Tag: Literary criticism
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Canada Emptor: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush and the Early Immigrant Literature of the Great White North
“Home! The word had ceased to belong to my present it was doomed to live for ever in the past; for what emigrant ever regarded the country of his exile as his home?” – Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush (Chapter II) As I’ve mentioned a few times, I spent the overwhelming bulk of […]
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A (Fake) True Story: Lucian and the Birth of Modern Sci Fi
“To put yourself in another man’s shoes and say what he would of said was a regular exercise of the schools, but to laugh in your sleeve as you said it was not the way of the ordinary rhetorician.” – A.M. Harmon (introduction to Phalaris) Okay, as promised, we’re going to talk about Lucian (c. […]
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Reading in Review: My Best Books of 2022
Well, my lovely readers, we’ve managed to make it to the end of another year, and while all signs point to 2023 not likely to be existentially any easier, making it to the new year is always to be commended. I had intentions of doing an entry on the satirist Lucian this week, but I […]
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Accidental Adventures in Antiquity: The Works of Ausonius
“For when the Emperor Octavianus was reigning, they [the Golden Age poets] vied with one another in presenting him with their works, and set no limit on to the number of the poems which they composed to his praise. You may be sure that though he may perhaps have admired these authors as much as […]
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Death Becomes Her: Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe & Clitophon
“Alas, Leucippe, how often have I seen you die!” – Leucippe & Clitophon (VII, 5.2) “The first time you came back from the other side, I thought it was the most phenomenal thing I’d ever heard. And the second time, I thought, ‘Wow! What are the odds?’ And the next four times I thought, ‘Well, […]
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Publishing Perils: Mark Twain, Amanda McKittrick Ros, and the Exuberant Afterlife of Irene Iddesleigh
“Over the years A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage has been ignored almost entirely by the myriad scholars who have scrutinized every other scrap of Twain’s writing voluminously.” – Roy Blount Jr., foreword to the Norton edition (2001) “Ros’ writing is not just bad, in other words; its badness is so potent that it seems to […]
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In the Noh: The Poetics of Classical Japanese Theatre
CHORUS: Pine Wind and Autumn Rain Both drenched their sleeves with the tears Of hopeless love beyond their station, Fisher girls of Suma. Our sin is deep, o priest. Pray for us, we beg of you! (They [Matsukaze and Murasame] press their palms together in supplication) Our love grew rank as wild grasses; Tears and […]
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Demons, Cannibals, and Courtesy: Richard Coer de Lyon and Inventing Modern English Mythology
Incredible as he is inept Whenever the history books are kept, They’ll call him the Phony King of England! Robin Hood (1973) Every five to ten years since the invention of film at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood has forced another movie in the Robin Hood mythos on us—whether, as noted by far […]
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Of Pirates and Persians: Chariton of Aphrodisias’ Callirhoe
“O treacherous beauty, you are the cause of all my woes!” – Callirhoe (Book 6.5) As threatened, I’ve been reading what might be the first western historical fiction novel, Chariton of Aphrodisias’ Callirhoe, and when I intimated that it sounded like the more far-fetched of Shakespeare’s comedies (I’m thinking The Winter’s Tale or Pericles), it has more lived up to that […]
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Dream Girls: The Jinling Beauties and the Many Illusions of Dream of the Red Chamber
The office jack’s career is blighted, The rich man’s fortune now all vanished, The kind with life have been requited, The cruel exemplarily punished; The one who owed a life is dead, The tears one owed have all been shed. Wrongs suffered have the wrongs done expiated; The couplings and the sundering were fated. Untimely […]
Sarah Holz 