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,
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in February 2019. George Eliot had a great interest in music. Her partner, George Henry Lewes, was friends with the pianist and composer Franz Liszt and, through this connection, Eliot met many
This post originally appeared on the Ploughshares blog in January 2019. What makes a novel “difficult,” and why does that label matter? When we think of traditionally “difficult” writers—James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon, for example—the answer to the first part
Written in the 1980s at the height of Thatcher’s Britain, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a politically charged graphic novel set in a dystopian near-future world in which Britain has fallen into fascism following a brief nuclear exchange. The
A version of this post appeared on READ, the blog from Durham University’s English department on 1st July 2016. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, anthropological and ethnographic studies of so-called “primitive cultures” were hugely popular, and there was a