By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The more the merrier’ is a famous phrase, but what does it mean? And where – and when – did this saying originate? And what do its origins have to do with a heart-wrenching medieval lament for a dead child? Let’s take a closer look at ‘The more the
Literature
April 21, 2023, 12:03pm Hilary Mantel died last September at age 70, but a memorial service just this week revealed something of use to those who miss her words. The Guardian’s Saturday Paper will be publishing excerpts from an unpublished project mashing together Jane Austen’s works. “She was having the greatest fun dissecting a literary
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Ballad metre’ is the term given to poems written in quatrains, usually of alternating tetrameter (four-foot) and trimeter (three-foot) lines, rhymed abcb. Ballads originally became popular in the late medieval period, and were designed to be sung and danced to: the word ‘ballad’ is derived from the Latin balar,
April 20, 2023, 11:29am Did Amazon get the idea for The Rings of Power from J.R.R. Tolkien’s vast legacy, comprising over a dozen books, or did they steals it from LA dude Demetrious Polychron? That’s what Demestrious Polychron would like to know. PCMag reports that Polychron wrote a fanfic called The Fellowship of the Kings
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Saving All My Love for You’ is one of those songs which few people probably realise is actually a cover version. Several of Whitney Houston’s most famous songs – including ‘The Greatest Love of All’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’ – were first recorded by other artists, even
April 20, 2023, 12:37pm Shh shhshh! Jack Thorne, who adapted Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for TV, has the conch! Along with the production company behind Sex Education, Thorne will be adapting William Golding’s Lord of the Flies for a BBC TV series, Deadline reports, and somewhere, a prop stylist is forming Piggy’s ill-fated spectacles.
Religion is an important feature of many people’s lives, so it shouldn’t surprise us that many writers of short stories have written about religion from various perspectives: the power of superstitious belief, the importance of religious conversion, the cultural role of Christianity, and many other religious attitudes and themes. Below, we introduce some of the
April 19, 2023, 2:42pm One more reason to love the New York Public Library—the Young Lions Fiction Award, which was founded by Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Rick Moody, and Hannah McFarland, and recognizes American fiction writers 35 and under with a $10,000 prize. Past recipients include Catherine Lacey and Ling Ma. This year’s judges
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ is a phrase which has the ring of an anonymous proverb handed down over the centuries, a pithy apercu whose author and true origins are both lost in the mists of history. However, this assumption would be quite wrong. We know
TODAY: In 1989, English novelist and playwright Daphne du Maurier dies at 81. “In the frequency of our family there is hum, high and happy, of three humans sharing their lives with a beast.” Ramona Ausubel on falling with a dog (and the world). | Lit Hub Animals Alison L. Strayer describes the process
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) In his vast Guide to Modern World Literature, Martin Seymour-Smith calls Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman the only true poetic innovators in nineteenth-century American poetry. But in fact, Dickinson’s eccentric use of slant rhyme and Whitman’s development of free verse are both anticipated in the work of an earlier
April 18, 2023, 10:26am First of all, if you’re a teen who likes to write, keep at it, and don’t let anyone tell you different. (And if you’re the parent of a teen who likes to write, please encourage them.) With the above in mind, the Miami Book Fair is offering a virtual summer camp
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The best-laid schemes of mice and men’ is one of those literary quotations which have slipped free of their origins and taken on a whole new, proverbial meaning. This phrase has issued from the mouths of people who have doubtless never read the poem in which it initially appeared,
April 18, 2023, 11:16am Fans of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All The Light We Cannot See have something to chew on today, with the release of the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Deadpool and Stranger Things(?!) producer Shawn Levy. Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, adapted the book for television.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Both Sides Now’ is one of Joni Mitchell’s best-known songs. But the meaning of the song is less universally understood. Is it a coming-of-age celebration of learning wisdom, a lament for lost innocence, or a song about being unable to part with one’s illusions, even once our experience of
April 17, 2023, 11:03am In a plot straight from a Cohen Brothers’ movie—think “high stakes/low IQ”—a former romance novel cover model has been sentenced to 36 months in prison for his violent role in the January 6 Capitol Insurrection. Logan James Barnhart, whose chest has graced the covers of such classics as Stepbrother UnSEALed: A
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’ has attained the status of a proverb, so that may lead us to believe that it should be attributed to that most prolific of all authors, ‘Anon.’ But in fact, the phrase can be fairly confidently ascribed to a particular writer. But
April 17, 2023, 12:03pm When Ashley C. Ford showed up to the book club in March, she found an audience who had all read her 2021 bestseller, Somebody’s Daughter, and were primed for a lively discussion. “I gotta tell you, I’ve been to a lot of bookstores where they didn’t do that,” Ford laughs. The