But the truth is, I rarely actually write about my own research area here on Substack. I’m not totally sure why, but it is probably in an attempt to separate my academic “work” from my online content. I think, though, that it’s time to broach the literary area that I’ve spent the most time on throughout my career: the modern & contemporary.

This is an introductory guide to Modern & Contemporary Literature, with important terms, must-read poems, excerpts from key novels, and a further reading list. The guide is based on my own experiences as a modern & contemporary literature graduate student, and research I’ve done throughout this week to amalgamate recurring trends and resources from several top graduate programs in this area.

But first: What do we mean by Modern & Contemporary Literature?

In everyday speech, the terms “modern” and “contemporary” are frequently interchanged. But in the world of literary academia, these two terms are distinct. It’s important that they’re used accurately, because they denote entire fields of study which are separate (but related) to one another.

When we talk about “modern literature,” especially at the graduate level and above, we are really referring to the modernist turn. This simply means the beginning of modern history, or alternatively, the end of the Victorian period. So, “modern literature” refers to work written during that critical turn-of-the-century epoch, in which culture and art began to discard its old-world remnants and look toward the possibilities of a new millennium.

“Modern literature,” then, refers to literature written from approximately 1890-1950. Different scholars and books will give you slightly different barometers for this literary period. Another popular one that you might come across is “1900-1945.” It doesn’t really matter which delineation you prefer; but I like to include the last decade of the nineteenth century, because there was a lot of proto-modernist literature during this time that anticipated the modernists, and perhaps was even a necessary bridge between Victorianism and Modernism.

What, then, is Contemporary Literature?

When we use the phrase “contemporary literature,” we are referring to the end of the modern period to the present. Contemporary literature, then, refers to work written from approximately 1945-present. Like the term “modern literature,” some scholars shift these years slightly earlier or later. But the important thing about contemporary literature is that it begins at the end of the second World War – and thus it represents a wholly new world order, a literary, cultural, and political landscape that is vastly different from that of the early modernists.

So, is “Modern Literature” the same as “Literary Modernism”?

Not quite, but they are very much related. Literary modernism was an aesthetic and artistic movement that burgeoned in the early twentieth century. It can be boiled down to a famous quote from modernist poet Ezra Pound: to “make it new.”

As the twentieth century dawned and brought with it two world wars, new technology, and industrialization, writers like Ezra Pound believed that new literature had to reflect the new modern world. So, Pound, and people like Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, all began to experiment with the art of literature. They explored new ways to represent psychology, the city, and life itself; they beckoned in an innovative style and form that was a major departure from Victorian literary conventions. That is literary modernism.

Modern literature, however, merely encompasses that entire time period, and includes non-experimental literature of the early twentieth century too. Think: your detective stories from Agatha Christie, which likewise exploded around this time period, but which did not play with conventions in the same way as, say, the novels of Virginia Woolf. To put it most simply: Literary modernism was a movement within the period of modern literature.

Modern & Contemporary literature are, in my opinion, some of the most fascinating periods to study. It’s why I chose to get my master’s in this specific historical period, and why my PhD research spans literature written between approximately 1890-1905, a proto-modernist period of early innovation.

Below is a reading guide based on the material that I covered in my own master’s in modern & contemporary literature, as well as my teaching to current Oxford University undergraduate students in these areas. I’ve included several must-read poems (including the full poems themselves), a list of novels (with key excerpts), and suggestions for further reading and research.

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CHORUS.
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which, if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

In this sonnet, Shakespeare coins the phrase “star-crossed lovers” – an astrological idiom that, in 2026, remains a part of our everyday speech. He also lays out the beats of Romeo and Juliet: feuding families, teenage love, and tragic death. Thus, many people associate the sonnet form with this specific play, and therefore we assume that the sonnet is the stuff of the intense love affair.

But Shakespeare’s sonnets get a lot more interesting when we don’t approach them as a series of love poems. Or, at least, when we avoid treating “love” as their central theme. When we consider some of the deeper and darker themes from Shakespeare’s corpus – which I’ve written about here in the past, through plays like Macbeth and Hamlet – the sonnets become a different thing entirely.

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“The Homeric Question,” or “Is Odysseus a Hero?” or “Which Translation Is Best?” Whichever question you’ve come across recently, it all comes back to the same old debate. And at the crux of this debate is a several thousand year old story called The Odyssey, which is the sequel to a work titled The Iliad. As you know, both of these works are epic poems, originally written in Ancient Greek, by a guy called Homer.

Here’s where the story gets complicated.

1. Did Homer Actually Exist?

Look in any bookstore and you’ll find a copy of The Odyssey, translated by any number of the eminent classical academics of literary history: from Alexander Pope to Robert Fagles to Emily Wilson to Daniel Mendelsohn. Each of these is idiosyncratic in its own way - translation is, after all, another type of adaptation. But one thing persists across every copy of The Odyssey - they are all attributed, originally, to Homer.

But as with everything in literature, it’s not actually that simple.

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And that’s because much of Shakespeare’s humor gets lost amongst his Early Modern English and Elizabethan social context. Here’s an example from Hamlet:

HAMLET.
Well, God-a-mercy.

POLONIUS.
Do you know me, my lord?

HAMLET.
Excellent well. You are a fishmonger.

POLONIUS.
Not I, my lord.

