Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Robin Redbreast in a Cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage.’ This couplet constitutes the other most famous quotation from ‘Auguries of Innocence’ after ‘To see the world in a grain of sand’. But what is the meaning of this quotation? To understand the meaning of Blake’s

August 29, 2023, 6:00am The wheel of the year is turning, as it always does, beginning its slow shift from summer to the fall. If you’re unsure of how to spend the last days of August, rest assured that even if seasons always shift, one constant you can rely on is that there will always

The great French physiologist Claude Bernard developed the concept of the milieu intérieur: the delicately regulated fluid environment that surrounds our cells, courses through our arteries and veins, bathes every muscle and nerve, organ and bone in our bodies. Kidneys do many things to maintain the equilibrium, or “homeostasis,” of this fluid environment. They remove

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Some words have curious, and revealing, etymologies. The origins of the word ‘plagiarism’ are certainly revealing. The meaning of the word is fairly well-known: ‘plagiarism’ means stealing another person’s work, especially their writing, and passing it off as your own. To plagiarise is to seek to get the credit

Early on the morning of August 28, 1993, the poet William Stafford scratched out the draft of a poem, as he did most mornings, while lying on the couch beneath the living room window at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Later in the day, he sat at the cluttered desk in his writing room,

I think artist Richard Wentworth pre-empted the idea of Instagram through his brilliant series of photographs titled Making Do and Getting By (1974 – present). A hugely influential body of work, his images document a surfeit, ‘ a creativity beyond functionality, a transformative repair.’ He has changed the way we look at the world, and

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What are the most important symbols and images in William Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’? The poem is from Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. ‘A Poison Tree’ is a powerful poem about anger, and how anger eats away at us, causing

What is dignity? The measure of liberty.–Giannina Braschi * Yo-Yo Boing! has often been called a translingual text. Daringly written in Spanish, English, a combination of the two, and in Spanglish, critics have focused on the translanguaging aspects of the novel. In their introduction to Yo-Yo Boing! Doris Sommer and Alexandra Vega-Merino write: “Choose and

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) gave us many memorable lines. The majority of these are one-liners and witticisms which he either used in conversation or sprinkled throughout his clever comedies – his plays which were performed to great acclaim during the first half of the 1890s. But ‘each man kills the

Among the many dolls mentioned in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie there is one associated with time and memory and literally named after Marcel Proust. It didn’t sell well. Perhaps Mattel got the wrong writer. They could have gone for the same Marcel, but as a comedian, a French, philosophical, disguised partner of Dickens. Critics have

TODAY: In 1904, Christopher Isherwood (Goodbye to Berlin, A Single Man) is born.    “Whatever has been invented, Le Guin teaches us, can be reinvented.” John Plotz revisits Earthsea. | Lit Hub Criticism Moeen Farrokhi on writing and humiliation under Iranian censorship: “I began to question the very act of writing itself.” | Lit Hub Memoir “No one needs

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What connects the word ‘gobbledygook’ with the word ‘maverick’? To discover the link, we need to delve into the origins, or etymologies, of both words. But first, let’s consider how we came to have the word gobbledygook to refer to meaningless jargon or nonsense. First of all, how is

From What Would Velma Do? out now from Running Press. Velma may be the modern model of a particular ideal, but it’s an ideal that’s existed since a nearsighted Australopithecus shone a torch into the back of her cave to logically prove that the Ghost Mammoth was just Ogg with a blanket over his head.

TODAY: In 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche at 55.   Michael Wood wants to know: Why do we always forget that Marcel Proust is funny? | Lit Hub Humor What do writers do on Instagram? Cornelia Parker looks to Amit Chaudhuri, Andrew O’Hagan, Kamila Shamsie, and others. | Lit Hub Photography Christina Lamb on the widespread practice

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ is a song whose title has a long history, taking us back to the Deep South in the nineteenth century. However, it was in the 1990s that the song became a worldwide smash hit, and its chorus remains instantly recognisable. But what’s the story behind ‘Cotton

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” Fantasy and science fiction never meant escapism

August 24, 2023, 8:59am In 1966, after more than a quarter century in obscurity, the Dominica-born British author Jean Rhys published what is now considered to be her masterpiece. Wide Sargasso Sea is an astonishing, hallucinatory fantasy about the early life, and eventual psychological disintegration, of the first Mrs. Rochester—aka Bertha from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The question ‘what is a woman?’ has been widely discussed and debated in recent times, given the ongoing arguments – which have entered mainstream politics – surrounding gender and self-identification. But the question of where the word woman comes from is also of interest, since, as is so often