The History of Literature

836 Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (with Robin Waterfield and John Sellars) | My Last Book with Daniel Olivas

What does it mean to live a good life? How can we accomplish it? For more than two thousand years, Western civilization has looked to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to he

835 Blackness in Iran (with Amy Motlagh) | My Last Book with Nicholas Boggs

What do Iranians - both home and abroad - think of race? Does "blackness" exist in Iran? And what can we learn about race and slavery in Iran from folklore, ethnography,

834 Shakespeare's Scholars (with Sean Keilen) | My Last Book with Nan Z. Da

Shakespeare himself didn't attend a university - and yet, for centuries, the world's greatest scholars have studied his works to learn about everything from poetry to pol

833 Galahad and the Grail (with Malcolm Guite)

Everywhere we look, we see the benefits of the modern world. But what have we lost? In this episode, Jacke talks to Malcolm Guite about his new book Galahad and the Grail

832 Stendhal [Revisited]

As we recently discussed with Hadley Suter, nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal (1783-1842) came of age in an era when identity was up for grabs. So who was he? H

831 Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" (with Rachel Pastan) | My Last Book with David Denby

When times are tough, can literature help? After sharing an email from a listener, Jacke talks to author Rachel Pastan about her novel We're So Lucky to Live Here, in whi

830 Becoming Stendhal (with Hadley Suter) | A Literary Tribute to Dolly Parton

We often say it's important for a person to be "authentic," but what does that mean? Why is that necessarily a good thing? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Hadley S

829 Charlotte Brontë and Her Biographer Elizabeth Gaskell (with Susan Dunne) | My Last Book with Travis Franks | The Odyssey Kerfuffle

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two of the leading novelists of the 19th century, shared a remarkable literary friendship. After Charlotte's death, Gaskell's Life

828 Confucius (with Mark Csikszentmihalyi) | Celia Bookshop! (with Rachel Pastan) | Jacke in Taiwan

What do we know about the Chinese philosopher and teacher Confucius? Although people have written biographies of Confucius for over 2,000 years, a recent discovery of a C

827 American Literature's War on Crime (with Theodore Martin) | W.E.B. DuBois Sits with Shakespeare

The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an extreme increase in America's prison population, from roughly 250,000 inmates in 1940 to well over two million b

826 The Essayist's Essayist - Phillip Lopate on the Pleasures of Reading Washington Irving and Other "Minor Writers" | Notes from the History of Literature Podcast Tour!

At the time of Washington Irving's death, he was the most famous and widely praised American writer of his or any other era. But his reputation soon dwindled, and today h

825 Henry James's Ghosts (with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm) | My Last Book with David Womersley

In 1895, Henry James suffered through a terrible failure, as his play Guy Domville was greeted by hoots, jeers, and tomatoes being thrown at the play's author. James resp

824 Why Did Mary Shelley Try to Erase Her? The Claire Clairmont Story (with Emily Franklin) | My Last Book with Mathelinda Nabugodi

It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Godwin (

823 Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Shakespeare in a Divided America (with James Shapiro)

United States President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth were both deeply immersed in Shakespeare's works. And yet, the conclusions they reached about h

822 Wild Thoreau (with Lydia Willsky-Ciollo) | My Last Book with Douglas Clark

Henry David Thoreau was not a traditional Christian, and yet he was a deeply, profoundly religious man. In this episode, Jacke talks to Lydia Willsky-Ciollo about her boo

821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser)

The kiss! What could be more romantic? And yet, as historian Katie Barclay discovered when writing her book The Kiss: A History of Passion and Power, she found non-romant

820 Irish Radical Poet Eva Gore-Booth (with Sonja Tiernan)

After reading an email from a listener in Ghana, Jacke talks to Sonja Tiernan about her book Eva Gore-Booth: Irish Radical Poet, Rebel, and Reformer, which tells the stor

819 Robert Louis Stevenson (with Glenda Norquay) | The Rise of HOT Literati | My Last Book with Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

After discussing a news article detailing the rise of "hot literati," Jacke talks to biographer Glenda Norquay (Robert Louis Stevenson: A Critical Life) about the amazing

818 Muriel Spark (with James Bailey) | My Last Book with J. Michael Lennon

Jacke talks to author James Bailey about his critically acclaimed biography Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. PLUS J. Michael Lennon, friend and bi

817 The Odyssey - Getting Ready for a Summer Blockbuster | My Last Book with Mary Beard

Jacke gets ready for the release of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, the rare instance of a summer blockbuster based on a literary classic, with some help from classics schol