(Act 2, Scene 2)

Here, Hamlet calls Polonius (Ophelia’s father) a “fishmonger.” Of course, Polonius is far from it: he’s a nobleman who serves in the King’s court. But that’s not exactly why this scene is funny. The comedy here comes from the Elizabethan contexts of the term “fishmonger,” which, back then, was a slang term meaning “pimp,” or an otherwise shady character. So, when we consider the fact that Ophelia is the object of Hamlet’s affections and a high-born bachelorette, the accusation has a comedic double-meaning.

Yet this isn’t the sort of thing that I pick up on when I read Hamlet, or even when I see it performed. A lot of Shakespearean humor is like this: almost wholly dependent on anachronistic double-meanings and puns which have since been lost to time.

But not all of Shakespeare’s humor falls flat. Yes, many of the puns do; but Shakespeare doesn’t get enough credit for his use of dark humor. Shakespeare really did laugh in the face of death. A laudable accomplishment for the creator of some of literature’s most existential figures in Hamlet and Macbeth.

The above painting, titled “Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard,” is a prime example of how Shakespeare earns his dark humor in a tragic play like Hamlet. Much of it is unsavoury, all about death and decay. And although the term “gallows humor” wouldn’t be formally coined until the 20th Century, Shakespeare was a master at it. Indeed, in Hamlet, he even puns upon the term “gallows” itself. Here’s the excerpt:

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1. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, by Harold Bloom (1998)

I’ve chosen Harold Bloom’s famous book on Shakespeare for a few reasons. First, Bloom’s argument - that Shakespeare was instrumental to how literature represents the complexities of the human mind - is key to understanding Shakespeare himself. It’s also one of the reasons I remain fascinated by Shakespeare, and one of the topics I’ve focused on throughout Demystifying Shakespeare.

But beyond this, Bloom’s book is also a really useful insight into the state of Shakespearean studies today - and even literary scholarship more generally. Bloom is a divisive figure in the literary world. His ideas, like the “school of resentment,” are often read as traditionalist, because they favor aestheticism and “Art for Art’s sake” over contemporary readings. But whatever you think about Bloom, his work itself captures the key developments within literary theory, criticism, and academia over the past few decades. If you want to understand not only why Shakespeare matters, but also how he matters to different schools of thought, this is the book for you.

2. This is Shakespeare, by Emma Smith (2020)

I still remember sitting in Emma Smith’s Shakespeare lectures at Oxford University, eight years ago. She explains Shakespeare like no other, and is widely considered to be the foremost Shakespeare scholar working right now. Smith has a knack for dry humor, wit, and narrative style: her work feels like a self-aware, intellectual pursuit into Shakespeare’s awkwardness and strangeness. In This Is Shakespeare, her central argument is not that Shakespeare is an unparalleled genius (in her lectures and work, she often says that that’s an overdone take). Rather, she suggests that Shakespeare wrote deliberately awkward plots which, in turn, evoke ambiguity and interpretation. She calls it Shakespeare’s distinctive “gappiness.” Smith is the person to turn to if you want genuinely witty, conversational, and contemporary writing on Shakespeare. (Just look at this interview for proof. It showcases her signature dry humor).

If you want to explore Smith’s work before committing to the book, she has a brilliant free podcast series called “Approaching Shakespeare,” which is available here. These are essentially her famous Oxford Shakespeare lectures, in podcast form, and they are wonderful listens.

3. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, by Helen Vendler (1997)

This is a specific book for a specific reader. It’s the one to pick up if you want to understand how to close read literature. There is little biography, context, or commentary. The book is a masterclass in structural and formal interpretation. Basically, all that stuff that you learned in high school (enjambment, iambic pentameter, rhyme schemes) are maximized in brilliance.

Helen Vendler was one of the foremost literary academics of the twentieth century. Her niche was structural interpretation: how do the formal elements of a poem change its meaning?

This is academic close-reading at its highest level. I think this book is well worth a read (or, at least, a skim) for anyone interested in the interpretation of poetry. If you’re curious about how a Harvard English Literature professor might read Shakespeare’s sonnets, this is the one to pick up. Here is an example, which is the opening to Vendler’s interpretation of Sonnet 1:

4. Shakespeare, by Anthony Burgess (1970)

This is the outlier of this list, because Burgess isn’t an academic. But in the case of Shakespeare, I think that is actually Burgess’ strength. You probably know him from his cult classic novel A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962 (one of my favorite novels of all time).

And yes, Burgess also wrote nonfiction. Shakespeare was a major interest for him. This book reads as a virtuoso fiction writer’s ode to his favorite writer. Here’s a quote from Shakespeare that illustrates the style:

Whatever you might think of Burgess, you must admit, he makes you think.

I also like Burgess’ Shakespeare because it features amazing, full-page artworks throughout. They are all, likewise, captioned by Burgess himself. Here’s an example of the art within the book, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I:

In Shakespeare, Burgess tries to keep it neutral and informative (to the best of his ability). But if you want something more speculative, try his other Shakespeare work, Nothing Like The Sun, which is an (imagined) biography of Shakespeare’s romantic life.

5. Shakespeare: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd (2005)

This one is for the fans of cultural, historical, and social context. In this biography, Ackroyd acts more as a historian than he does a pure literary critic. This is a really fascinating look at Shakespeare’s world, from Elizabethan London to the British countryside where Shakespeare spent his childhood.

London is Ackroyd’s major academic passion, and you can really tell in Shakespeare: The Biography. The detail with which he details 17th century England is incredible: you feel like you’re really there. It’s only merely a literary work, or even a literary biography. It’s a historical perspective that looks at Shakespeare as representative of a broad country and culture. This one also looks a lot at the 17th century world of theatre and dramaturgy. If you’re interested in things like how Shakespeare’s plays might’ve been performed during his time, this one is for you.

