“The best that is known and thought”: On rereading Matthew Arnold in 2023
Today, Arnold's ideas seem deeply unfashionable. They also seem pressingly relevant.
A Blog About Books and Reading
A Blog About Books and Reading
Today, Arnold's ideas seem deeply unfashionable. They also seem pressingly relevant.
John Guillory is best known for his 1993 book Cultural Capital. That book, which was published at the height of...
"Never trust a storyteller," Gottschall warns, although he also points out that we do, all the time, and it's probably inevitable.
Together, these essays provide a justification and rationale for queer readings of what may in fact turn out to be one of the queerest genres around.
"When the author gives me a scene of wild young passion, then I can no longer slog through the immediate follow-up of a tender description of the bendings of wheat in the breeze."
Glickman’s focus on technique on a granular level reveals her to be a deeply knowledgeable and highly erudite reader of a wide range of poets.
The reduction of literary characters to a history of trauma is too often used as convenient shorthand, robbing us of the pleasure found in complexity and ambiguity.
A noir sensibility finds its origins in German expressionism and creates a neurotic environment in which the borderline between good and evil is nonexistent.
Hammond has written a text that is frankly unclassifiable: part biography, part critical exegesis, part hipster manifesto.
The New York Times literary critic surveys the history of the newspaper’s book review to discover what has, and what hasn’t, changed in the last century.