Category: Uncategorized
-
Caught in a Bad Roman-ce Again: Medieval Myth- Making and the Octavian Romances
Somtym byffell ane aventure,In Rome ther was ane Emperoure,Als men in romance rede.He was a man of grete favoureAnd levede in joye and grete honoureAnd doghety was of dede.In tornament nor in no fyghteIn the werlde ther ne was a better knyghte,No worthier undir wede.Octovyane was his name thrughowte;Everylke man hade of hym dowteWhen he…
-
Empire and Imagination: The Victorian Middle Ages and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company
“So they lived, these men, in their own lusty, cheery fashion rude and rough, but honest, kindly and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. The sky may darken, and the clouds may gather, and again the day may…
-
Preview for THE GOURD AND THE STARS
As previously promised, I want to take this week to talk a little about my next book, The Gourd and the Stars, as I’ve entered the last pre-formatting editing phase and my artist at SelfPubBookCovers is beginning work on a cover. I thought I still might be jumping the gun a bit, but seeing how…
-
America’s Eternal Sweetheart: The Transatlantic Love Affair with Lafayette
“Lafayette, we are here.” – Col. Charles E. Stanton, visiting Lafayette’s tomb after the arrival of American forces in Paris during WWI “As I admired this noble countenance of stone, a wry smile crept across the [French] curator’s face. Suddenly the silence was broken. ‘Why,’ asked the curator, ‘should we have a bust of Lafayette?’”…
-
Different Worlds, Different Tongues: The Life and Works of Toru Dutt
One of the required classes for my English Literature BA at the University of Pittsburgh was one called “World Literature in English,” presumably an attempt by the program to make sure its graduates were exposed to at least a handful of writers who weren’t white at the end of four years of reading. Rather than…
-
Continuity, Change, and Collaboration: Post-Meiji Art and Printmaking in Japan
I love Japanese art and culture, but I usually don’t spend a lot of time saying so in public because that statement generally elicits presupposed knowledge about anime or J-Pop, of which I am a dilettante (the former) or almost completely ignorant (the latter). No, most of you who have been playing the home game…
-
Bite-Sized Bard: The Lambs and Tales From Shakespeare
“The following Tales are meant to be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare, for which purpose his words are used whenever it seemed possible to bring them in; and in whatever has been added to give them the regular form of a connected story, diligent care has been…
-
Into the Open Air: Barbara Newhall Follett, The House Without Windows, and Life Imitating Art
“She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.” — The House Without Windows (p. 205) In 2002-ish, when I was graduating…
-
Revolutionary Women: The Ladies of The Flight of Virtue
We’re back this week with more Flight of Virtue content, and I thought I’d make good on my threat to delve into some background information on the women who make up the core supporting cast of my novel behind Theo Burr. Because while I had a blast writing a lot of the men, this was…
-
Unfinished Business: The Second Part of Mary Wroth’s Urania
A year and a half ago, I introduced all of you to Mary Wroth and her sprawling Jacobean pastoral roman à clef, Urania. In that post, I promised to keep my eyes peeled for an ultra-rare copy of Urania’s incomplete second part in the wild and report back if I successfully got my hands on…
Sarah Holz 