The History of Literature

By Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

Arts History

What's The History of Literature about?

A Podcast

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Shakespeare's Greatest Sonn...

08.06.2020

What did Shakespeare do when the bubonic plague shut down London's theaters? Apparently he wrote poetry instead, including some or all of his 154 sonnets. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to ...

The History of Literature episodes:

08.06.2020 Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets \| Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day") What did Shakespeare do when the bubonic plague shut down London's theaters? Apparently he wrote poetry instead, including some or all of his 154 sonnets. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to ...
08.03.2020 The Brontes' Secret Scandal (with Finola Austin) Novelist Finola Austin joins Jacke for a discussion of her new novel Bronte's Mistress, which provides a fascinating new perspective on one of literature's most famous families. FINOLA AUSTIN, also known as the Secret Victorianist on her award-winning blog, is ...
07.30.2020 Beatrix Potter Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was a naturalist, a conservationist, and a highly successful children's book author and illustrator, whose stories of Peter Rabbit and other anthropomorphized animals have sold more than 150 million copies in at least 35 languages. But who ...
07.27.2020 The Brothers Karamazov Responding to a special request from a listener, Jacke discusses Fyodor Dostoevsky, his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and the search for meaning in a meaningless world. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. (We appreciate it!) Find out more ...
07.20.2020 Stendhal In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the life and works of French author Stendhal (1783-1842), whose innovative novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma made him one of the greatest and most influential novelists ...
07.16.2020 The History of Literature Presents: Storybound (with Mitchell S. Jackson) The History of Literature presents some content from another Podglomerate podcast, Storybound. In this episode from Storybound's first season, author Mitchell S. Jackson reads from his memoir, Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, with sound design and original music ...
07.13.2020 Raymond Carver (with Tom Perrotta) Novelist and screenwriter Tom Perrotta joins Jacke for a discussion of his blue collar New Jersey background, the cultural shock of attending Yale University, and the profound impact that Raymond Carver's first collection of short stories, Will You Please Be ...
07.09.2020 Giovanni Boccaccio \| The Decameron As the Black Death swept through the city of Florence, Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) began writing his classic tale of survival and revelry. The Decameron (1349-1353) tells the story of ten individuals who have retreated to a ...
07.06.2020 Joyce Carol Oates (with Evie Lee) Friend of the podcast Evie Lee joins Jacke to take a look at Joyce Carol Oates's classic short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" (1966). NOTE TO LISTENERS: This episode contains disturbing descriptions of an attempted abduction ...
07.02.2020 Alexandre Dumas Jacke takes a look at the astonishing story of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, whose own father (who was born into slavery before becoming a four-star general in Napoleon's army) led a ...
06.29.2020 Keeping Secrets! Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and the CIA (with Lara Prescott) Author Lara Prescott joins Jacke to talk about her novel The Secrets We Kept, which is based on the incredible but true story of the CIA's efforts to use a novel (Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) as part of its Cold ...
06.25.2020 William Faulkner \| Dry September The fourth part of a three-part episode run! Jacke takes the advice of a listener and adds William Faulkner's "Dry September" (1931) to the Baldwin-Faulkner consideration. NOTE FOR LISTENERS: This story (and our discussion of it) contains disturbing references to ...
06.22.2020 Literary Battle Royal 2 - The Cold War (U.S. vs. U.S.S.R.) Sputnik! Cuba! Glasnost and perestroika! In this follow-up to the very popular England vs. France literary battle royal, Jacke and Mike choose up sides and imagine the Cold War being fought by each nation's greatest authors. Enjoy! Help support the ...
06.18.2020 More Thoreau \| Experiencing Nature (with Nina Shengold) "We can never get enough of nature," wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1854. "I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature." A century and a half later, author Nina Shengold left her desk ...
06.15.2020 Henry David Thoreau \| On Civil Disobedience In July of 1846, Henry David Thoreau took a break from his two-year experiment of living in the woods to return to town, where he bumped into a tax collector who promptly had him arrested. For six years, Thoreau had ...
06.11.2020 The Seven Deadly Sins As with Santa's reindeer or Snow White's seven dwarves, we all know the phrase "Seven Deadly Sins" even if we struggle to remember the exact list. But who came up with this concept? And who decided that Pride, Envy, Wrath, ...
06.08.2020 Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (with Amanda Stern) In the autumn of 1902, a young man attending a German military school wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to ask him for some advice. Rilke responded, and the two struck up a correspondence that has become one of ...
06.05.2020 Alice Munro \| The Love of a Good Woman 3 What does it mean to be good? What does it mean to love and be loved? What sacrifices do we make in order to bring about happiness? And how can we do any of this if we're uncertain about the ...
06.03.2020 Alice Munro \| The Love of a Good Woman 2 Think about your life: Have you always gotten what you wanted? Have you LET yourself be happy? Have you kept secrets - from others, or even yourself? In this episode, Jacke returns to the great Canadian writer Alice Munro for ...
06.02.2020 Special Episode - America in Crisis In this special episode, Jacke responds to the news of the day with some thoughts about life, literature, and how to understand what's happening to America at this historic moment. (The History of Literature Podcast returns to its regularly scheduled ...
06.01.2020 Alice Munro \| The Love of a Good Woman "She is our Chekhov," said Cynthia Ozick, "and she is going to outlast most of her contemporaries." Ozick was talking about the great Alice Munro, the Canadian writer whose short stories about ordinary women and men have garnered every literary ...
05.28.2020 C.S. Lewis Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was an Irish-born writer who spent most of his adult life in Oxford and Cambridge, studying, teaching, enjoying the company of friends (including J.R.R. Tolkien) - and also writing some of the most widely read and ...
05.25.2020 The Diary of Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) was a successful administrator and general man-about-town in Restoration London. As a devoted theatergoer, a capable bureaucrat, and a privileged witness of the King and his court, he saw firsthand many of the most important developments of ...
05.21.2020 James Baldwin - Going To Meet the Man James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a fearless artist, an uncompromising critic, a brilliant essayist, and an American who lived within his time and yet was decades ahead of it. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at Going To Meet the ...
05.18.2020 William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily William Faulkner (1897-1962) is one of the most celebrated and divisive figures in American literature. Widely recognized as one of the greatest novelists America has produced, his fiction and his life have become the stuff of legend. In this episode ...
05.14.2020 Baldwin v Faulkner In the 1950s, William Faulkner (1897-1962) was one of most celebrated novelists in America, highly praised for this formal innovation, his prodigious storytelling gifts, and his sweeping, multigenerational portrait of Southern society. James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a writer on the ...
05.11.2020 England vs France - A Literary Battle Royale "Our dear enemies," a French writer once said of the English. Englishman John Cleese called them "our natural enemies" and joked "if we have to fight anyone, I say let's fight the French." With the exception of a few big ...
05.07.2020 "The Country Husband" by John Cheever John Cheever (1912-1982) scratched the surface of the American suburbs and found that they were built over a deep pit of despair. His short stories and novels, which chronicled the lives of those damaged psyches trying to put an alcohol-fueled ...
05.04.2020 Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) went from a childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to a wildly successful literary career, as his poems, short stories, and essays stunned the world with their inventiveness, intellectual seriousness, and flights of imagination. He was more ...
04.30.2020 "A Village After Dark" by Kazuo Ishiguro In this special quarantine edition, Jacke takes a brief look at the life and works of Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his short story, "A Village After Dark." Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or ...
04.27.2020 Albert Camus Albert Camus (1913-1960) was born in Algeria to French parents. After his father died in World War I, when Albert was still an infant, the family was reduced to impoverished circumstances, forced to move in with relatives in an apartment ...
04.23.2020 "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler Imagine a plague that ravages the world and impairs the ability of humans to communicate with one another. What kind of society would we have? Who would take power and how would they hold it? What would the world be ...
04.20.2020 The Best of the Bard: Top 10 Greatest Lines in Shakespeare When was The Bard at his best? How great did the GOAT get? Hall-of-fame guest Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for a discussion of the Top 10 Greatest Lines of Shakespeare. Help support the ...
04.16.2020 The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino \| The African Library Project Another special quarantine edition! In this action-packed episode, Jacke talks to Robyn Speed and Tatiana Santos of the African Library Project (africanlibraryproject.org), an organization that has helped create or improve more than three thousand libraries in Africa. He then turns ...
04.13.2020 A Lost Spring (with Professor Mitchell Nathanson) Professor Mitchell Nathanson, author of Jim Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, joins Jacke for a discussion of athletes, heroes, and A.E. Housman. Why do we celebrate athletes? How do we view them when their athleticism fades? And what ...
04.09.2020 After Rain by William Trevor William Trevor was born in Ireland in 1928. When he was 26, he moved to England, where for the next 62 years he quietly became one of the most celebrated writers in the English-speaking world. In today's History of Literature ...
04.06.2020 John Steinbeck John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was an American author known for what the Nobel Committee, who awarded Steinbeck its Prize for Literature in 1962, called "his realistic and imaginative writings, [which combine] sympathetic humor and keen social perception." Among his 33 books ...
04.02.2020 Extra by Yiyun Li Yiyun Li (1972- ) was born in Beijing, China, the daughter of a teacher and a nuclear physicist. She dreamed of studying in America, hoping to escape an oppressive political regime and an unhappy family life. But when she arrived ...
03.30.2020 The Trials of Phillis Wheatley In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in the English language. It was yet another milestone in Wheatley's extraordinary life, which began with a childhood in Africa, a passage on ...
03.26.2020 Kate Chopin From within the quarantine, Jacke travels to 1893 and the Louisiana bayou, where he finds Kate Chopin, pioneering feminist and author of the classic novel The Awakening, writing her short story "Desiree's Baby," in which a woman in love struggles ...
03.23.2020 Kipling, Kingsley, and Conan Doyle - When Writers Go to War (with Sarah LeFanu) In early 1900, the paths of three British writers - Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley, and Arthur Conan Doyle - crossed in South Africa, during what has become known as Britain's last imperial war. In this episode, Sarah LeFanu, author of ...
03.20.2020 Special Quarantine Edition - Gusev by Anton Chekhov More bonus content! For those of you living in isolation (and those of you who aren't), Jacke explores the depths of the human condition - as well as its ultimate beauty - with the help of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and ...
03.16.2020 Special Quarantine Edition - Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter As the world deals with a pandemic, we turn to one of America's greatest (and least appreciated) writers, Katherine Anne Porter, and her masterpiece, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a short novel that tells the story of Miranda, a newspaper woman ...
03.09.2020 Edith Wharton “There are only three or four American novelists who can be thought of as 'major',” said Gore Vidal. “And Edith Wharton is one.” In this episode, Jacke and Mike take a look at the life and works of Edith Wharton ...
03.02.2020 More John Keats John Keats (1795-1821) was born in humble circumstances, the son of a man who took care of horses at a London inn, and he died in near obscurity. We know him today as onen of a handful of the greatest ...
02.24.2020 Conflict Literature (with Matt Gallagher) Matt Gallagher is an American writer who served in the Iraq War as a U.S. Army captain. He first became known for his blog, which was shut down by the military, and his subsequent war memoir Kaboom: Embracing the Suck ...
02.17.2020 John Keats "Keats is with Shakespeare," wrote Matthew Arnold, and few would disagree. His life was short, but his poetry is deep and his legacy long enduring. Who was this man? How did he overcome his lowly origins and become one of ...
02.10.2020 Agatha Christie (with Gillian Gill) Agatha Christie is one of the most successful writers of all time - it's often said that sales of Christie's books are surpassed only by Shakespeare and the Bible. But who was Agatha Christie? What was she like before she ...
02.03.2020 Karl Ove Knausgaard Since the publication of the first volume of his massive novel Mein Kampf (or My Struggle) in 2009, Karl Ove Knausgaard (1968- ) has become a household name in his native Norway - and a loved and hated literary figure ...
01.27.2020 Saul Bellow Saul Bellow (1915-2005) was born in Quebec, immigrated to Chicago, and became one of the greatest of the great American novelists. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize for writing that displayed "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle ...