Thank you for joining me for this Shakespeare list! Next up in Demystifying Shakespeare, we’ll be looking at Shakespeare’s comedies and wit (is he actually funny?) Speak to you later this week!

And if you’re thinking, But these are just the core tenets of all storytelling everywhere, you’d pretty much be right. We really do see Macbeth everywhere. The TV shows Breaking Bad and Succession come to mind as prime examples.

Throughout this Demystifying Shakespeare self-study course, I’ve tried to emphasize exactly that. If you are reading (or watching) something in English, it is probably, at least in some way, Shakespearean. My favorite analogy is that Shakespeare is the Beatles of literature: it would still exist without him, but he changed the game forever.

So, Macbeth. That mainstay of secondary school education. Witches! Prophecies! Murder! Revenge! Madwomen!* Ghosts! A winning formula in literature both then and now. Indeed, part of Macbeth’s enduring allure is its darkness, its absolute refusal to let-up, even as Macbeth does deplorable things like order the murder of children. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Macbeth doesn’t begin the play like this.

In fact, at the beginning of the story, Macbeth is a pretty average guy, albeit a privileged one. He’s got some power and some land and money. He’s even got a castle, and a fancy title. His problem? Despite all of this, he is not the King. Macbeth wants it all. And as the story develops, Macbeth wants all or nothing.

Such begins the tragic downfall of Macbeth.

*as usual, I’m keen to probe Shakespearean madness further.

Here, I’m going to give a 2-minute overview of the Macbeth plot. It contains spoilers!

Macbeth is a celebrated Scottish nobleman who meets three witches. They give him a prophecy: that he will become the King of Scotland. Macbeth begins to wonder whether this could actually happen, and he delivers the news to his wife, Lady Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth encourages Macbeth to fulfill the prophecy. They conspire to kill the current King (King Duncan), while Duncan stays in the Macbeth castle. Macbeth murders King Duncan and becomes King, but he also becomes paranoid. He orders more murders, including those of his friend Banquo and Macduff’s children, and becomes haunted by guilt, hallucinations, and the fear of losing power. A cycle of violence is set in motion and the other noblemen of Scotland realize that Macbeth must be stopped.

Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth is driven mad – she takes her own life in the final act. An army marches on Macbeth’s castle, but even even as Macbeth’s enemies outnumber him, he clings to the witches’ prophecy. Ultimately, the prophecies don’t protect Macbeth, and he is killed in the battle.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you encountered Macbeth in school. If you were to ask someone who hasn’t read the play for years what happens, they’d probably mention these three things, and I’m curious if they come to mind for you as well:

1. The witches.

2. Lady Macbeth.

3. “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow…”

Although these are all important, they represent the broad strokes with which we paint Shakespeare in secondary school education. We do a disservice to these works of literature in the high school classroom.

I disagree with these reductions. Here, I want to write not about Macbeth’s tyranny, nor even his ambition; not the witches’ supernaturalism, or the play’s cycle of violence. Instead, I want to think about Macbeth’s imagination.

What I failed to realize, when I first encountered this play at fifteen, was this:

Macbeth isn’t really about the three witches at all. It’s about how Macbeth’s imagination reacts to their prophecy, and the events that follow. What matters most, really, is that the witches deliver to Macbeth a prophecy – but the witches themselves could’ve been anything with authority. In fact, Shakespeare’s choice to make the witches, well, witches, was a strategic political move, more than anything else. I’ll explain more on that later, when I write about Macbeth rabbit-holes to fall down if you want to study further.

My point is that Macbeth is a play so full of sound and fury. But amidst it all, Macbeth is driven by a desperately over-active imagination. And his imagination is, at its core, fuelled by hope: the hope that he might wield real power.

I prefer to think about Macbeth in this way, rather than as a tyrant or a murderer. Because really: who among us has not fallen victim, at some point, to a bit of an over-active imagination? And even further: who among us does not love a bit of power? Crave it? Indeed, part of the allure of the Macbeths, to me, is that I get it. I do. I can understand.

A confession, then. There has always been a dark little sliver inside of me that relates to Lady Macbeth. Dare I say: I believe that there’s something within her to be admired.

And that’s the power of Shakespeare: to make us sympathize with murderers.

Below, I’ll write about how Shakespeare does just this, through psychological warfare. I’ll analyze key excerpts from the play, list Oxford-style tutorial essay questions, and give additional reading lists for further study on Shakespeare’s witches, Lady Macbeth, and madness.

The Witches Don’t Make Macbeth A Murderer. So Who Does?

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Suffice to say, it’s become a problem for me. And it’s augmented by the fact that I create content on IG, TikTok, here on Substack, and now (as of yesterday), Youtube. I genuinely feel like I cannot escape the prism of social media - and specifically, bookish social media.

But that’s great, Heather! you might think. Your feeds are full of books and literature: exactly what you love and what you, yourself, write about.

I thought this at first too. But the truth is, the Bookstagram and Booktok (and even, honestly, the Substack) algorithms are extremely overwhelming when left to their own vicious devices. And one of my major problems is that, because I love books and reading, I often forget the core tenet behind social media marketing, promotion, and algorithms: that everyone is trying to sell you something. Yes, even a new lit fic release; yes, even a hyped-up romantasy release that claims to be the next ACOTAR or ASOIAF. Because we love books and literature so much, we can forget the essential downfall of social media, which is that we are the doomscroll-y victims of vast marketing ploys.

This has been the crux of my problem lately. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to break out of the prism of the social media bookish algorithms. I’m tired of seeing the same books recommended; of seeing the same trends duplicated; of being inundated by new releases by the day, by the hour. I’ve had a long think and have come up with a list of 5 things, all based in literature and the arts, that I’m doing this summer to be more mindful, and to get off my damn phone.

1. Read one (short) poem per day

Poetry is the perfect antidote to a short attention span. So many short, under 3-minute reads pack a huge punch in terms of imagery, literary technique, and food for thought. If you read just one short poem per day, that’s a literary moment that might stick with you for the rest of the week - or, who knows, maybe forever. Here’s a few poems that I might start with. They are all brief but evocative, and in some way significant to the literary canon:

A. “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

B. “Leda and the Swan” by W.B. Yeats (1924)

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

2. Discover New Books From Original Sources

I am changing the way I discover new releases. Right now, I passively scroll and bookmark anything that looks interesting. This inevitably means that I have a never-ending book list - and I can never remember why I had been interested in any given title in the first place.

To make a more deliberate practice out of bookish discovery, I’m going to go straight to the sources first: the publishing houses themselves. In so doing, I intend to discover which publishers and imprints are putting out the kind of work that I want to engage with. All presses and imprints follow unifying principles for the books that they publish: Penguin, for instance, has several literary fiction imprints, while presses like Angry Robot or Avon are best-known for putting out really successful genre fiction. It’s time for me to really figure out which presses (i.e. companies) I want to follow, support, and buy from. I’ll start with the obvious: publishers’ home pages.

My first step? I’m looking into the publishers of my favorite recent reads. I loved Ainslie Hogarth’s two latest releases Normal Women and Motherthing, and these were published in the UK by Atlantic. After looking through their catalogue, I’ve already found several fascinating literary fiction releases that all seem to share commonalities with Hogarth’s work: exactly the type of thing I’m looking for.

I hope that, by seeking new releases directly from their sources (rather than constant inundation by my social media algorithms), I’ll be more attuned with the publishing world more generally: who does what, where to look for certain work, and where I want to spend my money.

3. Literary Journalling

Starting on Monday, I’m starting my 31 Day Literary Journalling Challenge.

4. Shakespeare Sonnet Challenge

As of today (July 11) there are 73 days left of (astronomical) summer. Coincidentally, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets: if we read 2 every day, for the rest of the summer, we’ll be Shakespeare Sonnet experts by September!

I’m starting a mini challenge based on this conceit. I’ll call it the Shakespeare Sonnet Challenge and I’ll be using this free online version of the sonnets, in case you’d like to follow along with me. Today, we read sonnets I and II. Here they are:

I

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

II

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

5. Listening To Albums All The Way Through

I believe that music can be literature, and literature can be music. So, this summer I’m going to listen to albums in the same way that I would read a novel: from beginning to end, all the way through.

Although streaming has changed the way we construct the album - we’ve shifted away from the album-as-coherent-story - many albums are still made with very deliberate ordering. But nevertheless, I’m starting this project by listening through albums that were made in the heyday of the rock n’ roll concept album: that is, music released in and around the time of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967) which is considered (by some) to be the first true concept album. Here’s a list of albums that I will be listening to with no skips, no repeats, no shuffles: all the way through, as though I’m reading a narrative story.

1. The Beatles’ Revolver

2. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds

3. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St

4. The Strokes’ Room on Fire

5. Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell

3. Trudy and the Romance’s Sandman

4. Geese’s Getting Killed

A few obvious choices here, and a few deep cuts. Geese has been all over lately, and Getting Killed was named a best album of 2025 by The New Yorker. On the flip side, not enough people know about Trudy and the Romance, who are this generation’s answer to the early Beatles’ style doo-wop music. Worth a listen. I’ll leave you with a reading list that I made a few weeks ago, based on Geese’s biggest songs at the moment. Let me know what you think if you read/listen!

I would be willing to bet that your image looks something like this:

This painting has, ever so slowly and subtly, changed the way in which we understand Ophelia. For many of us, this is Ophelia herself. Beautiful, and longhaired: typical of a Pre-Raphaelite female muse. Surrounded by vibrant greenery, also typical of the school. Maybe most eminently: Ophelia is dead.

But there’s a lot more to her than that. Shakespeare’s Ophelia is so much more than her tragedy. Here, I want to explore Ophelia’s character textually, and look at how art and culture can change Shakespeare so drastically for us, as readers and consumers.

Ophelia as a figure continues to capture audiences today. Maybe the best contemporary example involves the latest release from Taylor Swift: a single titled “The Fate of Ophelia,” from her April 2026 album The Life of a Showgirl. And a few months ago, I analysed her lyrics against Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I found some discrepancies, and many of these more broadly relate to my concerns in this essay.

So, here I pose a question: Who is Shakespeare’s Ophelia? And how has she become somebody else? Or – has she become nobody at all?

A few months ago, I argued that Taylor Swift rather misunderstood the character of Ophelia in her latest single. Here’s the Instagram analysis below. And a quick summary of my argument: Swift romanticizes Ophelia by likening her to a figure locked in a tower, who is ultimately saved by a love interest – and who is thusly saved by the “fate” of Ophelia.

