Podcasts · Arts · History

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

300 episodes

Amateur enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Episodes are not in chronological order and you don't need to start at the beginning - feel free to jump in wherever you like! Find out more at historyofliterature.com and facebook.com/historyofliterature. Support the show by visiting patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. Contact the show at historyofliteraturepodcast@gmail.com.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. 839 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with David Medina

    · 1 h 25 min · Episode 839

    In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, in a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work, "Her poetic inspiration is the highest - we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself." Later that year,…

  2. 838 The Emerson Circle (with Bruce Nichols) | Life Hack! Could This Simple Trick Help You Read More?

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 838

    What did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have in common? In addition to being literary luminaries who've been…

  3. 837 Ghost Month (with Simon Wroe) | Madness and Murder - The Story of Charles and Mary Lamb

    · 1 h 16 min · Episode 837

    Jacke 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 the brother-sister duo later…

  4. 836 Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (with Robin Waterfield and John Sellars) | My Last Book with Daniel Olivas

    · 57 min · Episode 836

    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 this episode,…

  5. 835 Blackness in Iran (with Amy Motlagh) | My Last Book with Nicholas Boggs

    · 46 min · Episode 835

    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 this episode, Jacke…

  6. 834 Shakespeare's Scholars (with Sean Keilen) | My Last Book with Nan Z. Da

    · 57 min · Episode 834

    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…

  7. 833 Galahad and the Grail (with Malcolm Guite)

    · 55 min · Episode 800

    Everywhere we look, we see the benefits of the modern world. But what have we lost? In this episode, Jacke talks to Malcolm Guite about his new book Galahad and the Grail, the first of a four-volume Arthuriad, which…

  8. 832 Stendhal [Revisited]

    · 48 min · Episode 771

    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. So who was he? How did he view himself? What did he write, and…

  9. 831 Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (with Rachel Pastan) | My Last Book with David Denby

    · 59 min · Episode 831

    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…

  10. 830 Becoming Stendhal (with Hadley Suter) | A Literary Tribute to Dolly Parton

    · 1 h 38 min · Episode 830

    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 this episode, Jacke talks to author Hadley Suter (Becoming Stendhal: The Performance of…

  11. 829 Charlotte Brontë and Her Biographer Elizabeth Gaskell (with Susan Dunne) | My Last Book with Travis Franks | The Odyssey Kerfuffle

    · 1 h 11 min · Episode 829

    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…

  12. 828 Confucius (with Mark Csikszentmihalyi) | Celia Bookshop! (with Rachel Pastan) | Jacke in Taiwan

    · 1 h 22 min · Episode 828

    What do we know about the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius? Although people have written biographies of Confucius for over 2,000 years, a recent discovery of a Chinese tomb containing the oldest written…

  13. 827 American Literature's War on Crime (with Theodore Martin) | W.E.B. DuBois Sits with Shakespeare

    · 1 h 23 min · Episode 827

    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…

  14. 826 The Essayist's Essayist - Phillip Lopate on the Pleasures of Reading Washington Irving and Other "Minor Writers" | Notes from the History of Literature Podcast Tour!

    · 1 h 19 min · Episode 826

    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…

  15. 825 Henry James's Ghosts (with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm) | My Last Book with David Womersley

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 825

    In 1895, Henry James suffered through a terrible failure, as his play Guy Domville was greeted by hoots, jeers, and tomatoes being thrown at the play's author. James responded by starting work on his masterpiece The…

  16. 824 Why Did Mary Shelley Try to Erase Her? The Claire Clairmont Story (with Emily Franklin) | My Last Book with Mathelinda Nabugodi

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 824

    It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Byron's doctor John…

  17. 823 Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Shakespeare in a Divided America (with James Shapiro)

    · 55 min · 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…

  18. 822 Wild Thoreau (with Lydia Willsky-Ciollo) | My Last Book with Douglas Clark

    · 1 h 08 min · Episode 822

    Henry David Thoreau was not a traditional Christian, and yet he was a deeply, profoundly religious man. In this episode, Jacke talks to Lydia Willsky-Ciollo about her book Wildness: Henry David Thoreau and the Making…

  19. 821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser)

