Category: Literary Studies

We’ll have more in the coming month about Jenny Davidson’s just-published Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. The book offers a fascinating portrait of eighteenth-century debates concerning nature vs. nurture debate and how this Enlightenment concern has shaped...

As praise for Micki McGee’s Yaddo: Making America Culture continues to pour in, we thought it might also be worthwhile to point out other venues where you can appreciate the history of this influential artists’ colony. In an earlier post,...

In her Los Angeles Times round-up of the best of 2008, Sarah Weinman makes a special mention of Leonard Cassuto’s Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. Weinman writes: “Pick up Leonard Cassuto’s “Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History...

Friday’s Wall Street Journal included Leonard Cassuto’s essay “Bound for Perdition: Highsmith’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ is Fueled by Anxiety.” In the piece Cassuto describes how Highsmith tapped into Cold War anxiety to create such a compelling novel. As in...

It is not very often that international literature is covered in the seemingly ever-shrinking space allowed for book reviews in newspapers, so it was especially nice to see Carlin Romano’s review of Harold Segel’s The Columbia Literary History of Eastern...

The New York Public Library’s exhibition, Yaddo: Making American Culture opens today at the main branch at 42nd and Fifth Avenue. There is also a review of the exhibition in today’s New York Times. For those of us who cannot...

But what if that standard [of the hard-boiled narrative] had less to do with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe than with Ellen Montgomery, the naive young heroine of Susan Warner’s 1850 bestseller “The Wide, Wide World”? What if the walk...