Podcast
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History of Literature #91 – In Which John Donne Decides to Write a Poem About a Flea
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:42 — 33.7MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More John Donne (1572-1631) may have been the most wildly inventive poet who ever lived. But that doesn’t mean he was the most successful. Dr. Johnson, writing a hundred years later, objected to… Continue reading
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History of Literature #90 – Mark Twain’s Final Request
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:31 — 35.5MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More In 1910, the American author Mark Twain took to his bed in his Connecticut home. Weakened by disease and no longer able to write, the legendary humorist (and author of The Adventures of… Continue reading
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History of Literature #89 – Primo Levi
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:28 — 41.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More Primo Levi (1919-1987) lived quietly and wrote with restraint. An Italian Jewish writer, professional chemist, and Holocaust survivor, he was, said Italo Calvino, “one of the most important and gifted writers of… Continue reading
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History of Literature #88 – The Harlem Renaissance
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:41 — 35.8MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More The Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of African American arts and culture in the early twentieth century, is hard to define and easy to admire. Coupled with the Great Migration, in which… Continue reading
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History of Literature #87 – Man in Love: The Passions of D.H. Lawrence
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:08 — 37.4MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More The Edwardian novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) lived and wrote with the fury of a thousand suns. His novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow are commonly… Continue reading
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History of Literature #86 – Don Juan in Literature (aka The Case of the Red-Hot Lover)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:17 — 36.9MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More From his earliest days as a popular legend, through many appearances in drama and poetry and fiction and film, the sexual conquistador Don Juan has been the vehicle for authors and artists to… Continue reading
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History of Literature #85 – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:11 — 45.7MB) | Embed Subscribe: iTunes | Android | Email | RSS | More In 1813, a young author named Jane Austen built on the success of her popular novel Sense and Sensibility with a new novel about the emotional life of an appealing protagonist named Elizabeth Bennet,… Continue reading
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History of Literature #83 – Overrated! Top 10 Books You Don’t Need to Read
Life is short, and books are many. How many great books have you read? How many more have you NOT read? How to choose? Mike Palindrome, President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for a discussion of overrated classics and the pleasures of shortening one’s list of must-reads. Podcast: Play in new window |… Continue reading
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History of Literature #82 – Robinson Crusoe
In 1719, a prolific author and political agitator named Daniel Defoe published a long-form narrative about a shipwrecked sailor stranded on a desert island, who lives in solitude for 27 years before famously seeing a human footprint on the sand. Often viewed as the first novel written in English, Robinson Crusoe was a smash hit in its day and has been… Continue reading
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History of Literature #81 – Faust (aka The Devil Went Down to Germany)
Have you ever wanted something so badly you’d sell your soul to get it? Youth? Wealth? Sex? Power? Knowledge? We call it making a deal with the devil, or in more literary terms, a Faustian bargain. But who was Faust? How did his tale first get told? How was his legend advanced, and what great… Continue reading
Jacke Wilson 