    · 1 h 29 min · Episode 821

    The kiss! What could be more romantic? And yet, as historian Katie Barclay discovered when writing her book The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power, she found non-romantic kisses to be even more fascinating. In this…

  20. 820 Irish Radical Poet Eva Gore-Booth (with Sonja Tiernan)

    · 56 min · Episode 820

    After reading an email from a listener in Ghana, 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…

  21. 819 Robert Louis Stevenson (with Glenda Norquay) | The Rise of HOT Literati | My Last Book with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

    · 1 h 04 min · Episode 819

    After discussing a news article detailing the rise of "hot literati," Jacke talks to biographer Glenda Norquay (Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Life) about the amazing life of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish…

  22. 818 Muriel Spark (with James Bailey) | My Last Book with J. Michael Lennon

    · 1 h 13 min · 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. PLUS J. Michael Lennon, friend and biographer of Norman Mailer ( Norman Mailer: A…

  23. 817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard

    · 1 h 30 min · 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:…

  24. 816 Gulliver's Travels at 300 (with David Womersley) | My Last Book with Daniel Mendelsohn

    · 1 h 10 min · Episode 790

    As a literary classic turns 300, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's David Womersley about Jonathan Swift, the nature of satire, and The Cambridge Anniversary Edition of Gulliver's Travels, which Womersley…

  25. 815 Paddy Chayefsky

    · 1 h 40 min · Episode 815

    Thanks in part to beloved films like Marty (1955) and Network (1976), Paddy Chayefsky is often regarded as the greatest writer of television's first Golden Age and the most acclaimed screenwriter in Hollywood history.…

  26. 814 Shakespeare in Translation (with Daniel Hahn) | My Last Book with Indira Ghose

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 814

    What is it like to translate Shakespeare into another language? How does one attempt to capture that transcendent magic so familiar to English speakers? In this episode, Jacke talks to writer, editor, and translator…

  27. 813 George Sand (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with Kathleen Antonioli

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 813

    Upon her death, French novelist George Sand (1804-1876) was widely recognized as one of the most popular and acclaimed writers in Europe. And yet, even then, the legend of the cigar-smoking, cross-dressing, promiscuous…

  28. 812 Talking Classics (with Mary Beard) | My Last Book with Karen Spence

    · 1 h 02 min · Episode 812

    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…

  29. 811 The Harlem Renaissance [Reclaimed] | My Last Book with Erin Sharkey

    · 55 min · Episode 811

    The Harlem Renaissance, the great flowering of African American arts and culture in the early twentieth century, is hard to define but easy to admire. Coupled with the Great Migration, in which hundreds of thousands of…

  30. 810 "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant (with Mike Palindrome)

    · 1 h 15 min · Episode 810

    Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is widely regarded as one of the greatest short story writers in history. Among his admirers were Flaubert, who befriended and mentored the younger writer, and later masters of the form…

  31. 809 Robert Browning | The Dutch Roots of Washington Irving (with Elisabeth Paling Funk)

    · 1 h 26 min · Episode 809

    Robert Browning (1812-1889) is often considered one of the greatest of the Victorian poets. Two developments established Browning as an indispensable figure in the history of literature: first, his early taste for…

  32. 808 A Treacherous Secret Agent - How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare (with Marjorie Garber) | Arthur Miller on Writing "The Crucible"

    · 57 min · Episode 808

    During the Cold War, hearings led by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy soon turned into a witch hunt, as paranoia and political opportunism destroyed the careers (and lives) of actors, directors, singers, filmmakers,…

  33. 807 The Story of Stories (with Kevin Ashton) | My Last Book with Ilya Vinitsky and James H McGavran III

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 807

    When we first started this podcast in 2015, we began with a simple premise: "We are human beings, and human beings tell stories." But how has that happened? What has that meant for humanity? And to what extent has…

  34. 806 Robert Frost (with Adam Plunkett) | My Last Book with Ursula Buchan

    · 53 min · Episode 806

    By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was widely regarded as America's most popular poet, beloved for the simple, sincere verses that took readers on journeys through the wooded roads of rural New…

  35. 805 Robert Frost Finds a Friend [Revisited]

    · 55 min · Episode 805

    In preparation for next week's conversation with Adam Plunkett, author of a new major biography of Robert Frost (1874-1963), we revisit an earlier episode about the widely anthologized (and often misunderstood) New…

