Wuthering
Expectations

Since I am going to Norway for a little vacation and am reading around in the 1920s, I read the first volume of Sigrid Undset’s beloved Kris...

Wrapping up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis .   He ends with three chapters on the modern novel, mostly French, but covering a lot of territory. ...

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person tellin...

Erich Auerbach has gotten to (early) modern literature.   Things should roar along now. 11. “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” Rabelais, o...

An “earnest and likeable” student has asked Professor Joseph Epstein for a post-graduation reading list.   He fears his Northwestern Univers...

We’re enjoying Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis , a chapter at a time, but more briefly than yesterday. 3. “The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres,” Ammia...

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, tr. Willard Trask) was the final book in my hodgepodge...

I thought Henrik Pontoppidan, in Lykke-Per , was an excellent writer in passages.   Other times, he was not so good: flat and clichéd. Fir...

I think or fear that the psychology of Lykke-Per is driven by philosophy, and not vice versa, meaning that Henrik Pontoppidan expects you, ...

He had never felt so depressingly empty, never more abandoned by all the forces for good in the world, than right at that very moment.   (Ch...

My supplemental reading for Pontoppidan’s The Fortunate Man was Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Sc...

The Happiest People in the World, the Danes, had a terrible idea in 2004.   They assembled committees and created an official Danish Culture...

Do you want to know what has been going on in the fresh and exciting field of the history of reading?   I do, so I read Readers’ Liberation ...

Oh no, look at this error I made about how much F. Scott Fitzgerald earned from his short stories.   I wrote that he was making $3,000 per ...

I waved, yesterday, at Willa Cather’s use of classical literature, of Ovid and Virgil, but she has another way of using mythology in her fic...

Several years ago I wrote something about Willa Cather’s use of mythology, about how incidents in her novel made specific but subtle referen...

Willa Cather had published a book of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), a major theme of which is the hostility of her native Midwest to art...

I’m going to do this backwards, writing about The Professor’s House (1925), which is not a prairie novel, first and then go back to A Lost ...