The History Of Literature

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 Blume) Episode 139 - A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka Episode 134 - The Greatest Night of Franz Kafka's Life Music Credits: “⁠Handel – Entrance to the Queen of Sheba⁠” by Advent Chamber Orchestra (From the ⁠Free Music Archive⁠ / ⁠CC by SA⁠). Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 world of television news. Gillian Gill, author of Agatha Christie: The Women and Her Mysteries, stops by next for a discussion of the Queen of Mystery and her mysterious disappearance. And finally, Jonah Lehrer returns for a discussion of mysteries as they play out in Hamlet, Harry Potter, and human beings. Enjoy! Additional listening ideas: Episode 350 - Mystery! (with Jonah Lehrer) Episode 109 - Women of Mystery (with Christina Kovac) The History of Literature Podcast - Agatha Christie (with Gillian Gill) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature

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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 lifeboats and head into the open sea. Crane was one of the last to leave, and he wound up sharing a dinghy with the ship's captain and two others. While he didn't get to cover the war, the story of the four men, who struggled for days to survive without being rescued, helped add to Crane's growing literary fame. In this episode, Jacke explores (and reads in its entirety) the classic Stephen Crane story of shipwreck, "The Open Boat." Additional listening suggestions: Episode 90 - Mark Twain's Final Request Episode 101 - Writers at Work Conflict Literature (with Matt Gallagher) Help support the show at patreon.com/literat

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, NYRB, Longreads, Paris Review online, and dozens other places. Her essay on food insecurity was published in “Best American Food Writing 2019.” She’s done extensive reporting on the child welfare system and appears in the Netflix docuseries “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez.” Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. She is a Ph.D. candidate at USC’s Creative Writing Program.  Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. Storybound is hosted by Jude Brewer and brought to you by The Podglomerate and Lit Hub Radio. Music Credits: "Casa Bossa Nova" by Kevi

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.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 supplemented by his notorious exploits. Shipwrecks, romance, scandal, and high-profile court cases - and he somehow also found time to befriend literary lions like H.G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. In this episode, Jacke talks to Crane's biographer Linda H. Davis, whose new book Badge of Courage: The Life of Stephen Crane goes deep into the life and mind of the man whose own powers of empathy made him a staple of twentieth-century bookshelves and syllabi.  Additional reading suggestions: Episode 110 - Heart of Darkness - Then and Now Episode 316 - Willa Cather (with Lauren Marino) Episode 275 - Hem

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, writing styles, and distinct subject matter. The wild cast of characters, who sometimes argued with one another and who occasionally inserted themselves into Pessoa's life, fooled many literary critics into thinking that they were individual poets. Although Pessoa was nearly unknown when he died, he left behind a rich body of work to pore through and analyze - and a trunkful of his papers, gathered by later editors intoThe Book of Disquiet, has rendered him essential to a consideration of twentieth-century literature. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the poet who exploded his self into literary fragments, only t

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 tragic tale, like something out of Shakespeare, with genius and artistic ambition and love and sex and poetry entangled with themes of power dynamics, infidelity, and mental health problems. The poetic gifts of Ted and Sylvia - and the tragic ending of their marriage - has kept biographers and essay writers busy. But what about the third woman, Assia Wevill, a successful professional with ambition of her own? What did she write? How did she fit into this triangle? In this episode, Professor Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick and Peter Steinberg, editors of The Collected Writings of Assia Wevill, join Jacke for a discussion of

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? How did they inspire and encourage one another? In this episode, Jacke talks to Plath's biographer Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, about the creative partnership of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Additional listening: Episode 198 - Sylvia Plath Episode 130 - The Poet and the Painter - The Great Love Affair of Anna Akhmatova and Amedeo Modigliani Episode 95 - The Runaway Poets - The Triumphant Love Story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning (A NOTE OF CORRECTION: At one point during this episode, the host mentions the years of Plath's birth and death

