Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

In Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant, a messenger arrives to report that Jocasta, queen of Thebes, has killed herself. To prepare listeners for this terrible news, he announces, “The tragedies that hurt the most are those that sufferers have chosen for themselves.” Edith Hall, whose own life and psyche have been shaped by such loss—her mother’s grandfather, mother, and first cousin all took their own lives—traces the philosophical arguments on suicide, from Plato and Aristotle to David Hume and Albert Camus.

أحمد خالد توفيق، العراب كما يُلقّب، هو واحد من أبرز الكتاب العرب في مجال أدب الرعب والخيال العلمي وأدب الشباب. وقد ترك إرثًا أدبيًا غنيًا من الروايات والقصص القصيرة التي حظيت بشعبية واسعة في العالم العربي.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. In this wonderfully entertaining audiobook, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

A foundling of mysterious parentage, Tom Jones is brought up by the benevolent and wealthy Squire Allworthy as his own son. Tom falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sophia Western, a neighbor’s daughter, whose marriage has already been arranged. When Tom’s sexual misadventures around the countryside get him banished, he sets out to make his fortune and find his true identity.

English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.

Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

Belisarius and Antonina were titans in the Roman world some 1,500 years ago. Belisarius was the most well-known general of his age, victor over the Persians, conqueror of the Vandals and the Goths, and as if this were not enough, wealthy beyond imagination. She made a name for herself by traveling with Belisarius on his military campaigns, deposing a pope, and scheming to disgrace important Roman officials. This unadulterated power and wealth did not mean that Belisarius and Antonina were universally successful in all that they undertook.

This is an audiobook about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This an audiobook about a poet, W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

Straight Acting is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act straight and to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world's most famous playwright.

Novelists, poets and playwrights live double lives, sharing the real world with everyone else while spending a good deal of time in a universe of their own making. When they fall out with each other, they are able to kindle feuds and antagonisms as passionate and public as workers in any trade. Richard Bradford’s highly entertaining audiobook looks at some of the closest and most complex relationships in literary history, examining their dramatic effects on literature itself.

How do the best writers get to work?In every episode, we'll chat to an author about what they do through a day. Where do they work? What time do they start? How do they plan their time and maximise their creativity, in order to plot and publish a bestseller? Some are frantic night-owls, others roll out of bed into their desks, and a few lock themselves away in the woods - but none have a regular 9 to 5, and we'll find out how they've managed it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A. N. Wilson has been thinking about the Bible, and reading it, since he read theology for a year at university. Martin Luther King was 'reading the Bible' when he started the Civil Rights Movement. When Michelangelo painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel, he was 'reading the Bible'. In The Book of the People, A. N. Wilson explores how readers and thinkers have approached the Bible and how it might be read today.

Everything you want to know about France and more… in a free podcast. Janine Marsh, Editor of The Good Life France, award-winning travel writer and author of best-selling memoirs about life in France with her unruly chickens, dogs, cats, ducks and geese, quirky neighbours and the joys of renovation, and Olivier Jauffrit, the vintage French music expert at Radio Paris Chanson – have teamed up to make a podcast!

This is the story of the unhappy family of Anna Karenina. The novel contains much concerning Tolstoy's spiritual crisis and his search for the meaning of life. But it is also chiefly about marriage, and the growth and death of love.

Thirty-five years after the publication of Ronald Blythe's classic portrait of an English village, Akenfield, Craig Taylor returned to the Suffolk village on which the book was based. He sought out locals who appeared in the original book to learn how their lives had changed, met newcomers, and interviewed Ronald Blythe himself.

A century after it first appeared, Crime and Punishment remains one of the most gripping psychological thrillers. A poverty stricken young man, seeing his family making sacrifices for him, is faced with an opportunity to solve his financial problems with one simple but horrifying act: the murder of a pawnbroker. She is, he feels, just a parasite on society. But does the end justify the means?

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

An editor and writer's vivaciously entertaining, and often moving, memoir — a true story that reminds us why we should all make time in our lives for books.Nearing his fortieth birthday, author and critic Andy Miller realized he's not nearly as well read as he'd like to be. A devout book lover who somehow fell out of the habit of reading, he began to ponder the power of books to change an individual life—including his own—and to define the sort of person he would like to be.

Writing advice tends to be full of "rules" and "tips" which are either too broad to be helpful or outright wrong. In On Writing and Worldbuilding, we will discuss specific and applicable ideas to consider, from effective methods of delivering exposition and foreshadowing, to how communication, commerce, and control play into the fall of an empire.

The New York Times best-selling author of seagoing epics now celebrates an American classic.Moby-Dick is perhaps the greatest of the Great American Novels, yet its length and esoteric subject matter create an aura of difficulty that too often keeps readers at bay. Fortunately, one unabashed fan wants passionately to give Melville's masterpiece the broad contemporary audience it deserves.