There’s a few thematic issues in Swift’s interpretation. First, in Hamlet, Ophelia is never in a tower. Of course, this could just be a metaphor: for the subject’s loneliness, isolation, desperation. But I think it’s a very loaded one to use in any interpretation of Ophelia, and one that replaces her complexity with a Disney-fied vision of medieval damsels in distress. And if you wanted to get really picky about Swift’s interpretation, you could also question her use of the term “fate” – for was it really Ophelia’s fate at all? Was it really her destiny, or rather a tragic ending which resulted from some design or machination? In my latest post on Hamlet for Demystifying Shakespeare, I wrote a bit more about fate in the play, and in my first post for this series, I wrote about how Shakespeare is concerned with it throughout his whole body of work.

Ophelia is a fascinating example: as with any Shakespearean character, nothing is so simple as being “fated.”

Yet my biggest concern with Swift’s Ophelia is that she seems, to me, deeply inspired by Everett’s painting, at the expense of Shakespeare’s play. The line from Swift’s song that suggests this to me the most is: “And if you’ve never come for me / I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.” Indeed, Everett’s painting is deeply melancholic, and it alludes to Ophelia’s cause-of-death by drowning. So many Ophelia paintings follow this pattern: Here’s a selection:

Throughout each of these paintings, two things are consistent. The first: Ophelia is beautiful. The second: she is in proximity to a body of water.

These consistencies are important because they illustrate the central things that visual art associates with Ophelia: the way she looks, and the way she dies.

I want to question these simplistic understandings of Ophelia. For the pre-Raphaelites, Ophelia was a “stunner” – the term that Dante Gabriel Rosetti used to describe the groups’ beautiful female muses. For Taylor Swift, Ophelia becomes an amalgamation of fairytale tropes. But if we look at the play, Ophelia is so much more than all of that: she’s a quick wit; she points out fallacies and contradictions in the powerful men around her; she is poetic in her thinking and speech; at times, she seems to understand the plays goings-on better than anyone else. Here are just a few of my favorite quotes, spoken by Ophelia:

Do not as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whilst like a puff’d and reckless libertine
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede. (Act 1, Scene 3)

Here, Ophelia is responding to a long polemic from her brother, Laertes, who advises her to preserve her purity. In response, Ophelia cleverly articulates a universal and timeless fallacy: how can you lecture me, while you yourself do not do as you say?

It’s powerful that Ophelia points out this contradiction in the context of her purity, because that’s a fixation throughout the play (think: “get thee to a nunnery!”) This is an early articulation of a central question that has always fascinated society and which is central, also, to womanhood: what value do we place on women’s purity? Who determines that, and to what end? And, perhaps most explicitly here: should women listen to the dictations of men who are themselves hypocrites?

Ophelia is also the speaker of one of the play’s most beautiful and profound stand-alone lines. This line, even out of context, carries such resonance and impact. Ophelia says:

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. (Act 4, Scene 5).

Interestingly enough, this lucid point emerges in the midst of Ophelia’s demise into madness. Sometimes, with Ophelia, I think we assume too much – instead, we might ask of her the same questions that we ask of Hamlet himself. Is she mad? And how mad, really?

Finally, I want to highlight another of Ophelia’s beautiful stand-alone moments. This, like the above line, occurs during her final descent into madness. Like a lot of Shakespearean lines, we could read it in so many different ways. But I tend to read it as a raw, earnest, and disquieting lamentation on grief:

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.

His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll.
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan.
God ha’ mercy on his soul. (Act 4, Scene 5).

It’s short, abrupt, intense. It captures real grief in a way that flowery poetics cannot – these are the sorts of things we think, feel, and scream in the wake of tragedy. Ophelia, to me, expresses that better than anyone.

To conclude, I want to highlight one more important note on Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She speaks very little for herself. When she does speak, it’s often observant and earnest. But Ophelia, unlike the male characters in the play, is not granted the gift of voice. Her life is dominated by the men around her: her lord father Polonius, her brother Laertes, and her possibly-mad lover Hamlet. Maybe most tragically of all, even her death is delivered as a form of hearsay, gossip, secondhand information. We never actually see her die: we only hear her final songs. This raises a famous Shakespearean question: what really happened to Ophelia?

I’ll leave you then, with this. As Ophelia’s mental capacities deteriorate, the King says: “Poor Ophelia / Divided from herself and her fair judgement…”

Essentially, the King observes, Ophelia’s gone mad. But as I’m always doing in Demystifying Shakespeare, I invite you to question that assumption. Should we believe the King, who is himself so rotten? How else might we read Ophelia? And for Ophelia, as with Hamlet, can it really be so simple as madness?

But you all knew it was coming next: Hamlet. A Demystifying Shakespeare crash course would not be complete without it. The play, written in (circa) 1600, is widely considered to be Shakespeare’s magnum opus: his masterpiece. And yet doesn’t Shakespeare have so many equally famous and brilliant plays? What about Macbeth? Or King Lear? Why does Hamlet wear such a crown, amidst such a brilliant body of work? That’s the question I’m setting out to answer today.

Hamlet has an unearned reputation for being difficult. It’s why (I think), my high school chose to teach us Macbeth instead. But the truth is, Hamlet is, in all of the ways that really matter, actually quite accessible: linguistically, it’s comparatively simple and less sticky than some other works by Shakespeare. And the plot is, honestly, the stuff of a bloody revenge thriller: The young Prince of Denmark is grieving after the death of his father, the King. The Ghost of the King appears, and tells Hamlet that, actually, he was murdered by Claudius: the King’s brother, Hamlet’s uncle, and - now - the new King of Denmark.

