Our obsession with gut health, diet and well-being is far from new: the Victorians had very similar concerns.
Tackling tough topics from racism and bullying to Indigenous identity and the holocaust, young adult fiction can challenge stereotypes and encourage critical thinking. Pictured here, an illustration from ‘Skim’ by Mariko Tamaki, the fictional diary of a depressed Japanese-Canadian girl.
Handout.
Five novels for young adults that boldly tackle tough issues - from racism, to Indigenous identity and the Holocaust - to cultivate critical thinking in the classroom and at home.
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote letters to his children from Father Christmas every year for 23 years. And they’re filled with elves, goblins and playful polar bears.
In their novels, Nathanael West and Bret Easton Ellis depict a world few want to admit exists, a place where ‘Unless you’re willing to do some pretty awful things, it’s hard getting a job.’
John Fekner’s art warned others of toxins poisoning the planet.
Fekner at English Wikipedia
Diet books aren’t just fluff. They offer a powerful insight into who Americans are – and how we wish the world could be.
Ernest Hemingway with a bull near Pamplona, Spain in 1927, two years before ‘A Farewell to Arms’ would be published.
Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
A newly published batch of Ernest Hemingway’s letters could change the way we think about the author’s influences, relationships with other writers and views on race.
Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid documents the founding of Rome by a Trojan hero. As with other ancient epics, our hero has to remain resolute in the face of significant divine hostility.
Dark horse of the family.
National Portrait Gallery/Flickr
English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier…
The influence of countries in francophone Africa, like Ivory Coast, have shifted how universities think about the French language.
Reuters/Luc Gnago
French is no longer taught as a European language representative of “French” culture in South Africa. New modes of teaching, learning and research speak to an inclusive Africanist agenda.
Humans and computers are collaborating to create a new genre of ‘synthetic literature’. But how does it work and can a computer ever really be creative?
Giotto’s Last Judgment in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s vision of heaven and hell.
Wikimedia
The gates to hell in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy tell us to “abandon all hope, yet who enter here”. Despite its unfunny premise, ‘La Commedia’ ends well, with its protagonist Dante reaching heaven.