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PODCAST

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

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.

arts books

All Episodes

69:28

678 Fernando Pessoa (with Bartholomew Ryan) | My Last...

The History of Literature ·

2025/02/13

Jacke's been trying to come to grips with Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa ever since Harold Bloom named him one of the 26 most influential writers in the entire Western canon. But it's not easy! As a young man, Pessoa wanted to be, in his words, "plural like the universe," and he carried this out in his poetry: writing verse in the style of more than one hundred fictional alter-egos that he called heteronyms. In this episode, Pessoa expert Bartholomew Ryan, author of Fernando Pessoa: A

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67:50

677 Dylan Thomas (with John Goodby) | Emily Brontë...

The History of Literature ·

2025/02/10

Dylan Thomas: brilliant poet or self-indulgent blowhard? In this episode, Jacke talks to John Goodby, co-author of the biography Dylan Thomas: A Critical Life, about the misconceptions swirling around the famous Welsh poet, and the approach that he and fellow author Chris Wigginton took in presenting a revealing and fresh introduction to Thomas's life and work. PLUS Jacke reads an essay by Emily Brontë in which she wades through deep currents of darkness and gloom to catch a glimpse of

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85:52

676 "Mrs Spring Fragrance" by Sui Sin Far (with Mike...

The History of Literature ·

2025/02/06

Mike Palindrome, the President of the Literature Supporters Club, joins Jacke for a reading and discussion of "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" by Sui Sin Far. The story, which takes place against a backdrop of waves of immigration to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and the racist anti-Asian laws that followed), depicts an enterprising "Americanized" Chinese woman with a taste for matchmaking as she navigates the worlds of Seattle, San Francisco, and her own marriage. While

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70:18

675 Zora Neale Hurston (with Cheryl Hopson) | Jack...

The History of Literature ·

2025/02/03

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was the most published African American woman writer of the first half of the twentieth century; her signature novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is still read by students, scholars, and literature lovers everywhere. In this episode, Jacke talks to Hurston biographer Cheryl R. Hopson (Zora Neale Hurston: A Critical Life) about the life and creativity of this remarkable figure. PLUS Jacke takes a look at some newly resurfaced works by Jack Kerouac, which shed light on

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51:13

674 Nabokov vs Freud (with Joshua Ferris) [Ad-Free...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/30

“I admire Freud greatly,” the novelist Vladimir Nabokov once said, “as a comic writer.” For Nabokov, Sigmund Freud was “the Viennese witch-doctor,” objectionable for “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of his ideas. Author Joshua Ferris (The Dinner Party, Then We Came to the End) joins Jacke for a discussion of the author of Lolita and his special hatred for “the Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella.”[This episode was originally released on September 30, 2017. It is presented here

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64:39

673 Edna Ferber (with Julie Gilbert) | My Last Book...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/27

Novelist and playwright Edna Ferber (1885-1968) lived a wondrous life: residing in Manhattan as a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (So Big), and producing works that Hollywood turned into twentieth-century classics, including the Kern & Hammerstein musical Show Boat and George Stevens's Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Along the way, she also served as a caretaker and mentor for her grandniece, who was wowed by her great

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58:43

672 The Little Review (with Holly A. Baggett) | My...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/23

Founded in Chicago in 1914, the avant-garde journal the Little Review became a giant in the cause of modernism, publishing literature and art by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Amy Lowell, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella, Hans Arp, Mina Loy, Emma Goldman, Wyndham Lewis, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, and more. Perhaps most famously, the magazine published

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60:06

671 Shakespeare's Tragic Art (with Rhodri Lewis) | My...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/20

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and where did he innovate? In this episode, Jacke talks to Shakespeare scholar Rhodri Lewis about his new book Shakespeare's Tragic Art, a new account of Shakespearean tragedy as a response to life in an uncertain world. PLUS Joel Warner (The Curse of the Marquis de Sade: A Notorious

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103:02

670 The Parable

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/16

Inspired by an email (from a listener?) with mysterious origins, Jacke takes a look at the brief narrative form the parable. How did parables get their name? What are their key features? Why did Jesus rely on them so heavily to communicate to his listeners? And what meaning does "A Parable" have for us today?Additional listening: 634 The Bible: A Global History (with Bruce Gordon) 368 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) 41 The New Testament (with Professor Kyle Keefer) The music

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56:00

669 Obsessed with Melville (with Jennifer Habel and...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/13

What happens when a woman becomes obsessed with Herman Melville during the pandemic? What if the process of sorting fact from fiction in Melville's work inspires a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition? And what if she (a poet) and her husband (a novelist, by the way) write a book about all of it? Well, the result would be something like Dayswork: A Novel, which has been called "a supremely literate achievement that wears its erudition lightly." In this episode, Jacke talks to the

