Early modern poets - John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Abraham Cowley - lived in a world where theological questions were as hotly contested as political struggles over issues like empire, gender, civil war, and poetic authority. In this episode, Jacke talks to Deni Kasa (The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature) about the ways poets used ... Show More
Aug 31
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 1940 to well over two million by 2008. At the same time, American readers were devouring mysteries, thrillers, detective novels, police proce ... Show More
1h 23m
Aug 27
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 reputation soon dwindled, and today he's known primarily as the author of just two stories ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle"), wh ... Show More
1h 19m
Aug 24
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 the play's author. James responded by starting work on his masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, which tells the story of a governess and the ... Show More
1h 8m
Apr 2001
Literary Modernism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss literary modernism. In James Joyce’s Ulysses he writes, “Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man may lay down his wife for a friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius Professo ... Show More
42m 13s
Oct 2024
John Milton: life of the week
Across the 65 years of his life, writer John Milton packed a lot in: poet, polemicist, political operator – engaging with ideas that often challenged the status quo. In today's Life of the Week episode, Professor Islam Issa speaks to Matt Elton about the life and legacy of this 1 ... Show More
37m 43s
Dec 2021
The Sunday Debate: Shakespeare vs Milton
Nearly four centuries after his death, no writer has matched William Shakespeare’s influence across drama, theatre and poetry but a few have come close. John Milton, say his fans, works on an altogether different, higher plane. In Paradise Lost – one of the most significant poems ... Show More
1h 57m
May 2021
16.18: Poetry and the Fantastic
Your Hosts: Mary Robinette, Dan, Amal, and Howard For the last seven episodes we've explored language, meaning, and their overlap with that thing we mean when we use language to say "poetry." In this episode we step back to some origins, including, at a meta-level, the origins of ... Show More
24m 57s
Jul 2023
Take A Walk On The Wild Side
This week, AE Stallings, the new Oxford professor of poetry, on the lives of poets; and Ann Kennedy Smith considers the different faces of Cornwall.'Sleeping on islands: A life in poetry', by Andrew Motion'The American poet laureate: A history of US poetry and the state', by Amy ... Show More
1h 1m
Aug 2023
History of Ideas: James Baldwin
This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, vi ... Show More
53m 4s