Seasons, stars, settler colonialism: the nations of the south – Australia, Argentina and South Africa – have much in common. And the 2003 Nobel laureate for literature, JM Coetzee, is helping reframe Australian writing within this southern context.
Whether it’s through Facebook or Snapchat, images and videos are changing how we communicate. But as words become more trivial, our attention, our creativity, and even our empathy may be at stake.
Its critics complain that current Afrodiasporic literature is not in tune with everyday life on the continent. They see its versions of Africa as sanitised and Westernised.
The president of the Thomas Wolfe Society explains why Law had his work cut out for him when he agreed to portray a man who was “a hydroelectric plant of emotion.”
When biographer Gretchen Gerzina came across an old British newspaper article calling Sarah E. Farro “the first negro novelist,” she wondered: who was Farro, and why had she been lost to history?
The psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s characters has rendered them timeless. Today, we see The Bard’s influence in shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘True Detective.’
Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here,’ which described the rise of an American dictator, was turned into a play seen by over 500,000 people.
Like it or not, the literary canon is part of the cultural capital of the West. Universities that choose not to teach it – or refuse to critically engage with it – are actually disempowering students.
This Saturday it will be a year since Alzheimer’s stole Terry Pratchett from the world. We mark the occasion with a beginner’s guide to his most enduring creation, the 41-book Discworld series.
The perception of publishing as a business, even a creative one, means that the question of book sales dominates our conversations about it. But publishing offers far more to our culture than that.
After Jonathan Bate, in his recent biography of Ted Hughes, wrote about Hughes’ salacious sex life, a number of critics – including Janet Malcolm – were quick to pounce.
England’s green and pleasant land will be beset by a plague of the living dead, corpses will dig their way out of graves … Jane Austen horror is now a distinctive subgenre of Austen adaptations.
Poetic terminology can be alienating, off-putting. Whispering “dactylic hexameter” in people’s ears won’t necessarily tempt them into reading heroic verse. But there is hope – and poetry – for us all.