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: Episode 318 - Lolita (with Jenny Minton Quigley) Episode 96 - Dracula, Lolita, and the Power of Volcanoes (with Jim Shepard) Episode 112 - The Novelist and the Witch-Doctor: Unpacking Nabokov's Case Against Freud (with Joshua Ferris) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Freud's famous work "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." PLUS a preview of our upcoming episodes featuring Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Assia Wevill. Additional listening ideas: Episode 392: Sigmund Freud Episode 112 The Novelist and the Witch Doctor - Unpacking Nabokov's Case Against Freud (with Joshua Ferris) Episode 48 Hamlet Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 our conversation with Scottish novelist Margot Livesey, who has been reading Boswell's Life of Johnson, generally considered one of the greatest biographies ever written (and one of Jacke's favorite books). Additional listening suggestions: Weeping for Gogol Natalia Ginzburg Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog" Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 and our society. In this episode, we look at Freud's life and some of his most famous works, setting the stage for an analysis of Freud's impact on literature. Additional listening ideas: Episode 112 - The Novelist and the Witch-Doctor: Unpacking Nabokov's Case Against Freud (with Joshua Ferris) Episode 164 - Karl Marx Episode 174 - The Oedipus Trilogy (with Bryan Doerries) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 accomplish? And what were the books that brought him down? After that, Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for part two of a discussion on great literary terms and devices. The two old friends recount the first ten they chose and - tongues firmly in cheek - select THE GREATEST LITERARY TERMS OF ALL TIME, numbers 11-20. Additional listening ideas: Episode #384 - A Writer's Tools - Top 10 Literary Terms and Devices | PLUS F. Scott Fitzgerald's Writing Advice Episode #90 - Mark Twain's Final Request Episode #176 - "The Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. T

In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Victor Hugo (1802-1885), whose poetry, plays, and novels made him one of the leaders of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement. In addition to his famous novels Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, we also look at some of his lesser known works; his family background; the legend of his conception in a Roman temple atop a mountain; his belief in the transformation of poetry throughout the history of human civilization; and the gusto with which he approached both life and literature. Additional listening suggestions: 152 George Sand Albert Camus Stendhal Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Such is the opening of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), the novel that won the National Book Award but repulsed the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Pynchon's special blend of paranoia and postmodernism made him one of the hallmark authors of the Cold War era. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Pynchon's life and works, then is joined by a contemporary author, Antoine Wilson (Mouth to Mouth), for a discussion of his writing process and his recent trip to Pynchonland. ANTOINE WILSON is the author of the novels Panorama City and The Interloper. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and The Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, he lives in Los Angeles. His website is: Anto

"I am never too busy to think of S&S," Jane Austen wrote to her sister, referring to her 1811 novel by its initials, "I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her suckling child." Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen's first published novel. First begun when she was in the throes of her doomed dalliance with Thomas Lefroy, the novel contains the familiar Austen project of a Hero, a Heroine, a Search for Love, and the Obstacle Called Money. In this case, the heroines are two sisters named Elinor and Marianne, representing the "sense" (prudence, restraint) and "sensibility" (passion, impulsiveness) of the title. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the writing of Sense & Sensibility; the still common themes contained within this classic novel; and the 1995 film adaptation, in which Emma Thompson, herself in the midst of an Austen-like entanglement, nevertheless drives a shiv into Jacke's battered old heart. Additional listening suggestions: Episode 85: Pride and Prejudice Episode 302: Jane in Love:

What's it like to be in love with a genius? How does one express oneself? Jacke takes a look at a beautiful 1926 love letter that Vita Sackville-West sent to Virginia Woolf. Then Professor Lauren S. Cardon, author of FASHIONING CHARACTER: Style, Performance, and Identity in Contemporary American Literature, stops by for a discussion of how authors use fashion choices to reveal character - and how this has changed over time. Lauren S. Cardon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama and the author of Fashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature and The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945-2008. Additional listening suggestions: Keats's Great Odes (with Anahid Nersessian) Jane in Love: The Story of Jane Austen and Thomas Lefroy T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Lear

Jacke takes a look at Nikolai Gogol's early stories about his native Ukraine, including two famous descriptions of Ukrainian nights. Then Jacke turns things over to Eve and Julie from the Book Dreams Podcast, as they interview a scholar about a surprising find: in 2019, a librarian in Bristol discovered four scraps of parchment bearing the names "Merlin" and "Arthur." Their guest, Dr. Laura Chuhan Campbell, was part of an interdisciplinary team working to determine the origins and significance of these medieval manuscripts. Learn more about the Book Dreams Podcast at https://www.bookdreamspodcast.com/ Additional listening ideas: Need more Gogol? Try Episode 189: Weeping for Gogol Feeling medieval? Try Episode 286: J.R.R. Tolkien or Episode 108 Beowulf (a.k.a. Need a Hero? Get a Grip...) In the mood for something else? Try Episode 362: Kurt Vonnegut (with Tom Roston) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub