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What is the nexus between liberty and Breaking Bad, named by Rolling Stone as the third-best television show of all-time?  The archetypal tale of Walter White’s “transformation from Mr. Chips to Scarface” teaches that there is… more

What could possibly connect the spirit of Christmas, A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge, and Dante’s Inferno? Though they are differing representations at the literal level, each work portrays a similar underlying religious… more

Though Dante Alighieri is well known for his Inferno and the fact that he was happy to include bishops, popes, and kings in it, it would surprise many readers to hear that he included Santa Claus in his infernal masterpiece… more

Though the Christmas season is rapidly approaching, and Christmas trees, both artificial and natural, are adorning the homes of many individuals, it is far less likely that the denizens of those homes understand the origin of their… more

When As You Like It opens, the political world of its unnamed duchy is truly out of joint. At both the familial and ducal level, injustice is ascendent. What marks the play as a comedy—rather than one of Shakespeare’s blood-thirsty… more

During the past few weeks, as Jews in America, Europe, and Israel have been experiencing an upsurge an antisemitism unlike anything the world has seen since the Holocaust—an increase in Jew-hatred so alarming that it prompted Senate… more

In the 2300s B.C., Sargon the Great united a disparate collection of city states located in Sumer in the southern portion of modern-day Iraq. By doing so, he created the world’s first empire, the Akkadian Empire. Having solidified… more

Sir Thomas Wyatt, a Tudor courtier, the first English translator of Petrarch’s sonnets, and a famous poet in his own right, is a supporting but important character in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels. Mantel first introduces him… more

It might seem weird to be including renowned horror novelist Stephen King in this essay series on classic pulp fiction. For one thing, he’s still alive, and for another thing, he’s not exactly known for pulp magazine short stories.… more

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country… more

When we think of the classics, we usually think of long, sober epic works of literature that address very serious themes—war, individual and societal turmoil, vengeance, treachery, and tragedy. 

One of the most famous dinner parties in literature occurs in Book Five of Milton's Paradise Lost. Eve is busily preparing the evening meal when Adam comes running to tell her that the Angel Raphael is arriving to join them. Adam… more

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings presents several societies with different approaches to government. The most prominent include the idyllic Shire, the grand realm of Gondor, the hardy kingdom of Rohan, and the absolute… more

“All my stories,” wrote H.P. Lovecraft, “unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practising black magic, lost their foothold and were… more

One of the surprise cultural hits of this past summer was the three-part Netflix docu-series Arnold, which has scored a 96% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and which has been lauded by critics and audiences alike. 

There is a third theme which weaves its way through the first few of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, building up to its use in one of the most famous Tales, the Wife of Bath’s Tale. This is the theme of a good woman. 

Paradise Lost, published more than 350 years ago (1667), is still almost routinely characterized as the greatest poem in English. More guardedly, it is called “the greatest epic poem.” (Yes, there are others, such as Beowulf,… more

“One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy, The Merchant of Venice, is a profoundly anti-Semitic work.” This is the pronouncement with which Shakespeare scholar, Harold… more

As Caroline Breashears has recently discussed, John Milton (1608-74) was a  prominent champion of the freedom of the press, something he most famously exhibited in his 1644 tract Areopagitica.  But Milton’s own writings… more

An earlier post explored the rigorous ‘dialogue’ elicited by the Knight’s Tale between the other pilgrims. The Miller is the first to push back, using a two-pronged attack against the ideas of high philosophy and courtly romance in… more

King Lear is a graphic, grotesque, visceral play. Blow after blow strikes Lear and the audience as we see a great man transformed from King of England to homeless, mad wretch, worse than the blind Gloucester and the raving Poor… more

When it comes to why Thomas Bowdler felt the need to “censor” Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1807, the answer is pretty easy: it features a lady cursing.

At the heart of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales lies the Challenge, the thing which draws out the innermost being of each of the characters, revealing a piece of their souls to their fellow pilgrims and sparking the wide-ranging… more

In 1759, when Voltaire published Candide, at first anonymously, he was sixty-five years of age. He had been imprisoned in the Bastille, exiled to England in lieu of further incarceration, banished from Paris by King Louis XV (in… more

That Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales has suffered periods of censorship and banning since its first publication should be of little surprise to anyone who has read any of it. Banned in the latter half of the 19th century in America… more