Shakespeare’s early scheming women—Joan of Arc, Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester, and Margaret of Anjou—share a set of overlapping traits. They are each driven by their ambition for ever greater power, which distorts their femininity into something unnatural.
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in August 2019. The Old West is a place of myth as well as of history. Popularized through the Western genre, the mythological West is commonly associated with the activities of cowboys, gunslingers,
This post originally appeared in Cleveland Review of Books Caroline Fraser’s Prairie Firesis a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the internationally famous Little House books. In it, Fraser tells a story of sweeping historical significance, at
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in July 2019. Traditional fairytales, despite their reputation as stories for young children, are replete with horror and gore. The fairytale genre is one in which evil queens dance themselves to death
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in June 2019. Originally published in 2002, The Days of Abandonment sits uncomfortably in its cultural moment. Elena Ferrante’s examination of the spiraling decline of an abandoned wife resists the hopefulness of the girl-power-era,
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in May 2019. Philosophies for achieving genuine happiness and a good life are never intended to create dystopias. Nevertheless, many writers enjoy taking these ideas to their extremes, creating in their fictions
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in April 2019. In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes examines the relationship between art and power, or, more specifically, between individual creativity and a controlling state. The novella is a fictionalized biography
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2018. The Italian intellectual and novelist Umberto Eco died on February 19, 2016, just four short months before the surprise result of the British referendum on the European Union. During
This review was originally published on OperaWire Cecilia Bartoli’s latest album, “Antonio Vivaldi” (2018), comes almost twenty years after her historic recording, “The Vivaldi Album,” which was released in 1999 to wide critical acclaim and incredible popular success. The 1999
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in March 2019. The “sexism of genius” has been well studied and widely reported. Male professors are more than three times as likely to be described as “geniuses” by their students than female professors,