literature

What can historical fiction do that history can’t? from magistra 6 days old

Bavardess has just revealed herself as another historian who either wants to or is actually attempting to write historical fiction rather than ‘straight’ ...

Why I no longer read historical fiction from magistra 103 days old

I read a lot of historical novels both as a child and as a young adult. I still have my copies of books by Rosemary Sutcliff, Geoffrey Trease, Ronald ...

Princesses and agency from magistra 140 days old

[ ... ] read children's literature from 50 years ago or more, you realise that most of the parents involved would be getting prosecuted by the NSPCC for ...

Middlemarch and male reputation from magistra 221 days old

I’ve been re-reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch and realising how much of the plot I’d forgotten in the several years since I last read it. But reading ...

Gutting literature for historical pleasure and profit from magistra 603 days old

[ ... ] ‘But is gutting literature for use as a context-less data-bank ever really sound history?’ I’ll start by saying that I didn’t hear Stephen’s ...

Why historians should read literary scholars from magistra 705 days old

[ ... ] classical, secular literature got a taste for secular pleasures and their literary celebration, but not for the moral uplift they were supposed to ...

Should historians read literary scholars? from magistra 724 days old

[ ... ] don't affect literature in some way). But often scholars will combine aspects from several theories together, making it hard to split off the ...

Elites and culture (1) from magistra 802 days old

[ ... ] (I do use heroic literature in my own research, but largely to explore moral attitudes, which I hope is less problematic). So that’s the end of ...

Harry Potter and moral consequences (Warning: lots of spoilers) from magistra 808 days old

I’ve finally had the chance to finish reading the Harry Potter series (or rather, I’ve shamelessly neglected my research in order to do so), so I wanted ...

What do we mean by ‘oral tradition’? from magistra 870 days old

This post will return to the Latin poem ‘Waltharius’ (my current obsession) yet again in a short while, but it starts from a more modern question. If ...