The History of Literature

What do we know about the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius? Although people have written biographies of Confucius for over 2,000 years, a recent discovery of a Chinese tomb containing the oldest written account of his life gives us a chance to look at Confucius afresh. In this episode, after some reflections on his experiences as a young teacher in Taiwan, Jacke talk...

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an extreme increase in America's prison population, from roughly 250,000 inmates in 1940 to well over two million by 2008. At the same time, American readers were devouring mysteries, thrillers, detective novels, police procedurals, and other forms of crime fiction. In this episode, Jacke talks to Theodore Martin about hi...

At the time of Washington Irving's death, he was the most famous and widely praised American writer of his or any other era. But his reputation soon dwindled, and today he's known primarily as the author of just two stories ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle"), while his groundbreaking works of history, biography, and essays are barely known. In this episode, ...

In 1895, Henry James suffered through a terrible failure, as his play Guy Domville was greeted by hoots, jeers, and tomatoes being thrown at the play's author. James responded by starting work on his masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, which tells the story of a governess and the demonic forces haunting her and the children in her care. In this episode, Jacke...

It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Byron's doctor John Polidori, gathered in a Swiss villa and decided to tell each other ghost stories to pass the time. Mary Shelley began to write Frankenstein, and John ...