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:

Shakespeare's Greatest Sonnets | Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day")

The Brontes' Secret Scandal (with Finola Austin)

Beatrix Potter

The Brothers Karamazov

Stendhal

The History of Literature Presents: Storybound (with Mitchell S. Jackson)

Raymond Carver (with Tom Perrotta)

Giovanni Boccaccio | The Decameron

Joyce Carol Oates (with Evie Lee)

Alexandre Dumas

Keeping Secrets! Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, and the CIA (with Lara Prescott)

William Faulkner | Dry September

Literary Battle Royal 2 - The Cold War (U.S. vs. U.S.S.R.)

More Thoreau | Experiencing Nature (with Nina Shengold)

Henry David Thoreau | On Civil Disobedience

The Seven Deadly Sins

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (with Amanda Stern)

Alice Munro | The Love of a Good Woman 3

Alice Munro | The Love of a Good Woman 2

Special Episode - America in Crisis

Alice Munro | The Love of a Good Woman

C.S. Lewis

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

James Baldwin - Going To Meet the Man

William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily

Baldwin v Faulkner

England vs France - A Literary Battle Royale

"The Country Husband" by John Cheever

Jorge Luis Borges

"A Village After Dark" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Albert Camus

"Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler

The Best of the Bard: Top 10 Greatest Lines in Shakespeare

The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino | The African Library Project

A Lost Spring (with Professor Mitchell Nathanson)

After Rain by William Trevor

John Steinbeck

Extra by Yiyun Li

The Trials of Phillis Wheatley

Kate Chopin

Kipling, Kingsley, and Conan Doyle - When Writers Go to War (with Sarah LeFanu)

Special Quarantine Edition - Gusev by Anton Chekhov

Special Quarantine Edition - Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter

Edith Wharton

More John Keats

Conflict Literature (with Matt Gallagher)

John Keats

Agatha Christie (with Gillian Gill)

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Saul Bellow

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