The History of Literature

By Recorded History Podcast Network

Arts History

What's The History of Literature about?

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Sylvia Plath

12.02.2019

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston in 1932, the daughter of a German-born professor, Otto Plath, and his student, Aurelia Schober. After her father died in 1940, Plath's family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where her mother taught secretarial studies ...

The History of Literature episodes:

12.02.2019 Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston in 1932, the daughter of a German-born professor, Otto Plath, and his student, Aurelia Schober. After her father died in 1940, Plath's family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where her mother taught secretarial studies ...
11.26.2019 Margaret Atwood A week ago, Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) turned 80. A month ago, she was awarded the Booker Prize for her eighteenth novel, The Testaments. But how did the little girl who grew up in the forests of Canada turn into ...
11.18.2019 One-Hit Wonders! (with Mike Palindrome) We all know how difficult it is to scale the mountain of success, whether you're a musician or a novelist. But why do some artists reach the summit again and again, while others spend the rest of their careers stuck ...
11.11.2019 Thomas Hardy He was born to a lower class family of tradesmen in 1840. Eighty eight years later, he died as one of the most celebrated writers in England. His name was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and he was at the same time ...
11.04.2019 George Saunders (with Mike Palindrome) Jacke and Mike take a look at contemporary author George Saunders, author of Pastoralia, Tenth of December, and Lincoln at the Bardo, In spite of some inauspicious beginnings, Saunders somehow managed to ascend to literary greatness, setting aside a career ...
10.28.2019 Macbeth It's been called "the great Shakespearean play of stage superstition and uncanniness." It's also one of Shakespeare's four major tragedies, and for more than four hundred years it's proved horrifying to audiences and captivating to scholars. And it's a perfect ...
10.21.2019 Alfred Hitchcock (with Mike Palindrome) Jacke's joined by the Hall of Fame Guest Mike Palindrome (President of the Literature Supporters Club) for a look at the ten greatest films by the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock directed dozens of films, including masterpieces of the ...
10.10.2019 Chinua Achebe Chinua Achebe's first novel Things Fall Apart (1959) ushered in a new era where African countries, which had recently achieved post-colonial independence, now achieved an independence of a different kind - the freedom of imagination and artistry, as African authors ...
10.03.2019 Blood and Sympathy in the 19th Century (with Professor Ann Kibbie) "England may with justice claim to be the native land of transfusion," wrote one European physician in 1877, acknowledging Great Britain’s role in developing and promoting human-to-human transfusion as treatment for life-threatening blood loss. But what did this scientific practice ...
09.26.2019 Weeping for Gogol "Gogol was a strange creature," said Nabokov, "but genius is always strange." Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809 – 1852) rose from obscurity to a brilliant literary career that forever changed the course of Russian literature. Born in 1809, he and his ...
09.16.2019 Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (with Yuval Taylor) They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Their names were Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960), the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes ...
09.09.2019 The Brontes Although their lives were filled with darkness and death, their love for stories and ideas led them into the bright realms of creative genius. They were the Brontes - Charlotte, Emily, and Anne - who lived with their brother Branwell ...
08.31.2019 Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) went from a childhood in the western islands of Scotland to the heights of literary popularity and success, beloved and admired for his adventure stories Treasure Island and Kidnapped and his eerie portrait of ...
07.22.2019 Marcel Proust Marcel Proust (1871-1922) did little of note until he turned 38 years old - but from that point forward, he devoted the rest of his life to writing a masterpiece. The result, the novel In Search of Lost Time, published ...
04.08.2019 George Eliot Perhaps the greatest of all the many great English novelists, George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. Her father Robert managed an estate for a wealthy family; her mother Christina was the daughter of ...
04.01.2019 Samuel Beckett (with Nic Barilar) We're back! A newly reenergized Jacke Wilson returns for a deep dive into the life, works, and politics of Samuel Beckett. Yes, we know him as one of the key figures bridging the gap between modernism and post-modernism - but ...
03.06.2019 182 Darkness and Light (with Jessica Harper) Jessica Harper has had the kind of life it would take ten memoirs to capture. Born in 1949, she went from a childhood in Illinois to a career as a Broadway singer, a Hollywood actor and movie star, a songwriter, ...
02.27.2019 181 David Foster Wallace (with Mike Palindrome) Frequent guest Mike Palindrome takes the wheel for another solo episode on David Foster Wallace, including a deep dive into Wallace's unfinished manuscript The Pale King, published posthumously in 2011. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE (1962-2008) was an American author best known ...
02.20.2019 180 Donald Barthelme Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” (1966) is one of the strangest and most enduring short stories to come out of the second half of the twentieth century. Filled with Barthelme’s gift for observation and detail, his wild imagination, and his playful ...
02.13.2019 179 The Oscars by Decade (with Brian Price) Screenwriter and film scholar Brian Price (author of Classical Storytelling and Contemporary Screenwriting: Aristotle and the Modern Screenwriter) joins Jacke for a decade-by-decade look at the Oscar Winners for Best Picture. Which decade had the best movies? When did Hollywood ...
02.06.2019 178 "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson (with Evie Lee) In this episode, we take a look at the classic twentieth-century American short story, "The Lottery" (1948) by Shirley Jackson. Why did it cause such an uproar? Who banned it and why? And how well does it hold up today? ...
01.30.2019 177 Sherwood Anderson (with Alyson Hagy) One hundred years ago, a collection of short stories by a little-known author from Ohio burst onto the literary scene, causing a minor scandal for their sexual frankness. In the years since, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) became more famous ...
01.23.2019 176 William Carlos Williams (The Use of Force) Today, the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is famous among poetry fans for his vivid, economical poems like "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just to Say." But for most of his lifetime, he struggled to achieve success ...
01.16.2019 175 Virgin Whore - The Virgin Mary in Medieval Literature and Culture (with Professor Emma Maggie Solberg) Today, we know the Virgin Mary as quiet, demure, and (above all) chaste, but this wasn't always the way she was understood or depicted. In her new book Virgin Whore, Professor Emma Maggie Solberg investigates a surprising - and surprisingly ...
