The History of Literature

Did you think we already knew everything there was to know about Virginia Woolf? Think again! In this episode, Jacke talks to scholar and editor Urmila Seshagiri about The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, which presents three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet, which

At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but he portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, a professor of English literature who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, this startl

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was born into relative obscurity and died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 29. And yet, somehow this ambitious cobbler's son brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture. In this episode, Jacke talks to Stephen Greenblatt about his book Dark

When Jacke started the podcast in 2015, he decided to privilege books that were at least fifty years old. (Longtime listeners will know he's made a few exceptions, but for the most part, that's been the policy.) Last month, the History of Literature Podcast celebrated its tenth anniversary - which means there are ten y

Charlotte Brontë wasn't born the eldest child, but she was thrust into a leadership role at the age of ten, as the Brontë children dealt with the tragic deaths of their mother and two eldest sisters. How did this affect their family dynamic? And when the younger two sisters, Emily and Anne, had their novels accepted wh

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman,