Wuthering
Expectations

Pan Tadeusz is mostly (mostly) not an obviously patriotic poem. One character claims that Polish coffee is the best, and at another point ...

Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1834) is the Polish national epic. That has a dreary sound to it, somehow - conjures images of bored sc...

A Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1817) is not the account of just any voyage to Senegal – see left. It’s that voyage to Senegal. H. B. Henri S...

William Hickling Prescott was an important 19th century historian ( The Conquest of Peru , The Conquest of Mexico ). George Ticknor, a child...

I've complained before , and I'll complain again, about the poor presence of 19th century German-language literature in English. Rea...

Das unheimliche – the uncanny - when something is not quite right. Weird and spooky. In the 19th century, the uncanny was a specialty of th...

Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider (1842) starts with a trick. Gotthelf was a Swiss pastor who wrote tales and novellas of peasant life, ...

Sometime, perhaps next fall, I hope to do a sort of Balzac roundup, so just a few comments on Ursule Mirouët (1841). A wealthy Parisian doc...

We must be as precise as possible. Most novels and poems and essays are failures. Some are honest hackwork, some are the work of con artists...

I spent all last week admiring Edgar Allan Poe's hatchet jobs. Lovely, blood-soaked things. Joseph Epstein's latest collection, In a...

Back to that James Wood interview for a minute, and "the essential juvenility of plot." He said it, not me! Wood immediately admi...

Although I have not read Jane Eyre , I know, through cultural osmosis, I guess, the entire story, including the last line* and the genuine ...

I hate the word “spoilers”. It will never be used here without quotation marks. Stories – novels, movies, whatever – whose primary value is ...

At the beginning of the week, I quoted a piece of Poe's blast at William Ellery Channing, Jr . Channing has five poems in the Library of...

I don't want to give the wrong idea about Poe the book reviewer. He viewed his brutal negative reviews as a necessary enterprise, as imp...

This is Poe's December 1844 note on novelist William Gilmore Simms: "Mr. Simms has abundant faults—or had;—among which inaccurate E...

Commenter " comments i done left " asked a reasonable question about Poe's book reviews yesterday - is it all this good? Meani...

Edgar Allan Poe made his living as a book reviewer and magazine writer. He was a pioneer, one of the first people to take book reviewing ser...

Edgar Allan Poe, in his review of The Old Curiosity Shop , takes a good crack at a common misunderstanding of Dickens: "There are oth...

Dickens tried something new in The Old Curiosity Shop . He borrowed an structure from another novel to prop up part of his own story. The jo...