The next bit is probably the most important plot point in all of Hamlet: After the Ghost reveals this news, he asks his son to avenge his murder. Below is this all-important moment, which appears early in the play: Act 1, Scene 5. You can read it for free online here.

So, a bit of a whirlwind moment for our Prince Hamlet. And to add salt to the wound, Claudius (his father’s murderer), has just married Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Yes, that’s right: right after the death of the King, Queen Gertrude went ahead and married the King’s brother. So when the Ghost tells Hamlet that he must get revenge not only for the “unnatural” murder, but also for incest, that’s what he’s referring to. See this excerpt as an example:

That, really, is the core plot of Hamlet: everything that comes after is dependent on how Hamlet responds to this information. And so it’s not necessarily the play’s language or storyline that might seem difficult at first: it’s dealing with a character like Hamlet himself, and becoming comfortable with his contradictions.

When approaching Hamlet, you should feel ready to ask a lot of questions that the play itself will not answer. To me, that’s the beauty - and the genius - of the play. I have my own theories and conclusions about the play and about Hamlet as a character, and those are so deeply intertwined with who I am as a person, my experiences, my perspective. Hamlet means something different to everyone - and so, in some ways, it resists interpretation. To enjoy Hamlet, you should be comfortable with that inherent unknowability.

There are some universal questions, though, that the play asks: What does grief actually feel like? How about depression, even before we actually had the language to describe mental illness? Where’s the line between madness and normalcy - and who determines where that is? What do we owe to our parents, if anything?

Very shortly after the Ghost’s Big Reveal, something strange seems to overcome Hamlet. Polonius, Ophelia’s father, calls it “lunacy.” The King says that he is worried about “Hamlet’s transformation” - that he no longer truly understands himself. Ophelia gets freaked out by Hamlet’s sporadic behavior. But to some people, like his childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet actually acts pretty sound. All of this raises one of the most central questions surrounding the Hamlet legacy. It is a question that has confounded and fascinated us since the play’s very first performance:

Is Hamlet Actually Mad?

I’ll leave you with some core evidence, anecdotes, and passages that help us to answer this question; then I’ll explain some of the academic theories surrounding Hamlet’s madness, and you can decide for yourself where you land in this perennial debate.

Hamlet’s “Madness” (or not) Explained

1. In Act 1, Hamlet directly tells Horatio that he intends to feign madness. Shortly thereafter, other people in the castle begin to notice his strange behavior. So, he could be acting madness: that is, after all, what he said he’d do.

2. At certain points thereafter, Hamlet can appear to be either very lucid or very out-of-it: it depends largely who is speaking with at any given time.

3. Even when Hamlet acts mad, his insults and jibes are not always incoherent: they sometimes feel clever and deliberate, pointed at a particular person. Below is an example, from Act 4, Scene 3. Claudius is questioning Hamlet about where Polonius’ body is (hint & spoiler: Hamlet has killed Polonius). On first read, Hamlet’s response sounds, well, a big unhinged:

   “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service,—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.”

   The King, for his part, thinks that this is just more of Hamlet’s incoherent rambling. But if you really take a look at this passage, it’s actually a very logical and even advanced conception of philosophies that would’ve been way ahead of Shakespeare’s own time: about nihilism, existence, personhood, and existentialism. Hamlet is reckoning with mortality. What he’s saying here - and what he really comes to obsess over - is that the emperor and the beggar, despite their vastly different stations, will both eventually end up as maggot food. In life, we treat them so differently. As dead bodies, they are “two dishes, but to one table.”

   Hamlet asks: who are we, really, once we have died? What do we become, if anything at all? How much does anyone’s - yours, theirs, ours - existence really matter, when we all reach the same end?

   These passages are philosophically complicated and well-reasoned. So something that scholars often ask about Hamlet, when he says things like this: would a madman actually say that?

To be honest, these types of questions, when they appear in Hamlet, have always affected me deeply. I am scared of death - it might be my greatest fear. I’ve read all sorts about the illogic behind this fear, but it doesn’t really matter. It still just deeply scares me.

So for paid subscribers, I’m going to get a bit more into Hamlet’s existentialism, madness, nihilism, and mental health. I’ll give some excerpts and context that will help you to understand Hamlet and interpret the Big Hamlet Questions for yourself, and a reading list to dive deeper. I’ll also draw on some personal reflections about Hamlet as a character, because, I think, everyone has their own Hamlet: their own sense of what he means. I’d love to hear about yours.

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A lot of film, TV, and literature deals with summertime as something a bit nefarious. It’s not always ice cream and long days at the beach. Sometimes it’s sticky humidity, claustrophobia, ghosts, hauntings, overgrown forests and gardens, and mischievous fairies.

Although this might seem fairly modern, it’s a very long literary tradition, rooted in folklore. It really starts to solidify in English Literature with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which popularizes the idea of long summer days as a time of enchanted forests and supernatural interference.

This tradition is with us today - have you ever wondered why so many fairytales and children’s fantasy novels begin with a few unassuming kids who wander into the wood on a summer’s day? It’s all rooted in folklore and literature.

Here’s a “Summerween” Reading List, with both fiction and nonfiction suggestions to help you get into the spooky and supernatural summer headspace.

