The History of Literature
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The History of Literature
Amateur enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Episodes are not in chronological order and you don't need to start at the beginning - feel free to jump in wherever you like! Find out more at historyofliterature.com and faceboo...
Recente afleveringen
761 afleveringen
796 Marion Turner and The Wife of Bath (Revisited)
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode,...
795 Will Tosh and Queer Shakespeare (Revisited)
As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode,...
794 E.T.A. Hoffmann (with Ritchie Robertson) | My Last Book with Gerri Kimber
In addition to being an accomplished lawyer and a highly influential music critic, the nineteenth-century German Romantic Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffma...
793 The Secret Order of Shandeans: Laurence Sterne in Early Soviet Russia (with Peter Budrin) | My Last Book with Edward Watts
The 1920s were a tumultuous time for Russia, as the nation careened from the aftermath of revolution to the death of Lenin, the establishment of the S...
792 Death and Decay in Early Modern Lyric Poetry (with Eileen Sperry) | My Last Book with Bruce Gordon
In this episode, Jacke talks to author Eileen Sperry about her book This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric, which examines how the l...
791 Emilia Lanier (a.k.a Aemilia Bassano Lanyer) Revisited
The "Forgotten Women of Literature" series continues with a look at Aemilia Bassano Lanyer (1569-1645), the first Englishwoman to publish a volume of...
790 Madness and Myth (with Natasha Joukovsky) | My Last Book with Kimberly Lau
What happens when an abnormally average man is suddenly on a path to greatness, as his picks in the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament start panning ou...
789 The 25 Greatest Books of All Time (with Mike Palindrome) | My Last Book with Cass Sunstein
In 2025, Jacke began a countdown of the top 25 greatest books of all time, as part of a series called "25 for 25." In this episode, Jacke reveals the...
788 John Ruskin (with Bob Blaisdell) | My Last Book with Francesca Wade
Nineteenth-century art critic and polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a visionary thinker and influential social commentator who revolutionized how s...
787 Why Poetry with Matthew Zapruder Encore
In his book Why Poetry, the poet Matthew Zapruder issued "an impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for its accessib...
786 Cherokee Novelist and Poet John Rollin Ridge (with Travis Franks)
A member of the Cherokee nation, John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) lived a dramatic life full of contradictions. He also became the first Native American...
785 Literature in an Age of Anti-Immigration Sentiment (with Daniel Olivas) | My Last Book with Janet Todd
Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. In this episode, Jacke talks t...
784 Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King (with William O. Stephens)
In the fourth century B.C., Plato famously posited a philosopher-king as the ideal ruler for his imagined Republic. Five hundred years later, the Roma...
783 Southern Imagining (with Elleke Boehmer) | My Last Book with John McMurtrie
The world has a northern bias: our politics, culture, and literature all tend to view the northern viewpoint as the default position, leaving the far...
782 Consent in the Regency Novel (with Zoë McGee)
Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dr. Zoë Mc...
781 Laurie Frankel's Enormous Wings | My Last Book with Rhodri Lewis
"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It, "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of passing fro...
780 Chekhov on Writing (with Bob Blaisdell)
In an 1886 letter to his brother, Anton Chekhov delivered some advice about truthfulness in writing. "Don't invent sufferings you have not experienced...
779 Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises (with Mike Palindrome) RECLAIMED
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His plain, economical prose style--inspired by jour...
778 A History of Aphorisms (with James Geary) | My Last Book with Paul Chrystal
For thousands of years, writers from ancient China to contemporary meme-makers have demonstrated the power of the short, witty, philosophical phrases...
777 T.S. Eliot's "Preludes" | "The Story of the Marquis de Cressy" by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (with Kate Deimling)
Jacke kicks off the episode with an analysis of T.S. Eliot's underappreciated poem of urban alienation, "Preludes." Then scholar and translator Kate D...
776 Mary Shelley in Bath (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with D.G. Hampton
As fans of the novel know, Frankenstein began with a flash of insight during an ill-fated holiday near Geneva in the summer of 1816, when the young wo...
775 Celebrity Authorship in the Nineteenth Century (with Sarah Allison) | My Last Book with Emily Van Duyne
When assessing the literature of an era, we tend to think of the works that have made it into the canon - but in so doing, we're in danger of overlook...
774 Robert Louis Stevenson (with Leo Damrosch)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) suffered from poor health for most of his life, and yet he possessed immense vitality. In this episode, Jacke talks...
773 The Films of Rob Reiner (with Mike Palindrome) | My Last Book with Matt Abrahams
In mid-December 2025, the world was shocked by the horrible and tragic news that beloved film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner...
772 Thucydides and The History of the Peloponnesian War (with Polly Low and Robin Waterfield) | My Last Book with James West
The Ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) called his history of a war between Athens and Sparta "a possession for all time."...
771 Shakespeare and the Generation of Genius - The Role of Performing Arts in education (with Robin Lithgow) - RECLAIMED
Robin Lithgow spent her life immersed in the performing arts, including a childhood in the theater and decades spent as an educator and arts administr...
770 Shakespeare and Civility (with Indira Ghose) | Robert W. Service and "The Cremation of Sam McGee"
Civility can help a society overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good--and when political and religious factions threaten to break a...
769 The European Byron (with Jonathan Gross) | The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (#3 GBOAT)
The Romantic poet Byron (1788-1824) was more than just the scandal-ridden celebrity who was famously dubbed "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"--he was...
768 Young James Baldwin (with Nicholas Boggs) | My Last Book with Bruce Robbins
The American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) spent the second half of his life as a fixture in American intellectual life....
767 A Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (with Mathelinda Nabugodi) | My Last Book with Richard Kopley
A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair... In this episode, Jack...
766 Gertrude Stein (with Francesca Wade) | Ruskin on the Only One Way to Get Art | My Last Book with Holly Baggett
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) has long been one of the most famous - and most polarizing - figures in modernism. Was she a trailblazing genius? Or a lite...
765 Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne (with Mike Palindrome)
In Puritan New England, a young man leaves Faith, his wife, to go into the forest to meet the Devil. It's a story "as deep as Dante," said Herman Melv...
764 Two Thousand Years of Roman History (with Edward J. Watts) | My Last Book with Nathan Hensley
What do we talk about when we talk about ancient Romans? For many of us, it's typically a fairly narrow slice of history: the toga-clad figures of Cic...
763 Emily's Desk Drawer
After the publication of her debut novel Wuthering Heights in December of 1847, Emily Brontë - still writing under her pen name Ellis Bell - joined Cu...
762 The History of the Sonnet
“A sonnet,” said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “is a moment’s monument.” But who invented the sonnet? Who brought it to prominence? How has it chan...
761 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) | The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (#4 Greatest Book of All Time)
Stephen Mitchell has translated or adapted some of the world's most beautiful and spiritually rich texts, including The Gospel According to Jesus, The...
760 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, and Ebeneezer Scrooge
In this holiday-themed episode, a sentimental Jacke takes a look at Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), and the creation of Ebeneezer Scrooge....
759 The Godfather (with Karen Spence) | My Last Book with Elyse Graham
Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece The Godfather routinely tops lists of the greatest films ever made - and when it doesn't, it's often because its se...
758 Jane Austen in 41 Objects (with Kathryn Sutherland) | 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (#5 Greatest Book of All Time)
How well can we know someone through the objects they encountered? In this episode, Jacke talks to Kathryn Sutherland, Senior Research fellow at St. A...
757 George Orwell's 1984 (#6 Greatest Book of All Time)
In 1949, American critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the New Yorker, was quick to recognize the achievement of George Orwell's new novel. "[P]rofound,...