literary history
-
Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
-
Sidewalk Stanzas
Boston’s City Hall and Mass Poetry, a Massachusetts-based poetry nonprofit, has embarked on an urban art project: They’ve stenciled poems onto Boston’s sidewalks using paint that only appears in the rain. Sara Siegel, the program director at Mass Poetry, says:…
-
What’s Lit Got to Do with It
We remember the 80s as decidedly uncool, art included. But shoulder pads and good writing aren’t mutually exclusive: The labels didn’t matter. What mattered was revealing the world and its beleaguered citizens rather than torturing them with edifying or otherwise…
-
Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
This past weekend, thousands of people convened to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Elizabethan bard’s formal innovations are widely revered as some of the most influential literary developments in history, so much so that we almost overlook…
-
The Book as Christmas Present
Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented…
-
Between the Pages
Long since buried and canonized, Charlotte Brontë is now subject to every writer’s worst nightmare. A poem and prose piece penned by a teenaged Brontë have recently been discovered between the pages of a book that belonged to the Victorian…
-
The Quest for Literary Immortality
In Those Who Write for Immortality, [Heather] Jackson includes a checklist of factors relevant to literary survival. Did the writer have family and friends to ensure that her work stayed in print? When was her biography written, and by whom?…
-
How Street Lights Changed Literature
The Public Domain Review looks at how the introduction of street lights in 17th-century London forever changed literature.
-
Jane Austen: Teen Historian
Brain Pickings looks at Jane Austen’s “History of England,” a satirical pamphlet penned by the then 15-year-old Austen and illustrated by her sister Cassandra.
-
Searching for Cervantes
After a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search may have finally yielded results. Cervantes was buried in Madrid’s…
-
Books Save Lives
You know all those movies in which a character is shot in the chest, only to be miraculously saved by a pocket Bible, and everyone in the audience rolls their eyes? Well, it turns out that books actually are bulletproof—to…
-
The First (Not-So-Great) American Novel
He dearly yearns for Harriot as his mistress: “Shall we not,” he asks her, “obey the dictates of nature, rather than confine ourselves to the forced, unnatural rules of—and—and shall the halcyon days of youth slip through our fingers unenjoyed?”…