The History of Literature

The hits keep coming at the History of Literature Podcast! In this episode, Jacke follows up on last week's episode on Crime and Punishment with a look at the short story that literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "practically a complete encyclopedia of Dostoevsky's most important themes." (Don't worry if you haven't read "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" before - we read the short story as part of the episode.)Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's another packed episode! First, Jacke talks to Langston Hughes scholars Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed about their new book, Langston Hughes in Context, which shows how Hughes was much more than just a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. PLUS Melissa Homestead, who last joined us for a look at Willa Cather and her creative partnership with Edith Lewis, selects the last book she will ever read.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"It is directly obvious," said Virginia Woolf after reading Crime and Punishment, "that [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born." In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the classic novel of murder, guilt, and redemption, including the letter Dostoevsky wrote proposing his book, a likely source for inspiration, and the two young men in Chicago who set out to prove themselves worthy of one of the novel's more nefarious propositions.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacke and Mike discuss the life and works of novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023), who recently died of esophageal cancer. The son of writer Kingsley Amis, Martin forged his own path, writing fifteen novels and several other works of essays and memoirs, with a devotion to style that earned him comparisons with Joyce and Flaubert. For decades, Amis was a fixture on the Anglo-American literary scene, dominating the landscape even as his books were famously snubbed by critics and prize committees.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jacke talks to Shin Yu Pai, currently the Civic Poet of Seattle, about her career as an artist and her podcast Ten Thousand Things, which explores a collection of objects and artifacts that tell us something about Asian American life. PLUS Ross Benjamin (translator of The Diaries of Franz Kafka) selects the last book he will ever read.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"The words of its writers are part of the texture of Dublin, an invisible counterpart to the bricks and pavement we see around us." Exploring this synergy - between a city and its chief cultural export - is the promise of a new book called Dublin: A Writer's City (part of the Imagining Cities series). In this episode, Jacke talks to author and series editor Christopher Morash about his step-by-step examination of the stomping grounds of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney, and many others. AND THEN Jacke talks to author John Higgs (Love and Let Die: James Bond, The Beatles, and the British Psyche; William Blake vs. the World) about his choice for the last book he will ever read. PLUS Shin Yu Pai, the Civic Poet of Seattle and host of the podcast Ten Thousand Things, previews her appearance on the History of Literature Podcast with a reading of her poem "Virga."Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2019, journalist Elizabeth Winkler wrote an article for the Atlantic, in which she asked whether Shakespeare's plays might have been written by someone other than the man born in Stratford-upon-Avon. The backlash to her article raised a new set of questions: Why are academics - even those who acknowledge the relative lack of evidence for the Stratford man writing the plays - so reluctant to explore this question? Who gets to decide how literature is discussed and debated? And what does this need for certainty say about us as a society? In this episode, Jacke talks to Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature) about how an inquiry and its backlash turned into an inquiry OF the backlash. PLUS Jacke talks to Pulitzer-winning literary biographer Megan Marshall (Margaret Fuller: A New American Life; Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast) about her choice for the last book she will ever read.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an American author who was, by his reckoning, seven-eighths white, though he identified as black. Rejecting the opportunity to "pass," he instead devoted his life to improving race relations through the medium of fiction. Known for his complex portrayals of racial and social identity in the post-Civil War South, he has gone from being admired by his fellow writers to appreciated and studied by scholars interested in the African American experience in the decades following emancipation. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at one of his most popular stories, "The Wife of His Youth" (1898).Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don DeLillo (White Noise, Underworld) is a writer's writer's writer. Often called one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, his themes and style have made him one of the most highly regarded and influential writers of our time. In this episode, Jacke talks to Professor Jesse Kavadlo, the President of the Don DeLillo Society, about the new book he has edited, Don DeLillo in Context, which examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Graduate, a 1967 film directed by Mike Nichols and based on a novel by Charles Webb, introduced the world to actor Dustin Hoffman and became one of the most beloved Hollywood comedies ever made. Telling the story of a disaffected college graduate who has an affair with an older woman and then falls in love with her daughter, the movie was nominated for seven Academy Awards (with Nichols winning for Best Director) and soon became a favorite of critics and college campuses everywhere. How does the movie hold up? Is the novel any good? Why did Roger Ebert fall out of love with it, finding it to be much less worthy at age 55 than he had thought thirty years earlier? And why did the author Charles Webb, together with the real-life inspiration for the movie's Elaine, end up destitute and living out of a VW bus? In this episode, Jacke takes a look at a classic film and what it means to grow old as art grows old too (or does it?). Music Credits: "Quirky Dog" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices