Latest posts
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The House of the Seven Gables: Hawthorne’s Haunted America
“The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable…
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Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novelist of the Industrial Age
When Charles Dickens wanted a writer who could make the cotton mills of the north feel like a moral emergency rather than a statistical abstraction, he…
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Zane Grey and Riders of the Purple Sage: The Novel That Fixed the Western
Close your eyes and picture a Western. The lone rider on the ridge, dressed in black, gun low on the hip. The vast sweep of red rock and sagebrush. The…
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Achilles: The Hero Who Chose a Short, Bright Life
Achilles knew. That is the detail the popular image of him — the invincible warrior, the heel, the rage — tends to bury, and it is the detail…
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Norse Myth vs Greek Myth: Two Ways to Imagine the Gods
The Greek gods are immortal. The Norse gods are doomed. Everything else — the temperament, the humor, the moral weather, the kind of hero each world…
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Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone: The First Great Detective Novel
T. S. Eliot called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels,” and the verdict has held for a century and a half, which…
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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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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…