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Writing a book about John Steinbeck has many twists and turns, but something I never expected was to go viral in the process. I was interviewed by Dalya Alberge for The Guardian/The Observer about my interest in Steinbeck, but then the story was picked up by The New York Times and a host of other […]
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These are not the days when most educators would be inclined to turn to a writer with the profile of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). A Eurocentric white male upper-middle-class poet, academically installed during those years when canons were unthinkingly composed of such figures. A reserved lawyer who rose to the position of vice president of a […]
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My study of the history of Shakespeare publishing and editing, Shakespeare in Print, first appeared in 2003. In recent years, it has come to feel that the book was in need of significant updating and revision, for two main reasons. Firstly, a broad range of exciting new work – often authored by younger scholars – […]
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“Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends,” Philip Roth once famously said of his own work. The enduring appeal of this assertion derives in part from the fact that it so accurately captures the tone of Roth’s work: wry humor mingled with an unflinching appraisal of American life, satirical but compassionate treatment of […]
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How did Canadian fiction, essentially a late-nineteenth-century/early-twentieth-century creation, come to be a major avenue of world fiction in little more than one hundred years? More than a century ago, a few fiction writers published highly regarded and incredibly popular books. Writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton and Marshall Saunders, Ralph Connor and Stephen […]
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To be convalescent, in the nineteenth century, was to have survived a medical crisis and to be still picking up the pieces. The category of convalescence could be applied to the survival of all kinds of traumatic medical experiences—a brush with death in a cholera epidemic, an emergency amputation, even a mental health crisis. Convalescents […]
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Why does art even have a history, asked Ernst Gombrich in his classic book Art and Illusion? We might suppose, for instance, that everyone’s pictures would be different, a stylistic jumble resulting from varying competencies, individual desires, local preoccupations. Or to the contrary, we might assume that they would be basically the same, the way […]
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Back in the 1700s, the first performance of an actor in the patent theatres would often be under some anonymous title like ‘A Gentleman (who never appear’d on any stage)’. Sometimes, actors even pushed this a bit further, and maintained a kind of pseudo-anonymity in later performances, using titles like ‘the Gentleman who perform’d King […]
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