One of the first puzzles students encounter in Beowulf is a strange doubleness in its worldview. The characters live in a pre-Christian Scandinavian setting, cremate their dead, believe in monsters […]
Beowulf is often introduced to students as a “monster poem,” and on the surface, that is true — the plot is structured around three fights with three different creatures. But […]
When modern readers first meet Beowulf, he can seem larger than life — a man who swims for days, tears a monster’s arm off with his bare hands, and announces […]
One of the pleasures of reading Lewis Carroll is that his apparent nonsense almost always has a precise target. Behind the jokes about jam and birthdays, behind the backwards memory […]
Alice begins Through the Looking-Glass as a pawn — the least powerful piece on the chessboard — and ends it as a Queen. On the surface, this is a story […]
One of the most famous exchanges in all of English literature happens when Alice meets Humpty Dumpty sitting on his wall. They get into an argument — not about politics […]
When Lewis Carroll sat down to write the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he did not simply send Alice tumbling down another rabbit hole. Instead, he invented an […]
The Poem That Refuses to Stand Still There is a peculiar quality to Rabindranath Tagore’s forty-fifth poem from Gitanjali (1912) — it feels less like something you read and more […]
Before the novel, before the newspaper, before the modern essay — there was a queen, a printing press, and a group of writers who decided that English was worth taking […]
A Reading Guide | Look Back in Anger by John Osborne Nearly seventy years have passed since John Osborne’s play premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. The British Empire, which […]
