Arts
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The History of Literature #400 – Anniversary Special! (with Mike Palindrome)
Celebrating 400 episodes of The History of Literature, Jacke and Mike respond to a listener poll and choose the Top 10 Episodes We Must Do in the Future. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 83 – Overrated! Top 10 Books You Don’t Need to Read Episode 149 – Raising Readers (aka the Power of Literature in an… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #399 – Stephen Crane (with Linda H. Davis)
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) lived fast, died young, and impressed everyone with his prose style and insight into the human condition. While he’s best known today for his novels The Red Badge of Courage and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (along with some classic short stories like “The Open Boat,” “the Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #398 – Fernando Pessoa
Questioning the nature of the self is a standard trope in literature and one of the hallmarks of the Modernist movement. But no one pushed this to the extreme like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). While the use of a pseudonym or two is common enough, Pessoa wrote poems as more than a hundred “heteronyms”… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #397 – Plath, Hughes, and the “Other Woman” – Assia Wevill and Her Writings (with Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter Steinberg)
In 1961, poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath rented their flat to a Canadian poet and his wife, the beautiful, accomplished, and slightly mysterious Assia Wevill. Soon afterward, Ted and Assia began having an affair. Within a year, Assia was pregnant with Ted’s child and Sylvia, after years of suffering from depression, had committed suicide.… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #396 – Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (with Heather Clark)
Ultimately, the marital relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was filled with pain and ended in tragedy. At the outset, however, things were very different. Within months of their first meeting at Cambridge, they had fallen in love, gotten married, and started having children – all while writing poetry and supporting one another’s art.… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #395 – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (A Best of HOL Episode)
Jacke plays a clip from Nabokov discussing his famous novel Lolita, in which the frantic narrator Humbert Humbert recounts his passionate (and illegal, immoral, and illicit) love for a young girl. After hearing from the author, Jacke plays clips from three History of Literature Podcast interviews: Jenny Minton Quigley, Jim Shepard,, and Joshua Ferris. Additional listening:… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #394 – Freud and Fiction | PLUS An Assia Wevill Preview
What narrative techniques did Freud borrow and employ? What was the effect? And what did it mean for the literary critics who followed? Following his look at the life and major works of Sigmund Freud, Jacke describes Freud and his followers’ at-times fraught relationship with fiction and fiction writers, with a particularly close look at… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #393 – Writers in Odessa, Ukraine’s “Black Sea Pearl” | PLUS Margot Reads Boswell
Still recovering from his immersion in Sigmund Freud, Jacke looks instead to one of the world’s great literary cities: Odessa. More than 300 writers have lived in, traveled through, and/or written about Ukraine’s “pearl of the Black Sea” – what did they find so compelling? And what did they write about afterwards? PLUS we continue… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #392 – Sigmund Freud
As the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Although many of his claims and theories are still hotly debated, for decades his ideas dominated writers and thinkers around the world – and they continue to exert a major influence on how we view ourselves… Continue reading
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The History of Literature #391 – Mark Twain’s Publishing Fiasco | Great Literary Terms and Devices Part 2 (with Mike Palindrome)
Mark Twain was an enormously successful writer and a horrendous businessperson, with a weakness for gadgets and inventions that cost him a fortune. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at his efforts to start his own publishing company, which started off strong but quickly descended into bankruptcy and ruin. What was he trying to… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 