Essay The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Essay Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren’t allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
Video After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Essay To discover that which was believed lost April 13, 2021 I thought it was gone. I thought it had left me or I had left it somewhere in the street, in a cabinet, inside the grocery store, at the gas station. The arguments were depleting, had become idiotic, fantasy. Read More
Essay Nabokov: When playfulness is serious March 22, 2021 A rather common response to Nabokov has entailed complaints that he is altogether too cerebral or calculating a writer. Read More
Essay Madame d’Aulnoy, the mysterious fairy‑tale queen March 17, 2021 For those readers who do not believe that fairies are real, they should think twice, for the extraordinary Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse d’Aulnoy (1650–1705) did not only invent the term fairy tale (conte de fees) and create tales about fairies, she was a fearless fairy herself. Read More
Podcast The life of Geoffrey Chaucer March 02, 2021 Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the circulation of his writings, Marion Turner reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Read More
Video The multilingual pleasures of English February 08, 2021 At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst. Read More
Essay How Each Line Appears | some loose leaves January 04, 2021 Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as “a master of musicality and enlightening allusions.” In the wholly original world of these poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls “creating between liberties.” Read More
Podcast Sexuality, gender, and race in the Middle Ages December 18, 2020 While the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Read More
Essay The mountain memories that fuelled Tolkien’s epic tales December 14, 2020 ‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.’ Bilbo Baggins is thinking of adventure, of course, not pandemics. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’ Yet The Lord of the Rings is a lesson in how far you can travel without leaving home. Read More
Essay Bob Dylan’s rowdy ways and American voice September 25, 2020 One of the great ironies surrounding Bob Dylan’s 2016 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that, at the time of the prize, the great songwriter had just released a pair of recordings that featured no compositions of his own. Read More
Interview Roy Foster | On Seamus Heaney September 10, 2020 The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Finding humanity through fairy tales July 14, 2020 Ever since I began a collaboration with Princeton University Press in 2008 to found the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series, almost all the books we have published have been somewhat political but not didactic. Read More
Reading List Be Enchanted July 01, 2020 The imaginative and often dangerous world of fairy tales spins common human experience in a way that feels strangely vital. Read More
