830 Becoming Stendhal (with Hadley Suter) | A Literary Tribute to Dolly Parton
We often say it's important for a person to be "authentic," but what does that mean? Why is that necessarily a good thing? In this episode,...
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The History of Literature
Enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Find out more at historyofliterature.com and facebook.com/historyofliterature...
Episodes
20 of 797 episodes829 Charlotte Brontë and Her Biographer Elizabeth Gaskell (with Susan Dunne) | My Last Book with Travis Franks | The Odyssey Kerfuffle
Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two of the leading novelists of the 19th century, shared a remarkable literary friendship. After Cha...
828 Confucius (with Mark Csikszentmihalyi) | Celia Bookshop! (with Rachel Pastan) | Jacke in Taiwan
What do we know about the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius? Although people have written biographies of Confucius for over 2,000 ye...
827 American Literature's War on Crime (with Theodore Martin) | W.E.B. DuBois Sits with Shakespeare
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an extreme increase in America's prison population, from roughly 250,000 inmates in 1...
826 The Essayist's Essayist - Phillip Lopate on the Pleasures of Reading Washington Irving and Other "Minor Writers" | Notes from the History of Literature Podcast Tour!
At the time of Washington Irving's death, he was the most famous and widely praised American writer of his or any other era. But his reputat...
825 Henry James's Ghosts (with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm) | My Last Book with David Womersley
In 1895, Henry James suffered through a terrible failure, as his play Guy Domville was greeted by hoots, jeers, and tomatoes being thrown at...
824 Why Did Mary Shelley Try to Erase Her? The Claire Clairmont Story (with Emily Franklin) | My Last Book with Mathelinda Nabugodi
It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord B...
823 Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Shakespeare in a Divided America (with James Shapiro)
United States President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth were both deeply immersed in Shakespeare's works. And yet, the co...
822 Wild Thoreau (with Lydia Willsky-Ciollo) | My Last Book with Douglas Clark
Henry David Thoreau was not a traditional Christian, and yet he was a deeply, profoundly religious man. In this episode, Jacke talks to Lydi...
821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser)
The kiss! What could be more romantic? And yet, as historian Katie Barclay discovered when writing her book The Kiss: A History of Passion a...
820 Irish Radical Poet Eva Gore-Booth (with Sonja Tiernan)
After reading an email from a listener in Ghana, Jacke talks to Sonja Tiernan about her book Eva Gore-Booth: Irish Radical Poet, Rebel, and...
819 Robert Louis Stevenson (with Glenda Norquay) | The Rise of HOT Literati | My Last Book with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
After discussing a news article detailing the rise of "hot literati," Jacke talks to biographer Glenda Norquay (Robert Louis Stevenson: A Cr...
818 Muriel Spark (with James Bailey) | My Last Book with J. Michael Lennon
Jacke talks to author James Bailey about his critically acclaimed biography Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. PLUS J....
817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard
Jacke gets ready for the release of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the rare instance of a summer blockbuster based on a literary classic, with...
816 Gulliver's Travels at 300 (with David Womersley) | My Last Book with Daniel Mendelsohn
As a literary classic turns 300, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's David Womersley about Jonathan Swift, the nature of satire, and T...
815 Paddy Chayefsky
Thanks in part to beloved films like Marty (1955) and Network (1976), Paddy Chayefsky is often regarded as the greatest writer of television...
814 Shakespeare in Translation (with Daniel Hahn) | My Last Book with Indira Ghose
What is it like to translate Shakespeare into another language? How does one attempt to capture that transcendent magic so familiar to Engli...
813 George Sand (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with Kathleen Antonioli
Upon her death, French novelist George Sand (1804-1876) was widely recognized as one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Europe. An...
812 Talking Classics (with Mary Beard) | My Last Book with Karen Spence
Why are we so fascinated by the ancient world? What can we find in the distant past that is recognizably human--and how do we grapple with t...
811 The Harlem Renaissance [Reclaimed] | My Last Book with Erin Sharkey
The Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of African American arts and culture in the early twentieth century, is hard to define but easy...