Wuthering
Expectations

My final German Literature Month book ( look at all of the participants !) will be The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) by ...

George Bernard Shaw argues, in The Perfect Wagnerite , that the Ring operas are a response to the revolutions of 1848 and are an allegorica...

Reading Wagner gives me the opportunity to read around Wagner.  For example, George Bernard Shaw’s little 1898 book The Perfect Wagnerite ,...

I am going to write one post about Richard Wagner’s four Ring of the Nibelunga operas, or really the texts.  To do that I need a translatio...

Michael Hofmann’s Gottfried Benn is a bit like a character in a novel about an old man ruminating over his past mistakes.  This novel is inn...

It was The Blue Lantern , I believe, who alerted me to the 2013 publication of Michael Hofmann’s translations of Gottfried Benn, Impromptus:...

I included a grotesque description of a character from Mastro-Don Gesualdo , which is from a section full of grotesquerie, almost nothing bu...

Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889) is another tough one.  The title character is a mason who works his way to wealth but makes the...

He then seemed to hesitate between a glass of fine champagne and one of Chartreuse.  (p. 17) I have had the great luck to read the latest vo...

In some important ways, E. T. A. Hoffmann was an original, but he was not what I would call a thinker.  His work is full of philosophical id...

German Literature Month, via Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat , plus a bicentennial anniversary means that I read The Dev...

And the luminosity said: silence!  Blind man who thinks He reads, fool who thinks he knows!  I tell you: For all eternity does the wondrou...

Victor Hugo, in The End of Satan (1886), is describing the Gospels and their authors (“four simple men”): This story seems added by them to...

Victor Hugo is a giant in French poetry.  Why we do not have, in English, some kind of collected edition of his poems (in many volumes) I do...

All I’m saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see and feel, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see...

The logical place to go after the feminist domestic fiction of Matilde Serao and Maria Messina is to the plays of Luigi Pirandello. That p...

I’ll follow Serao’s Neapolitan unmarried women with a Sicilian example from Maria Messina’s little novel A House in the Shadows (1921), one...

Scott at seraillon has been reading Italian literature this year, like I have, except more widely and deeply and etc.  Today we cross paths...

Sometimes I wonder about the point of writing at any length about as complex a work as The Portrait of a Lady given that I have read it onc...

Never before have I read a novel where so many characters begin their lines with “Ah.”  I have been using “Ah” while answering comments late...