Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ This line is a quotation from one of the most disturbing short stories of the entire twentieth century; but what does it mean? Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, published in the New Yorker in 1948, has been read as a response to the

April 25, 2023, 11:03am Ah, now I see why Republicans want to ban books and defund libraries. According to JSTOR Daily, a young Mao Zedong was an ardent library patron who loved hanging out with books so much he briefly became an assistant librarian. As Mao told his biographer Edgar Snow, after he quit secondary

‘The God’s Script’, sometimes translated under the title ‘The Writing of the God’, is a 1949 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story concerns a Mayan priest who is imprisoned with a jaguar; the priest comes to realise that his god has hidden magic writing within the jaguar’s skin. ‘The

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘To every thing there is a season’ is a famous Biblical quotation. It is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. This short book is actually chock-full of oft-quoted lines: the phrases ‘nothing new under the sun’, ‘the sun also rises’, ‘eat, drink and be merry’,

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Put simply, an ode is a poem written about, or to, a particular thing or person. So Andrew Marvell wrote a poem about Oliver Cromwell, Percy Shelley wrote an ode to the west wind, and John Keats wrote odes to everything from a Grecian urn to the state of

The History Department’s baby ceremony took place on a Thursday afternoon under the fluorescent lights in the Clausewitz Library, located in the windowless basement of one of West Point’s oldest buildings. Its walls are lined with black-, green-, and gold-bound tomes about military strategy and history, and the center of the room features clusters of

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ is one of the most famous songs by Tears for Fears. But what is the meaning of this anthemic mid-80s song? Written by one of the band’s founding members Roland Orzabal, along with Ian Stanley, and producer Chris Hughes, the song reflects its

April 21, 2023, 9:30am Tomorrow is Earth Day, our annual reminder to spare a thought for our spinning planet lest we destroy it completely. Come on guys, how will we read outside if there is no outside left? If you’re lucky enough to be able to spend some time in the out-of-doors this weekend, here

What are the most important themes William Blake’s poem ‘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 us to behave in deceitful and dishonest ways,

A few years back we put together a comprehensive climate change library—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—to help readers grapple, both emotionally and practically, with the ongoing and imminent climate catastrophe we all face. We’re still happy with that collection of books, but in the interest of updating things we reached out to our favorite magazine of nature

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Canary for One’ is a short story by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). He began writing ‘A Canary for One’ in 1926 and it was first published the following year. It contains a number of the most characteristic features of Hemingway’s writing: clear, unadorned prose, and a focus on ordinary,

TODAY: In 1899, Vladimir Nabokov is born.    “Pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms … a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals.” David Barnes considers the baggage of Ernest Hemingway, 100 years after his first published work. | Lit Hub Criticism How language acquisition nourishes a love of literature. |

The myth of Eros and Psyche has exercised writers’ and artists’ imaginations for several millennia, but what are the details of the myth? Below, we summarise the story of these unlucky lovers, and provide an analysis of the myth’s meaning and symbolism. Surprisingly, although the myth is usually referred to as ‘Eros and Psyche’, with

I had been counting down the weeks until I could see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., the new film from writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (Post Grad, Edge of Seventeen) and producer James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News) that adapts Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel of the same name. When it was

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

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