Episodes

Hardly anyone knows Ursula Parrott today, but not long ago she was close to being a household name. As a bestselling novelist of the Roaring Twenties and beyond, Parrott's life was filled with literature, celebrity, and scand...

Jacke talks to Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro about his new book, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future , which looks at eight contentious periods in American history to see how...

Jacke talks to author William Egginton about his new book Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality , which uses the examples of three profound thinkers to explore the differences between reality "out there...

Jacke talks to Professor Maaheen Ahmed, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Comics , about the popular, multifaceted, and dynamic art form of manga, graphic novels, and other comics. PLUS Elizabeth Winkler ( Shakespeare Was ...

Jacke talks to author Ed Simon about his new book Heaven, Hell, and Paradise Lost , which considers Paradise Lost within the scope of Simon's alcoholism and recovery. PLUS Jacke continues his journey through the poetry of Emi...

In this episode, Jacke and Mike discuss Disgrace , J.M. Coetzee's stunning 1999 novel about sex, violence, salvation, and ruin in post-apartheid South Africa. Telling the story of David Lurie, a fiftysomething professor who h...

Rome! The Eternal City! It's a place for celebrating lives both present and past - and in addition to all the art and culture and architecture and food, it's a place to think deeply about the meaning of life. In this episode,...

Jacke begins with a look at Emily Dickinson's poem #122, then continues (and concludes) his reading and analysis of the Henry James masterpiece, "The Altar of the Dead." Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or hist...

During a horrible period of grief, literary failure, and general bewilderment, Henry James turned to art - and created some of his greatest masterpieces. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at one of James's best (and most un...

Jacke kicks things off with a look at Emily Dickinson's Poem #90, then welcomes author Vanessa Riley for a discussion of her new historical novel Queen of Exiles , which tells the story of Haiti's Queen Marie-Louise Christoph...

Jacke and Mike take a look at the stormy Fitzgerald marriage and F. Scott Fitzgerald's fourth novel, Tender Is the Night , which many consider to be his masterpiece. (Yes, even better than Gatsby !) Help support the show at p...

Jacke continues his Emily Dickinson series with a reading of Poem #32. Then Professor Patrick Whitmarsh stops by for a discussion of his new book Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science , which exami...

Jacke talks to Professor Hamid Dabashi about his new book The Persian Prince: The Rise and Resurrection of an Imperial Archetype , which replaces Machiavelli's Il Principe with a bold new figurative ideal. Drawing on works fr...

It's a trip to the Big Easy! The city of New Orleans is so famous for its music, its food, and its Mardi Gras mentality that it's sometimes overlooked as a magnet for writers like Walt Whitman, Zora Neale Hurston, and William...

Australia! After promising listeners an episode about Australia for years, Jacke FINALLY gets his act together - and luckily he has the perfect guest to help him out. In this episode, Australian novelist Pip Williams, who ach...

The hits keep coming at the History of Literature Podcast! In this episode, Jacke follows up on last week's episode on Crime and Punishment with a look at the short story that literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "practical...

It's another packed episode! First, Jacke talks to Langston Hughes scholars Vera Kutzinski and Anthony Reed about their new book, Langston Hughes in Context , which shows how Hughes was much more than just a poet of the Harle...

"It is directly obvious," said Virginia Woolf after reading Crime and Punishment , "that [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born." In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the classic novel of murder, guilt, and redemptio...

Jacke talks to fairy tale expert Jack Zipes about his new book Buried Treasures: The Power of Political Fairy Tales , which profiles modern writers and artists who tapped the political potential of fairy tales. Help support t...

Jacke and Mike discuss the life and works of novelist Martin Amis (1949-2023), who recently died of esophageal cancer. The son of writer Kingsley Amis, Martin forged his own path, writing fifteen novels and several other work...

Jacke talks to Shin Yu Pai, currently the Civic Poet of Seattle, about her career as an artist and her podcast Ten Thousand Things , which explores a collection of objects and artifacts that tell us something about Asian Amer...

"The words of its writers are part of the texture of Dublin, an invisible counterpart to the bricks and pavement we see around us." Exploring this synergy - between a city and its chief cultural export - is the promise of a n...

In 2019, journalist Elizabeth Winkler wrote an article for the Atlantic , in which she asked whether Shakespeare's plays might have been written by someone other than the man born in Stratford-upon-Avon. The backlash to her a...

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was an American author who was, by his reckoning, seven-eighths white, though he identified as black. Rejecting the opportunity to "pass," he instead devoted his life to improving race relation...