Fiction

1. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

2. Sir Orfeo, J.R.R. Tolkien

3. Midsummer Nights, Lara Stokes

4. Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

5. Joyland, Stephen King

6. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier

7. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

9. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

10. The Little Friend, Donna Tartt

Nonfiction

1. The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, Katharine Mary Briggs

2. The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year, Nick Groom

3. Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate

4. The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang, edited by Jack Zipes

5. Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, Leila Taylor

6. Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

A Visual Journey

Summer-as-spooky also emerges in a lot of fascinating, beautiful, and haunting artwork. This work ranges from Victorian fairy paintings and illustrations to large oil landscapes depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s a few galleries to check out which accompany a dive into the literary history of “Summerween.”

Victorian Botanical and Forest Fairies

Some Victorian illustrators contributed to the idea of fairies as being connected to the natural world. This often appeared in lighter, cute artworks aimed at children, for whom the fairytale was becoming popular. Here’s a few examples of this Victorian illustrative style:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Art

In the nineteenth century, there was a resurgence in interest surrounding Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, partially augmented by the Victorian interest in fairies. Here’s a few paintings from this time which depict various scenes from the play.

Summer can mean many different things, and the literary history surrounding this time of year is equally variant and diverse. In some traditions, it’s a spooky time where the veil between the human world and the supernatural one collapses; in others, it’s a time of whimsy and light, similar to those cute-ified Victorian fairy illustrations.

What is midsummer to you, and how do you celebrate?

But we are so rarely taught why.

In high school, I remember being handed first Romeo and Juliet, then Julius Caesar, then finally Macbeth. We spent so much time pouring over the intricacies of these plays, to the extent that a fifteen-year-old can be convinced to do so. But for all of that focus, we were never really told about the why: why still bother with Shakespeare at all?

Then, in university, the greatness and significance of Shakespeare was taken as a given. Tutors assumed that we inherently understood, or had already been taught, about why Shakespeare is the centerpiece of English Literature. So somewhere in the standard literary education, we miss out on some really important questions.

For the first week of my Demystify Shakespeare in 1 Month Course, I’ll be redressing those gaps. I’ll start with one question that has always fascinated me:

Why Shakespeare, and not somebody else?

Shakespeare had a lot of talented contemporaries. In fact, he borrowed quite a lot from them: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (circa 1582) was the blueprint for Hamlet, and yet the latter play gets all the glory. Elizabethan England was a time of great literary production, and Shakespeare was surrounded by playwrights like Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton, all of whom produced fascinating and popular plays.

But most of us never even hear about these guys. And that doesn’t even touch on Shakespeare’s women contemporaries - yes, they existed. Figures like Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Mary Sidney were all writing poetry, plays, and prose at the same time as Shakespeare. But they have all but disappeared from public and literary consciousness.

Amidst all of these other sixteenth and seventeenth century talents, Shakespeare remains king. To understand why this is, I need to quickly set the scene of Elizebethan and Jacobean England (1558-1625).

This was a time of great change in England and across the world. From great change emerges great literature. It is a vessel through which writers and readers make sense of an otherwise unfamiliar world.

What was happening in England? For one, society itself was changing. There was a growing suspicion toward religious institutions, burgeoned by new interests in science and logic.

The severity of this social and cultural change is best represented by the example of Galileo, who was condemned because he argued that the Earth revolves around the sun. Why such drama over this observation? Well, it flew in the face of Catholic doctrine. The Pope wasn’t happy. And everywhere, people were similarly questioning the religious status quo.

Other important changes: cities were growing, and the nuclear family dissolving. Political violence and royal succession anxiety were ubiquitous. In only a few generations, Henry VIII broke from Rome, Mary I then brought back Catholicism, Elizabeth I undid Mary’s restoration and brought back Protestantism - and then she died without an obvious heir.

It was all very violent and turbulent. But for Shakespeare, it was also literary fodder. In a time where everyone was concerned with a few key anxieties, Shakespeare addressed them directly through his plays. He asked the questions that everybody was thinking, like:

• What makes a good ruler?

• What happens when ambition becomes destructive?

• Can we trust our own perceptions?

• What do we owe to our families?

• What should we do when morality and self-interest collide?

• Are we powerless against fate?

And if those questions sound familiar or relatable, it’s because they still guide our thinking 400 years later.

The Real Reason Shakespeare Persists

It’s not only about those complicated Shakespearean questions. The major reason Shakespeare survives, above all others, is the vessels through which he answered those questions: his characters.

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I did some research about why this might be, and it turns out that it’s a pretty common pattern: young people (especially women) keep journals consistently, and the habit tends to fall away as we age. James Pennebaker, an expert on the psychology of journalling, says that this phenomenon exists because journalling can help us to organize the chaos and incoherence of youth. Once we get older and have a more solid sense-of-self, we feel less of a need to work through our thoughts and emotions on paper.

But I’m keen to get back into it, in part because I’m inspired by so many brilliant journal-keepers here on Substack, and also because journalling has tangible benefits to adults’ mental health.

So, for my re-entry into this practice, I decided to create a classic literature-inspired monthlong journalling challenge. The challenge includes 31 prompts, one for each day. Each prompt is inspired by a theme or question explored in a great work of literature, but they are general enough so that you don’t have to have read the book to answer the prompt. But, if you’d like to deep-dive into any of these personal questions, the challenge also acts as a reading list into some of literature’s most powerful works on identity, selfhood, and emotion.

I’m getting married in two weeks, so things are a bit hectic right now. But right after, in early July, I’ll be starting the 31 day challenge. I’d love for you to follow along if you’d like, because trying something new is always easier in a community!

