Episodes Posts

In Episode 838, Jacke talks to author Bruce Nichols about his new book The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World. They discuss how literary luminaries — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Al…

Spend time exploring the world of Shakespeare with host Jacke Wilson on the History of Literature Podcast! Here's a list of the twenty episodes on Shakespeare on the History of Literature Podcast. In these episodes, Jacke talks with eminent scholar…

In Episode 837, the History of Literature Podcast host Jacke Wilson gets ready for the Halloween season with an episode filled with madness, murder, and ghosts! First, he recounts the story of Romantic period writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Although …

What does it mean to live a good life? How can we accomplish it? For more than two thousand years, Western civilization has looked to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to help answer those questions. In Episode 836, Jacke talks to translator Robin Wat…

What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography, literature, and films?  In Episode 835, Jacke talks to author Amy Motlagh abou…

Shakespeare himself didn't attend a university — and yet, for centuries, the world's greatest scholars have studied his works to learn about everything from poetry to politics. But have they missed the lessons that Shakespeare had for them in partic…

Everywhere we look, we see the benefits of the modern world. But what have we lost? In Episode 833, Jacke talks to Malcolm Guite about his new book Galahad and the Grail, the first of a four-volume series, Merlin's Isle: An Arthuriad, which poetical…

As we recently discussed with Hadley Suter, nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal (1783-1842) came of age in an era when identity was up for grabs (Episode 830). So who was he? How did he view himself? What did he write, and why do we care so …

When times are tough, can literature help? After sharing an email from a listener, Jacke talks to author Rachel Pastan about her novel We're So Lucky to Live Here, in which a woman copes with a tragic loss by staging a production of Chekhov's The Ch…

We often say it's important for a person to be "authentic," but what does that mean? Why is that necessarily a good thing? In Episode 830 of the History of Literature Podcast, Jacke talks to author Hadley Suter (Becoming Stendhal: The Performance o…

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two of the leading novelists of the 19th century, shared a remarkable literary friendship. After Charlotte's death, Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë became one of the most famous -- and controversial -- lite…

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an extreme increase in America's prison population, from roughly 250,000 inmates in 1940 to well over two million by 2008. At the same time, American readers were devouring mysteries, thrillers,…

At the time of Washington Irving's death, he was the most famous and widely praised American writer of his or any other era. But his reputation soon dwindled, and today he's known primarily as the author of just two stories ("The Legend of Sleepy Ho…

In Episode 823. United States President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth were both deeply immersed in Shakespeare's works. And yet, the conclusions they reached about how best to end tyranny — a feature of both Macbeth and Julius C…

Henry David Thoreau was not a traditional Christian, and yet he was a deeply, profoundly religious man. In Episode 822, Jacke talks to Lydia Willsky-Ciollo about her book Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making of an American Theology, which de…

In Episode 820, Jacke talks to Sonja Tiernan about her book Eva Gore-Booth: Irish Radical Poet, Rebel, and Reformer, which tells the story of a young woman who cast aside her aristocratic origins to champion the causes of barmaids, circus performers…

In Episode 819, Jacke talks to biographer Glenda Norquay (Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Life) about the amazing life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish author of classic works like Kidnapped and Treasure Island. His works are great reads,…

In Episode 818, Jacke talks to author James Bailey about his critically acclaimed biography Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. James and Jacke cover not only many of Spark's best known works, including The Prime of Miss Jean B…

In Episode 817, Jacke gets ready for the release of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the rare instance of a summer blockbuster based on a literary classic, with some help from classics scholars Daniel Mendelsohn (The Odyssey, An Odyssey: A Father, A Son…

In Episode 816, Jacke talks to David Womersley about Jonathan Swift, the nature of satire, and The Cambridge Anniversary Edition of Gulliver's Travels, which Womersley edited. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of Literature at the Unive…

In Episode 815, as America turns 250, Jacke takes a look at the career and major works of Paddy Chayefsky, whose 1976 film Network is often praised for predicting the demise of television (and, perhaps, America itself). Thanks in part to beloved fi…

In Episode 814, Jacke talks to writer, editor, and translator Daniel Hahn (If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation), about his encounters with writers and actors who've engaged with Shakespeare's work in more than a hundred …

In Episode 813 of the History of Literature Podcast, Jacke talks to award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson about her book Becoming George, which examines George Sand's iconoclasm and rehabilitates her as an intellectual and artistic giant.…

Why are we so fascinated by the ancient world? What can we find in the distant past that is recognizably human — and how do we grapple with the complicated and controversial issues that the past forces us to address?  In Episode 812, Jacke talks to…