01.09.2019 174 David Foster Wallace (A Mike Palindrome Special!) Ask and ye shall receive! It's an all-Mike episode devoted entirely to one of his literary heroes, David Foster Wallace. Enjoy! Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more at historyofliterature.com, jackewilson.com, or by ...
01.01.2019 173 The Yellow Wallpaper (with Evie Lee) Happy new year! Host Jacke Wilson is joined by special guest Evie Lee, a vice-president at the Literature Supporters Club, for a conversation about the classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) wrote ...
12.19.2018 172 Holiday Movies (with Brian Price) Seasons Greetings! In this episode, Jacke attempts to recover from last week's gloominess with something lighter and cheerier: a trip to the movies! Holiday movies dominate screens big and little during the month of December - but what do they ...
12.12.2018 171 To Sleep Perchance to Dream - On Writers and Death "To die, to sleep - to sleep, perchance to dream - ay, there's the rub, for in this sleep of death what dreams may come..." In these immortal lines, Shakespeare's Hamlet gives voice to one of the greatest of all ...
12.05.2018 170 Toni Morrison TONI MORRISON (b. 1931) is one of the most successful and admired authors in the history of American literature. Her novels include The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987), which is widely considered to ...
11.28.2018 169 Dostoevsky FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1821-1881) was, in the estimation of James Joyce, “the man more than any other who has created modern prose.” “Outside Shakespeare,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “there is no more exciting reading.” His influence is as impossible to understand as ...
11.21.2018 168 Jhumpa Lahiri ("The Third and Final Continent") What was it like to relocate from India to London to America in the early 1970s? And how can a daughter hope to recapture the experience of her father and convey it in fiction? In today's episode of the History ...
11.07.2018 167 F Scott Fitzgerald What happens when the party is over? Can you ever truly escape your past? Jacke and Mike take a look at F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1931 story of guilt and melancholy, "Babylon Revisited." F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940) was the quintessential ...
10.31.2018 166 Stephen King (with the Sisters of Slaughter) STEPHEN KING (1947- ) was born in the northern state of Maine, where he has lived most of his life. For more than forty years, he has been the world's leading practitioner of scary fiction. He’s also won numerous awards, ...
10.24.2018 165 Ezra Pound EZRA POUND (1885-1972) was born in a small mining town in Idaho and died in Venice, Italy. In his eighty-seven years, he changed the face of American poetry. A restless, tireless advocate for his artistic views and the authors who ...
10.17.2018 164 Karl Marx Karl Marx (1818-1883) turned his early interest in literature and philosophy into a lifelong study of the socioeconomic forces unleashed by the rise of capitalism. His works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, among others, influenced the course of the ...
10.10.2018 163 Gabriel Garcia Marquez (with Sarah Bird) Jacke welcomes author Sarah Bird to the program to talk about her background, her writing, and her readerly passion for the fiction of the great twentieth-century novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ (1927-2014) was one of the most revered ...
10.03.2018 162 Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His plain, economical prose style--inspired by journalism and the King James Bible, with an assist from the Cezannes he viewed in Gertrude Stein’s apartment--became a ...
09.26.2018 161 Voltaire Voltaire was born Francois Marie Arouet in 1694 in Paris, France, the son of a respectable but not particularly eminent lawyer. By the time he died at the age of 83, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest ...
09.17.2018 160 Ray Bradbury (with Carolyn Cohagan) Special guest Carolyn Cohagan, author of the Time Zero trilogy and founder of the creative writing workshop Girls with Pens, joins Jacke for a discussion of her writing process, her origins in standup comedy and theater, and her early love ...
09.10.2018 159 Herman Melville Today, Herman Melville (1819-1891) is considered one of the greatest of American writers, and a leading candidate for THE American novelist thanks to his classic work, Moby-Dick. How did this unpromising student become one of the most inventive and observant ...
09.03.2018 158 "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien In the 1960s and '70s, the Vietnam War dominated the hearts and minds of a generation of Americans. In 1990, the American writer Tim O'Brien, himself a former soldier, published "The Things They Carried," a short story that became an ...
08.22.2018 157 Travel Books (with Mike Palindrome) "The world is a book," said Augustine, "and those who do not travel read only one page." But what about books ABOUT traveling? Do they double the pleasure? Transport us to a different place? Inspire and enchant? Or are they ...
08.15.2018 156 The Sonnet “A sonnet,” said the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “is a moment’s monument.” But who invented the sonnet? Who brought it to prominence? How has it changed over the years? And why does this form continue to be so compelling? In ...
08.09.2018 155 Plato “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition,” said Alfred North Whitehead, “is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” We’ve all heard the name of Plato and his famous mentor Socrates, and most of us ...
08.01.2018 154 John Milton John Milton (1608 - 1674) was a revolutionary, a republican, an iconoclast, a reformer, and a brilliant polemicist, who fearlessly took on both church and king. And he ranks among the greatest poets of all time, a peer of Shakespeare ...
07.25.2018 153 Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. In his 58 years he went from a hardscrabble childhood to a world-famous author, beloved and admired for his unforgettable characters, his powers of observation and empathy, ...
07.18.2018 152 George Sand George Sand wrote an astonishing number of novels and plays, and had friendships and affairs with an astonishing range of men and women. She dressed in men’s clothing, and she inspired a host of 19th century authors and artists, including ...
07.11.2018 151 Viking Poetry - The Voluspa (with Noah Tetzner) The Vikings! Sure, they had helmets and hammers, but did they also have... poetry? Indeed they did! In this episode, we talk to Noah Tetzner, host of The History of Vikings Podcast, about the collection of Old Norse verses called ...
07.04.2018 150 Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog" It's a deceptively simple story: a man and a woman meet, have an affair, are separated, and reunite. And yet, in writing about Anton Chekhov's story, "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899), Vladimir Nabokov said, "All the traditional rules ...
06.27.2018 149 Raising Readers (aka The Power of Literature in an Imperfect World) Jacke and Mike respond to an email from a listener who is about to become a father and wondering about the role of literature in the life of a young child. Works and authors discussed include J.K. Rowling, Phillip Pullman, ...

