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What does it mean to write a novel of ideas? These are works of fiction that foreground debate and disputation-like the discussions of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the politico-religious arguments in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the utopian speculations of H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, the debates about Communism in Doris […]
Read MoreJohn Cleland, best remembered as the author of the erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49), was a tricksy and entertaining correspondent. His letters, just published by Cambridge University Press, reveal his attempts to insinuate himself with the rich and powerful at the same time as he teased them for what he perceived to be […]
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Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama: Wild Play seeks to demonstrate that the overwhelming popularity of revenge drama in the English Renaissance is best understood in the context of the unique ethical effects it generates in its intended audience during a putative performance. Adapting Francis Bacon’s notion of revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’, […]
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‘Diet’ is derived from the Greek diaita, meaning ‘way of life’, so that what we eat is intimately connected with who we perceive ourselves to be. Historically, those who chose to abstain from the eating of animal flesh were outsiders, frequently viewed with suspicion; today, vegetarianism and veganism are part of identity politics. There is […]
Read MoreThis illustration appeared at the start of the serialisation of Thomas Hardy’s “A Few Crusted Characters” (then called “Wessex Folk”); afterwards collected into the volume of Life’s Little Ironies. It shows a main street in Dorchester (Hardy’s Casterbridge) and gives an impression of the life of its people. Using words, Hardy does something similar, but […]
Read MoreThe Middle Ages is a story modernity tells about itself. Ideas of rebirth, or of an “enlightened” modern age, or of a supposed rejection of primitive superstition in favor of rational thinking, often depend on the idea of a cruder past that a more glorious present can be contrasted against—and often overstate the achievements of […]
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What comes to mind if you think about the use of Shakespeare during wartime? Perhaps it is Laurence Olivier’s famous 1944 cinematic adaptation of Henry V, prominently dedicated to the troops of Great Britain. But what is often overlooked is just how embedded Shakespeare has been in wartime culture, in Britain and globally, since at […]
Read MoreIn the summer of 1968 at the age of eighteen, I received my undergraduate first year reading list from my tutor at Lincoln College. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, the little two-volume hardback World’s Classics edition now out of print, instantly drew my eye. My Cheshire town had no bookshop, but a branch of W.H. […]
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