Wuthering
Expectations

Anybody else out there carrying around the idea that Henrik Ibsen introduced something called “realism” to the stage?  Plays were, for a lon...

1.  bibliographing nicole, host of last year’s historic, blog-shattering Clarel readalong has thrown down a metaphorical gauntlet, demandin...

But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness. (John Muir, The Story of M...

Butcher’s Crossing begins with a pair of epigrams that, if properly understood, could replace the novel, although I had to read the novel t...

C. B. James is running a challenge , encouraging people to read historical novels set in the American West.  There’s another name for this k...

Ignorant of linguistics, I followed the recommendation of Language Hat , and the prodding of a couple of my commenters, and read Through the...

Thomas Love Peacock has a few champions, readers of exquisite taste and refined sensibility blahbity blah blah.  Michael Dirda, of The Washi...

The last fifteen pages or so of Nightmare Abbey – that title is from Chapter XIV (Peacock’s chapters, like his books, are short) – move awa...

It might be easier, I suppose, to write about Peacock’s novels if I had some sort of point, but I am just aimlessly Appreciating.  I have no...

Thomas Love Peacock’s novels are, I am told, packed with satirical versions of the celebrities of his day.  If Gryll Grange  has any at all...

Another bad to terrible idea* from Wuthering Expectations:  a week or so writing about Thomas Love Peacock, friend of Percy Shelley, author ...

The warm and engaging hosting service of Wuthering Expectations took an unexpected but well-deserved personal day yesterday.  Some pool time...

Roberto Bolaño’s contribution to the Spanish issue of The Hudson Review is flattering.  It’s a post I wrote last year , on the extraordinar...

I have subscribed to The Hudson Review since 1999, I think, when I stumbled upon it in the library while determinedly avoiding my dissertat...

Another enthusiastic reading list: I read Proust, and I read about Proust; I read Faulkner, I read Mario Vargas Llosa, Borges, Onetti; I rea...

Strangest thing.  I was reading Annie Dillard’s Living by Fiction (1982), a short, pithy, witty work of literary criticism, and was constan...

Given the constraints, North and South is a stunning artistic achievement.  The constraint is that authorial nightmare, weekly serializatio...

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunn...

Should I spend a few days writing about Elizabeth Gaskell’s mature industrial novel, North and South (1855)?  I fear I did not read it well...

Victor Hugo, writing William Shakespeare , fails to follow his own advice, which is only offered in jest.  He is another importunate genius,...