Wuthering
Expectations

A Sportsman’s Notebook is the title Charles and Natasha Hepburn chose for their translation of Ivan Turgenev’s early book of stories, or wh...

Books Many People Should Read.  In this case, books by Ivan Turgenev, early Turgenev.  This was my non-American, non-Melvillean, not-so-diff...

There is nothing for a man but genius or despair.  We cannot answer in the smart language, certainly it would be a bastardization of our own...

I could go on about the imagery in Clarel .  I’d like to – the rose images, and the palm.  There’s this short canto (2.35) titled “Prelusive...

How to read Herman Melville’s enormous 1876 Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage ?  And, I know, why.  I’ll come back to that one, maybe.  How – ...

As I plan out my writing, I realize I’m working with a concept: it’s Books Few People Should Read Week.  Thank goodness it’s not Blog Sweeps...

Since I started Wuthering Expectations, I’ve had this mass of overheated gibberish dragging along at the bottom of the blog: I too could no...

Lived reclusively following wife’s death. I’m reading the paragraph on Frederick Goddard Tuckerman at the end of the Library of America’s A...

The nineteenth century.  So says Yvor Winters: Tuckerman is flawed by the vices of his century; but The Cricket , I feel sure, is the great...

The tricks memory plays. Vladimir Nabokov taught me to listen for the poetry embedded in prose.  In the magnificent Chapter 4 of The Gift ...

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Herman Melville’s collection of Civil War poems, is unusual (every Melville book is unusual). ...

The response to bibliographing nicole’s readalong of Clarel , Herman Melville’s massive 1876 epic poem of faith-and-doubt, has been fantasti...

Although I breezily dismiss the value of plot for the sake of overemphasizing style, plot is really another dimension of style, another plac...

Mrs. Morgan is the wife of the rector of Carlingford.  She is, perhaps, the fourteenth most important character in The Perpetual Curate .  H...

How many guidelines for good book reviewing did I violate yesterday?  I feel bad, genuinely, for omitting the slightest sample of Oliphant’s...

Geez, I take a break and I can’t write a word.  Wait, here I go. Margaret Oliphant wrote most of her books in the middle of the night, aft...

Away for a week.  Back Tuesday. Which will give me four days for Margaret Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate  (1864), hardly enough.  One...

From the aggravating Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass : The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters...

This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars,     markets, newspapers, schools,...

Frederic Remington illustrated the 1891 edition of The Song of Hiawatha (1855).  That’s the one I have been using, reprinted by David R. Go...