According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings ... Show More
Aug 10
London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped a ... Show More
25 m
Aug 2
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical maste ... Show More
35m 43s
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
Jun 2024
617 Politics and Grace in Early Modern Literature (with Deni Kasa) | Mike Recommends... James Baldwin! | My Last Book with Carlos Allende
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 K ... Show More
1h 9m
Jan 2022
378 Liu Xinwu and the "Scar Literature" of China (with Jeremy Tiang) | Bharati Sneak Preview (with Mira Sundara Rajan)
In this episode, Jacke talks to Jeremy Tiang about his new translation of The Wedding Party, a Chinese classic contemporary novel written in the early 1980s by Liu Xinwu, one of the originators of what has been termed "scar literature." PLUS we feature a sneak preview of our conv ... Show More
49m 26s
Jul 2016
Ep. 4 | Motherhood, Mythology, and Marjane
This week, the Reading discuss Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward and Persepolis by Majane Satrapi.
Books Mentioned in this Podcast
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn WardPersepolis by Marjane SatropiSex Object by Jessica ValentiSex and Girls by Peggy OrgensteinAll the Single Ladies by ... Show More
39m 14s