Edna Ferber Revisited
The first-generation Jewish American novelist exposed entrenched prejudices of her day. A reissue of The Girls introduces her wit to new readers.
Dark Academia’s Roots Lie in the Campus Novel
Revolving around student life, campus novels present a microcosm of the outside world, staged far from the humdrum of middle-class realities.
Revisiting The Enormous Room
This year marks the centennial of the publication of E. E. Cummings’s novel based on his imprisonment in France during World War I.
Dime Novels and Story Papers for Kids
The rise of popular literature for children put a story, a role model, and a set of values in a young boy’s pocket.
Banning The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 California
The Kern County, CA Board of Supervisors got a lesson in the Streisand Effect back in 1939, when they banned The Grapes of Wrath from their libraries and schools.
Batman: A Hero or a New ‘Mr. Hyde’?
The parallels between Bruce Wayne/Batman and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde are examined through the lenses of Gothic literature and psychological symbolism.
Are Video Games Like Novels?
Video games as interactive storytelling? Maybe not at first glance, but as Eric Hayot explains, the interplay between game and narrative is real.
How Social Upheaval Gave Rise to the Picaresque Novel
How did the arcadian shepherd and chivalric knight-errant, centuries-old fixtures of European literature, give way to this witty rascal, the pícaro?
The Power of Sibling Bonds in The Brothers Karamazov
In the year of Dostoevsky's bicentennial, a revisiting of familial relationships in one of his most popular works.
Science and Slavery in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
In one of the first novels written in English, a West African prince, fascinated with navigation, boards a ship for a fateful journey.