The History of Literature

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 wr...

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) Additional listening suggestio...

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 spa...

In his lifetime, the Romantic poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827) was barely known and frequently misunderstood. Today, his genius is widely celebrated and his poems are some of the most famous in the English language - and yet we still struggle to comprehend his unique way of seeing the world. In this episode, Blakean biographer John Higgs, author of the new book William Blake vs. the Wor...

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 t...

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 multi...

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...

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 an...

In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a new poet who would reflect the spirit and potential of America. In 1855, a then-unknown poet named Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, his attempt to fulfill Emerson's wish. In this episode, Jacke looks at Whitman's early life and career, contrasting Leaves of Grass with the works of a pair of poets that Emerson may have had in mind when he railed agai...

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...

In our last look at Søren Kierkegaard, we left our hero after he had just left the love of his life, Regine Olsen, in favor of a life devoted to God and philosophy. In this episode, Jacke looks at one of the great products of that seismic schism: Fear and Trembling, or Kierkegaard's analysis of God's command that Abraham should sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. How does Abraham's decision fit into...

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 th...

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 e...

Novelist Beverly Gologorsky joins Jacke for a discussion of the tumultuous years from 1967 to 1971, which provides the background for her new novel. In Can You See the Wind?, a working-class family in the Bronx struggles to make a better world, even as the world spins into chaos. Columbia professor (and friend of the podcast) Farah Jasmine Griffin says "Beverly Gologorsky brings a clarity of visio...

The nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is well known as the father of existentialism and one of the great Christian thinkers of all time. But it is in his relationship with Regine Olsen - his love for her, their brief engagement, and the horrible breakup, in which he left her for a life devoted to the pursuit of knowledge - where we see his true literary gifts. In...

Author Robin Hemley joins Jacke for a discussion of Kafka, writerly ambition, and his new novel Oblivion: An After Autobiography, which tells the story of a midlist author who finds himself in the posthumous world where authors fade from obscurity into the world of Oblivion...unless they can manage to write their way out. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 349 - Kafka's Metamorphosis (with...

Mysteries! In this best-of episode, Jacke revisits conversations with three guests for three different angles on this popular and enduring literary genre. First, Jonah Lehrer (Mystery: A Seduction, A Strategy, A Solution) discusses what exactly makes mysteries so compelling. Then, novelist Christina Kovac, author of the mystery The Cutaway, joins Jacke for a discussion of setting a mystery in the...

Literature enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Find out more at historyofliterature.com and facebook.com/historyofliterature. Support the show by visiting patreon.com/literature or paypal.me/jackewilson. New episodes every Monday and Thursday wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

After being given $700 in Spanish gold by some newspapers, a 25-year-old Stephen Crane set out for Florida, where he planned to travel by boat to Cuba and cover the impending Spanish-American War as a war correspondent. But the steamship he boarded capsized after hitting some sandbars, forcing Crane and 28 shipmates - most of them arms runners friendly to the Cuban insurrectionists - into lifeboat...

Jacke takes a look at the first work of literature by an African American author, courtesy of Fictions of America: The Book of Firsts by Uli Baer and Smaran Dayal. Then he turns things over to Storybound, a Podglomerate podcast, for a conversation with author Melissa Chadburn and excerpts from her essay "The Throwaways." Melissa Chadburn’s writing has appeared in The LA Times, NYT Book Review, NYR...

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 Imperfect World) Episode 92 - The Books of Our Lives Help support the show at patreon.c...

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 Sky"), his literary fame during his life was supplemente...

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" (as he called them), giving many of them their own richly developed biographies, w...

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. Six years later, Assia would do the same. It's a horribly...

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. What did they see in each other as people and as poets?...