In a thought-provoking piece in Politico Magazine , Professor Justin Gest proposes a “Moneyball Fix” for America’s immigration system. Taking a page out of sports analytics, he suggests that...
Where do the Iliad and Odyssey come from? The story of these ancient epic poems is a “complicated” one (to borrow Emily Wilson’s inspired translation of the Homeric epithet polytropos, a word that...
We do not yet know whether President Trump’s killing of Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s second most powerful leader, will prove to be a masterstroke or a disaster. The president’s antipathy toward the Islamic...
Party activism, understood as individuals voluntarily and regularly participating in party-related activities (i.e. not simply for electoral campaigns), seems to be a thing of the past. In the best-case...
I hate movies about Emily Dickinson, and novels. I hate even the idea of the play. I hate impudent rapey poems addressed to Dickinson by entitled male poets. I hate the mugs, pot holders, T-shirts, and...
When I was writing Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature, a book primarily about two writers, the Earl of Rochester and Aphra Behn, back in the 1990s, the opening sentence of the jacket blurb read:...
Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man, was published on April Fool’s Day, 1857. Aboard a steamboat on the Mississippi, a series of plausible projectors invite their fellow passengers to...
New York: A Literary History is the result of a lifetime of reading books about the city and reading authors who made the city their home. From Stephen Crane, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Zora Neale...
Any history of twentieth century literature in English is unimaginable without Yeats and Joyce, both born in Dublin in the last years of the nineteenth century. They are international figures who came...
“Get there if you can and see the land you once were proud to own…” W. H. Auden’s Poems (1930) presents a catalogue of exhausted landscapes and fragile psyches. This line in particular repeats...
Recently, India passed a bill to amend its citizenship law. With this bill, religion becomes a major criterion for the approval of new citizens. While the bill makes it easier to get citizenship for persecuted...
Present-day political controversies are strikingly like those in Britain at the end of World War Two. I’ve constructed The Cambridge Introduction to British Fiction, 1900-1950 to call attention to that...