Roman authorities in Jerusalem,…
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Why Dante Put His Enemies in Hell: The Politics of the Comedy
We are taught to read the Divine Comedy as a spiritual epic — the soul’s journey from the dark wood through Hell and Purgatory to the vision of God.…
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John Carter of Mars: Burroughs’s Other Mythology
In 1911, a failed pencil-sharpener salesman in Chicago, deep in debt and convinced he could write garbage at least as well as the garbage filling the pulp…
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Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass: The Poem That Invented American Poetry
In the summer of 1855, a Brooklyn printer set type for a thin quarto of twelve untitled poems and put his own name nowhere on the title page. There was,…