Older episodes

The History of Literature

What's The History of Literature about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The History of Literature episodes:

Sylvia Plath

Margaret Atwood

One-Hit Wonders! (with Mike Palindrome)

Thomas Hardy

George Saunders (with Mike Palindrome)

Macbeth

Alfred Hitchcock (with Mike Palindrome)

Chinua Achebe

Blood and Sympathy in the 19th Century (with Professor Ann Kibbie)

Weeping for Gogol

Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (with Yuval Taylor)

The Brontes

Robert Louis Stevenson

Marcel Proust

George Eliot

Samuel Beckett (with Nic Barilar)

182 Darkness and Light (with Jessica Harper)

181 David Foster Wallace (with Mike Palindrome)

180 Donald Barthelme

179 The Oscars by Decade (with Brian Price)

178 "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson (with Evie Lee)

177 Sherwood Anderson (with Alyson Hagy)

176 William Carlos Williams (The Use of Force)

175 Virgin Whore - The Virgin Mary in Medieval Literature and Culture (with Professor Emma Maggie Solberg)

174 David Foster Wallace (A Mike Palindrome Special!)

173 The Yellow Wallpaper (with Evie Lee)

172 Holiday Movies (with Brian Price)

171 To Sleep Perchance to Dream - On Writers and Death

170 Toni Morrison

169 Dostoevsky

168 Jhumpa Lahiri ("The Third and Final Continent")

167 F Scott Fitzgerald

166 Stephen King (with the Sisters of Slaughter)

165 Ezra Pound

164 Karl Marx

163 Gabriel Garcia Marquez (with Sarah Bird)

162 Ernest Hemingway

161 Voltaire

160 Ray Bradbury (with Carolyn Cohagan)

159 Herman Melville

158 "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien

157 Travel Books (with Mike Palindrome)

156 The Sonnet

155 Plato

154 John Milton

153 Charles Dickens

152 George Sand

151 Viking Poetry - The Voluspa (with Noah Tetzner)

150 Chekhov's "The Lady with the Little Dog"

149 Raising Readers (aka The Power of Literature in an Imperfect World)

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