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64:08

668 Book and Dagger - The Scholars and Librarians Who...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/09

When the U.S. joined the war in the 1940s, it had a problem: its military had virtually no intelligence service. Enter the librarians! In this episode, Jacke talks to Elyse Graham about her work Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, which tells the story of the efforts to recruit academics and train them for espionage. PLUS a look at some of the upcoming festivities being planned for Jane Austen's 250th birthday.Additional listening: 444 Thrillers

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55:33

667 Sui Sin Far (with Victoria Namkung) | My Last...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/06

Edith Maude Eaton (1865-1914) grew up in unusual circumstances: her father was an English merchant who traveled to China on business, and her mother was a formerly enslaved tightrope walker and human knife-throwing target who traveled all over the world with an acrobatic troupe. The eldest daughter among fourteen children, Eaton mostly grew up in Montreal, then relocated to America, where she became famous under the pen name Sui Sin Far. Today, her journalism and fiction, mostly chronicling the

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122:56

666 "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (with Mike...

The History of Literature ·

2025/01/02

First published in December of 1922, "Winter Dreams" was one of the short stories known as the "Gatsby cluster," as F. Scott Fitzgerald worked out the characters, themes, and prose style that would later make his famous novel The Great Gatsby (1925) an American classic. Telling the story of Dexter Green, a Midwestern golf caddy who becomes a wealthy - but not wealthy enough - suitor to a rich young heiress Judy Jones, "Winter Dreams" works out some of Fitzgerald's own nostalgia and regret for his

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68:22

665 Keats's Great Odes (with Anahid Nersessian)...

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/30

In 1819, John Keats quit his job as an assistant surgeon, abandoned an epic poem he was writing, and focused his poetic energies on shorter works. What followed was one of the most fertile periods in the history of poetry, as in a few months' time Keats completed six masterpieces, including such celebrated classics as "To Autumn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Now, two hundred years later, an American scholar has written an exciting new book called Keats's Odes: A Lover's

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84:30

664 James Joyce's "The Dead" Part 2 [Ad-Free Encore...

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/24

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the second half of the classic James Joyce short story "The Dead." [This episode was originally released on December 22, 2017.] Additional listening: 368 The Story of the Nativity (with Stephen Mitchell) 172 Holiday Movies (with Brian Price) 407 "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast

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31:33

663 James Joyce's "The Dead" Part 1 [Ad-Free Encore...

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/23

Happy holidays! In this episode, presented without commercial interruption, Jacke revisits the first part of the the classic James Joyce holiday story, "The Dead." [The full version of this episode was originally released on December 19, 2017.] Additional listening: 123 James Joyce's The Dead (Part 1) [Full Version] 72 The Best Christmas Stories in Literature 577 'Twas the Night Before Controversy - The Raging Dispute Over a Classic Christmas Poem 470 Two Christmas Days - A Holiday Story by Ida

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65:00

662 Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction - Black...

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/19

Generally speaking, a common conception of U.S. race relations in the mid-twentieth century runs like this: segregation was racist and bad, the doctrine of "separate but equal" masked genuine inequality, and the racial integration brought about by the famous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was a long-awaited triumph. But is the story as neat as that? What did writers - and in particular Black women writers - think about segregation in the 1930s-1950s? Did they view racial

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62:13

661 James Baldwin (with Colm Tóibín)

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/16

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. Inspired by the illumination and insight in Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín would soon become a lifelong fan. In this episode, Tóibín tells Jacke about that original encounter, the qualities he most admires in Baldwin's work, Baldwin's spiritual relationship to the works of Henry James, and more. He also tells Jacke about his new book On James Baldwin, which the Sunday Independent calls "lucid,

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56:18

660 "Wakefield" by Nathaniel Hawthorne | My Last Book...

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/12

Before his marriage, before meeting Herman Melville, and before the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in near seclusion, writing the stories that formed his first collection Twice-Told Tales. Edgar Allan Poe was impressed: "His tone is singularly effective," he wrote, "wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes...We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth." In this episode, Jacke

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58:26

659 The Legend of King Arthur (with Lev Grossman)

The History of Literature ·

2024/12/09

A legendary king, knights of the round table, magic and myths and valiant quests - the stories of King Arthur (also known as the "Matter of Britain") have captivated readers since the Middle Ages. It's potentially rich material for a contemporary novelist, but as Lev Grossman found, some of the Arthurian world's lesser-known characters can be just as compelling. In this episode, the bestselling author of the Magicians Trilogy tells Jacke about his new take on an old legend in his novel The Bright

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