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Posts by tag

literary history

17 posts
  • Other

Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think

  • Amanda Hildebrand
  • September 8, 2016
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…
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  • Other

Sidewalk Stanzas

  • Stephanie Bento
  • May 26, 2016
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…
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  • Other

What’s Lit Got to Do with It

  • Roxie Pell
  • May 24, 2016
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…
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  • Other

Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

  • Roxie Pell
  • April 26, 2016
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…
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  • Other

The Book as Christmas Present

  • Kelly Lynn Thomas
  • December 9, 2015
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…
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  • Other

Between the Pages

  • Roxie Pell
  • November 17, 2015
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…
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  • Other

The Quest for Literary Immortality

  • Michelle Vider
  • June 12, 2015
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…
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  • Other

How Street Lights Changed Literature

  • P.E. Garcia
  • June 5, 2015
The Public Domain Review looks at how the introduction of street lights in 17th-century London forever changed literature.
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  • Other

Jane Austen: Teen Historian

  • P.E. Garcia
  • February 2, 2015
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.
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  • Other

Searching for Cervantes

  • Dinah Fay
  • January 28, 2015
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…
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  • Other

Books Save Lives

  • Claire Burgess
  • January 23, 2015
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…
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  • Other

The First (Not-So-Great) American Novel

  • P.E. Garcia
  • January 23, 2015
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…
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