Wuthering
Expectations

The case of Thomas Lovell Beddoes in entirely different than that of his fellow Norton Anthology refugee George Darley.  His masterpiece Dea...

What a terrible discovery.  I was thinking, while writing my note on D. G. Myers’s use of the MLA International Bibliography to rank Ameri...

Professor Myers is investigating one of the canonical mechanisms I hid in the background yesterday:  who do researchers in English departme...

Anyone who reads a lot of old books should spend some time thinking about why these old books and not those.  Not too much time.  The same i...

In a discussion of the word “classics” at Caravana de Recuerdos, grisly details here , Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat championed the ...

Ask a graduate student in the humanities – an A(ll)B(ut)D(issertation) is who I really have in mind – what he “does” and you will likely hea...

Denis Donoghue’s The American Classics (2005) has a sad back story.  He was teaching a graduate course at New York University on what he co...

Everyone is assembling their Classics Club reading list , pledging to read  fifty classic books in five years .  Or 100 or what you like.  M...

One thing I love about book blogs, and about amateur readers, is that they sometimes want to slap fictional characters, or strangle them.  O...

To the Capital , another posthumous Eça de Queirós novel, this one published in 1925, a quarter century after Eça’s death, that’s the book I...

Eça de Queirós often – always? – ends his novels with a coda, the ending after the ending.  In The City and the Mountains, someone needs to ...

I am looking back at the St. Orberose overview of the novels of Eça de Queirós, where he describes The City and the Mountains as “a simpli...

The City and the Mountains (1901) and To the Capital (1925) are a pair of posthumous Eça de Queirós novels that I was fortunate enough to ...

APHORISM, n. , Predigested wisdom. In my thinking about aphoristic writing, I have barely moved beyond categorization.  For example, The Dev...

Here  we have Friedrich Nietzsche describing the “difficulty” created by the “aphoristic form” of some of his work which: arises from the fa...

If I have felt little urgency to read James, I blame his continual presence in my reading.  He rivals anyone but  Samuel Johnson as a subjec...

The other early Henry James stories I read recently (#s 2, 3, 4, and 7) are all, unlike the semi-noir of his first published story, more lik...

Joseph Epstein wrote an account of teaching a class on Henry James in 1990.*  Epstein was at Northwestern University, so his students were a...

The concerns I expressed yesterday about reading Henry James neurotically were the direct result of reading James neurotically.  By discussi...

Henry James has moved into the top spot of my Humiliation list, I think, the writer who, from the point of view of his status, I should know...