Literature and the Politics of Culture Wars

Writer, literary critic, and the man behind the great The Common Reader (https://www.commonreader.co.uk) blog, Henry Oliver joined me to gossip about literature and then dive in and build our own Western Canon. Enjoy!We talked about good literature and bad literature, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, Woolf, Bloom… Romanticism, quests, Goethe, Tolkien... And most importantly we built a from-scratch Western Canon for visiting aliens...Henry's Canon:1) The King James Bible2) The Odyssey3) The Aeneid4) Dante's Inferno5) Petrarch's Canzoniere6) Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur7) The Canterbury Tales8) Tartuffe9) A Winter's Tale10) The Pilgrim's Progress11) Montaigne's Essays 12) The Gargantua-Pantagruel series13) Gulliver's Travels 14) The Sorrows of Young Werther15) Emma16) Fathers and Sons17) The Death of Ivan Ilyich18) Chekhov: The Seagull19) The Lord of the Rings20) The Last Samurai