  36. 804 Shakespeare and Loss (with Sarah Beckwith) | My Last Book with Caroline Lea

    · 1 h 04 min · Episode 804

    It's Memorial Day in the United States, a day devoted to remembering the soldiers who have died in service. Together, the society grieves, mourns, and attempts to unite. Similarly, communities can come together through…

  37. 803 Literature, Authorship, and the Rise of AI (with Eric Burgess) | My Last Book with Mark Hussey

    · 51 min · Episode 803

    The rise of Artificial Intelligence has sent shockwaves through the literary world, with the impact being felt by both publishers and creative types. In this episode, Jacke talks to writer and entrepreneur Eric Burgess…

  38. 802 Colette (with Kathleen Antonioli) | My Last Book with Colombe Schneck

    · 46 min · Episode 802

    Twentieth-century French novelist Colette (1873-1954) was a strikingly modern celebrity and full of contradictions. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Kathleen Antonioli about her book Colette: A Critical Life,…

  39. 801 Persuasion by Jane Austen (Revisited)

    · 34 min

    As the History of Literature Podcast Tour rolls through literary England, Jacke and Emma are revisiting some past episodes with connections to what they're seeing and doing. Today, they're in Bath, which naturally…

  40. 800 Shakespeare in Jest (with Indira Ghose) | My Last Book with Nicholson Baker

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 800

    It's Episode 800! Jacke celebrates the milestone by talking to Shakespeare scholar Indira Ghose about her book Shakespeare in Jest, which draws fascinating parallels between Shakespeare's humor and the things we still…

  41. 799.5 Laurie Frankel's Enormous Wings (Revisited) | My Last Book with Julie Gilbert

    · 57 min

    Happy Mother's Day! Jacke takes advantage of an error to revisit a conversation with novelist Laurie Frankel about her book Enormous Wings, in which an unexpected pregnancy leads a seventy-seven-year-old woman to…

  42. 799 Emma Smith and Shakespeare's First Folio (Revisited)

    · 49 min · Episode 799

    As Jacke and Emma travel to England for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Emma Smith about…

  43. 798.5 Thinking Through Shakespeare (with David Womersley) | My Last Book with Ramie Targoff

    · 51 min

    Is there such a thing as a general human nature? And if so, does Shakespeare serve as a "faithful mirror" to it, as Dr. Johnson claimed? In this episode, Jacke talks to Oxford University's David Womersley about his…

  44. 798 Emma Smith and Portable Magic - A History of Books and Their Readers (Revisited)

    · 41 min · Episode 798

    As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Emma Smith about her book…

  45. 797 Marion Turner and Chaucer (Revisited)

    · 53 min · Episode 797

    As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Marion Turner about her…

  46. 796 Marion Turner and The Wife of Bath (Revisited)

    · 48 min · Episode 796

    As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to the University of Oxford's Marion Turner about her…

  47. 795 Will Tosh and Queer Shakespeare (Revisited)

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 795

    As Jacke and Emma get ready for the History of Literature Podcast Tour, they're revisiting some past interviews with special guests. In this episode, Jacke talks to Will Tosh, Director of Research at Shakespeare's…

  48. 794 E.T.A. Hoffmann (with Ritchie Robertson) | My Last Book with Gerri Kimber

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 794

    In addition to being an accomplished lawyer and a highly influential music critic, the nineteenth-century German Romantic Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) also wrote pioneering works of crime and horror…

  49. 793 The Secret Order of Shandeans: Laurence Sterne in Early Soviet Russia (with Peter Budrin) | My Last Book with Edward Watts

    · 48 min · Episode 793

    The 1920s were a tumultuous time for Russia, as the nation careened from the aftermath of revolution to the death of Lenin, the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the slide toward Stalinist totalitarianism. Given…

  50. 792 Death and Decay in Early Modern Lyric Poetry (with Eileen Sperry) | My Last Book with Bruce Gordon

    · 1 h 02 min · Episode 792

    In this episode, Jacke talks to author Eileen Sperry about her book This Body of Death: Form and Decay in Early Modern Lyric, which examines how the lyric poetry of Shakespeare and his contemporaries shaped our…

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