Latest posts
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The Golden Age of Children’s Classics: Alice, Oz, and the Books That Shaped Childhood
Sometime in the half-century between 1865 and 1911, childhood acquired a literature of its own, and the books written in those years have never been…
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The Decadents: Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Art for Art’s Sake
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” So Wilde announced in the preface to The…
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The Picaresque: Don Quixote, Gargantua, and the Comic Road
Before the novel was respectable, it was a vagabond. The form we now teach in universities and bind in cloth began its life in the gutter, in the company…
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Sea Stories: Melville, Conrad, and the Ocean as Fate
There is a kind of book that cannot happen on land. Not because the action requires water, but because the sea does something to character that a drawing…
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Madame Bovary: Flaubert and the Birth of Realism
In 1857 the French state put a novel on trial for offending public morality, and lost. The novel was Madame Bovary, the author was Gustave Flaubert, and…
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Banned and Burned: The Classics That Scandalized Their Age
In January 1857, a public prosecutor named Ernest Pinard stood before a Paris court and accused a novel of an offense against public morals and religion.…
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The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…
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H.P. Lovecraft and the Birth of Cosmic Horror
Most horror flatters us. It assumes that human beings matter enough to be worth tormenting — that there is a vengeful ghost who cares about us, a…