The History of Literature Podcast

The Greek tragedian Euripides gave the world perhaps the most villainous woman ever created: Medea, the scorned wife who murders her own children. But can we trace this mythological figure back to a real-life historical woman who migrated to Greece in the late Bronze Age? In this episode, Jacke talks to one of Britain's foremost classicists, Edith Hall, about her book Medea: A Life, which draws upon meticulous research to construct a biography of a woman navigating the violent patriarchies of th

How do we think about planet Earth? What's our relationship with it? Humans since the Enlightenment have been tempted to believe we've transformed and even - perhaps - tamed it. And yet, Earth is independent of us, and indifferent. In this episode, Jacke talks to Kir Kuiken, whose book Adrift on the Earth: Caribbean Romanticism and Geopoetics uses pairings of Caribbean and Romantic-era authors to deepen our understanding of how we've related to the Earth from the Romantic era through our own. PL

Dale DeBakcsy is an author, illustrator, essayist, instructor, and the creative mind behind the popular Women in Science column. He's also a lifelong fan of romance novels. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dale about his book A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents to Hunky Werewolves, which explores the long story of our love affair with love stories. SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time, enter promotion code THANKS26 to get 26% off - our biggest sale of the year! - on Great Detect

In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, in a review of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's work, "Her poetic inspiration is the highest - we can conceive of nothing more august. Her sense of Art is pure in itself." Later that year, he dedicated his collection The Raven and Other Poems to her, calling her "the noblest of her sex." In this episode, Jacke is joined by the alumni of the first-ever History of Literature Podcast Tour for a lively discussion with poet and biographer Fiona Sampson (Two Way Mirror: The

What did Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have in common? In addition to being literary luminaries who've been famous for nearly two hundred years, they all lived in Concord, Massachusetts, a little town roughly 20 miles northwest of Boston. How did a town of just over two thousand people come to host so many celebrated American writers? And how did their ideas end up changing the world? In

Jacke gets ready for the Halloween season with an episode filled with madness, murder, and ghosts! First, he recounts the story of Romantic period writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Although the brother-sister duo later became famous for their summaries of Shakespeare's tales, they each spent time in madhouses due to fits of "lunacy," one of which resulted in Mary killing their mother with a kitchen knife. Then Jacke talks to author Simon Wroe about his new novel Ghost Month, in which the spirits of