The History of Literature #419 – Christina Rossetti

July 11, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

It’s the Christina Rossetti episode! Jacke finally musters up the energy to finish what he started, and takes a look at one of the great poets of the Victorian era (and the creator of “Goblin Market,” one of the strangest poems he has ever read. How did this seemingly prim, even matronly woman, known for her religious devotion and for rejecting three suitors on mostly religious grounds, come to write such a bizarre and hedonistic poem? What did she say about posing for the pre-Raphaelites and their paintings? What did John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf say about her? Let’s find out!

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The History of Literature #418 – “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

July 10, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

Because Jacke could not stop for the scheduled episode topics, a certain poem kindly stopped for him. Luckily it’s one of the greatest poems of all time! It’s by the 19th-century American genius Emily Dickinson, and it packs into seven short stanzas a journey through life, death, and the cosmos.

Read a copy of the poem here:

Because I could not stop for Death – (479)

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The History of Literature #417 – What Happened on Roanoke Island? (with Kimberly Brock)

July 9, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

It’s one of the great mysteries in American history. The “lost colony” of Roanoke Island, where 120 or so men, women, and children living in the first permanent English settlement in North America simply disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a mysterious word carved into a tree trunk. While historians remain baffled, speculation has run rampant, with everything from massacre to relocation to space alien abduction taking their turns as potential theories. What happened to those people? And is there any way to tell their story? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Kimberly Brock about her novel The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, which extends the mystery of Roanoke and its legacy from the late seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth.

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The History of Literature #415 – “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

July 7, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

As a devout and passionate religious observer, Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) lived a life that might seem, at first glance, as proper and tame. Even some of her greatest works, devotional poems and verses for children, strike us as just the kind of art a fine upstanding moralist might generate. But there was more to Christina Rossetti than that – and in fact, she produced some of the most passionate and idiosyncratic poems of her era. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at her long narrative poem Goblin Market (1859-1862), about two sisters seduced by the fruits being sold by a pack of river goblins, which is one of the most sensationally bizarre poems Jacke has ever read.

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The History of Literature #414 – Henry James’s Golden Bowl (with Dinitia Smith) | William Blake Preview (with John Higgs)

July 6, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

Money. Sex. Power. Family. Those are the conceits at the heart of Henry James’s late-period masterpiece, The Golden Bowl. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Dinitia Smith, whose new novel The Prince reinvigorates this classic story of a wealthy American widower, his doting daughter, her charismatic foreign husband, and the childhood friend whose secret love affairs threaten to jeopardize multiple marriages.

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The History of Literature #413 – Walt Whitman – “Song of Myself”

July 5, 2022July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

In this episode, we resume our look at Walt Whitman’s life and body of work, focusing in particular on the years 1840-1855. Did Whitman’s teaching career end with him being tarred and feathered by an angry mob, as has long been rumored? What happened during his three months in New Orleans? And how did this printer and hack writer wind up writing the twelve poems in Leaves of Grass (1855), thereby becoming the “true poet” that Ralph Waldo Emerson had been searching for?

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The History of Literature #412 – HOL Goes to War (with Elizabeth Samet, Matt Gallagher, and Tom Roston)

July 4, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

In this best-of History of Literature episode, Jacke revisits the topic of war and literature with three guests: Professor Elizabeth Samet (Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point), who teaches literature to military officers in training; Matt Gallagher (Empire City and Youngblood), a veteran who served in Iraq; and Tom Roston (The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five), who places Kurt Vonnegut’s writing in the context of his POW experiences in WWII and his position as an antiwar prophet to the Vietnam generation.

Full episodes are available at:

143 A Soldier’s Heart (with Elizabeth Samet)
Conflict Literature (with Matt Gallagher)
362 Kurt Vonnegut (with Tom Roston)

The History of Literature #410 – What Is American Literature? (with Ilan Stavans)

May 30, 2022May 27, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

America, America, America… a continent, a nation, a people, and a whole lotta books. But how does America define itself? Who defines it? Where did the idea of American exceptionalism come from? And how does literature fit into any of this? In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Ilan Stavans about his new book, What Is American Literature?

ILAN STAVANS is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and the host of the NPR podcast “In Contrast”. The recipient of numerous international awards, his work, adapted into film, theatre, TV, and radio, has been translated into twenty languages.

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The History of Literature #408 – Dylan Thomas (with Scott Carter)

May 28, 2022May 27, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

Do not go gentle into this good episode! Rage, rage against the dying of the… well, things fall apart there, don’t they? (Because we’re not gifted poets like Dylan Thomas!) In this episode, Jacke talks to producer, playwright, and performer Scott Carter about his lifelong passion for the Welsh bard who took the U.K. by storm in the mid-twentieth-century and America by even stormier storm soon thereafter. Which poems are best? What’s good about them? How did they feed into the mythic reputation of Dylan Thomas? And what does it all mean for us today?

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The History of Literature #407 – “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell

May 27, 2022 ~ jackewilson ~ Leave a comment

Elizabeth Gaskell had only written one novel when Charles Dickens started publishing her work in his journal Household Words. But soon she would become famous as the author of Cranford and North and South, two of the best novels of the Victorian era. Dickens proved to be a generous and artist-friendly editor, offering suggestions but allowing Gaskell to have the final say over her work (with one exception). In this episode, Jacke looks at the ghost story that Dickens asked Gaskell to write, along with the alternative ending that Dickens first suggested and then wrote for her consideration.

Additional listening ideas:

Like Dickens? And Christmas ghost stories? Try our episode on Ebeneezer Scrooge (#293)..
Mad about the Victorians? We talked about Middlemarch with Yang Huang in Episode 330 and Forbidden Victorian Love with Mimi Matthews in Episode 382..
Did you know that Mrs. Gaskell wrote a famous biography of Charlotte Brönte? We did our own deep dive into the Bröntes back in 2019.

Jacke Wilson

Author

Fiction

The History of Literature #419 – Christina Rossetti

The History of Literature #418 – “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

The History of Literature #417 – What Happened on Roanoke Island? (with Kimberly Brock)

The History of Literature #415 – “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

The History of Literature #414 – Henry James’s Golden Bowl (with Dinitia Smith) | William Blake Preview (with John Higgs)

The History of Literature #413 – Walt Whitman – “Song of Myself”

The History of Literature #412 – HOL Goes to War (with Elizabeth Samet, Matt Gallagher, and Tom Roston)

The History of Literature #410 – What Is American Literature? (with Ilan Stavans)

The History of Literature #408 – Dylan Thomas (with Scott Carter)

The History of Literature #407 – “The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell

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