Here’s the 31 prompts for 31 days:

1. Jane Austen on First Impressions

Write about a time your first impression of someone turned out to be completely wrong.

2. Shakespeare on Ambition

What is something you want badly enough to seriously change your life for?

3. Virginia Woolf on Solitude

When do you feel most yourself?

4. Charles Dickens on Childhood

What is a memory from childhood that you know still shapes who you are today?

5. Min Jin Lee on Family History

What stories, sacrifices, or values have been passed down to you - whether you asked for them or not?

6. Homer on Homecoming

What place feels most like home to you. Why?

7. Mary Shelley on Responsibility

What is something you created, started, or set in motion that surprised - or unnerved - you?

8. George Eliot on Regret

What decision would you make differently if given another chance?

9. Oscar Wilde on Reputation

How do you think other people see you?

10. Emily Brontë on Obsession

What idea, goal, or memory is hardest for you to let go of?

11. Leo Tolstoy on Happiness

What does a successful life look like to you?

12. Toni Morrison on Memory

Which memory returns to you most often?

13. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Reinvention

Have you ever tried to become a different version of yourself?

14. Sylvia Plath on Identity

What parts of yourself do you rarely show other people?

15. Albert Camus on Meaning

What makes an ordinary day worthwhile?

16. James Baldwin on Belonging

When have you felt most understood?

17. Thomas Hardy on Fate

Do you believe your life is mostly shaped by choice or circumstance?

18. George Orwell on Truth

When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?

19. Anne Brontë on Independence

What does freedom mean to you?

20. Marcel Proust on Nostalgia

Describe a smell, sound, or taste that immediately transports you into the past.

21. Margaret Atwood on Power

When have you felt powerless, and how did you respond?

22. Dostoevsky on Conscience

What is something you still feel guilty about?

23. Zora Neale Hurston on Voice

What is something you wish you said more often?

24. Joseph Conrad on Fear

What uncertainty currently occupies your thoughts?

25. Emily Dickinson on Wonder

What small thing have you overlooked recently?

26. William Blake on Innocence

What belief did you once hold that you’ve since lost?

27. Chinua Achebe on Change

How do you react when familiar things begin to disappear?

28. Shakespeare on Love

What has love taught you that no book ever could?

29. Virginia Woolf on Time

What period of your life do you think about most often?

30. Franz Kafka on Transformation

How are you different from the person you were five years ago?

31. The Great Novel Question

If your life were a novel, what chapter would you be in right now? What would be the title of the chapter?

In order to get myself started in July, I’ll only spend a minimum of 5 minutes per day on each prompt. This is so that, mentally, I can surmount that procrastination obstacle - I can tell myself: 5 minutes, and then I’ve done it. This strategy, of course, borrows from the psychology behind the ever-popular 5-minute journal.

Now, a question for you: would this be the type of journalling challenge you’d be interested in trying? Let me know, and please do tell me if you’re going to give it a shot, so we can carry on together!

In my thinking and writing, I often compare music to literature. It helps me to demystify big literary ideas and concepts. And I believe that this is an apt analogy for anyone interested in understanding Shakespeare: Shakespeare is to English literature what the Beatles are to popular music. The worlds of music and literature would not be the same without them.

But have you ever actually wondered why? I certainly have. We throw around these lofty appeals to Shakespeare’s greatness but we rarely get into the why of it all, or even better, the show me how. That’s among one of the big Shakespearean questions I’ll be answering over the next few weeks.

This month, I’ll be giving paid subscribers a crash course in Shakespeare. I want to prove that you do not have to read the complete works - or even close to it - to understand why Shakespeare matters today and how to derive meaning and knowledge from his works. At Oxford University, English Literature undergraduates are expected to read the complete works: I don’t agree. Understanding the context of Shakespeare - and the before and the after - is just as important as reading the plays themselves. In fact, I think the experience of reading the plays is heightened immensely by contextual knowledge. This way we aren’t just reading, say, Julius Caesar for an interesting story about political mutiny. We’re reading to understanding why it is Shakespeare’s take on Roman history that sticks. What does Shakespeare do with his diction and his characters that sets him apart?

Below is the syllabus for the next four weeks. I have emphasized succinctness in this course. I know so many people try to learn more about English Literature while juggling work, school, and family, so even if you only read these weekly newsletters, you will leave the course with a good grasp on Shakespeare, and the reasons why we continue to elevate him as the Greatest Ever. But if you’d like to dive deeper, I’ll be including further reading lists, excerpts from plays, and longer deep-dive material into more specific topics (think: Shakespeare’s take on depression, or how Macbeth came to be seen as a “cursed” production).

Importantly, every work of literature excerpted or referenced in this course will be free to access through the public domain. I like Project Gutenberg for easy access to public domain literature – sometimes I even read it on my phone to try and break out of my doom-scrolling habit.

Each week, I’ll send paid subscribers an email that pertains to that week’s topic. These will include key terms with definitions, excerpts with my own analyses, further Oxford-style essay questions to consider, and deep-dives on specific figures or works. Here’s what the rest of the month will look like:

Week 1: Who Was Shakespeare, and Why Do We Still Care About Him?

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Kaya (1764)

1. The Round House, Louise Erdrich

2. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko

3. Cogewea, The Half Blood, Mourning Dove

4. The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones

5. The Removed, Brandon Hobson

6. Betty, Tiffany McDaniel

7. Never Whistle at Night, edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.

8. There There, Tommy Orange

9. Where the Dead Sit Talking, Brandon Hobson

Felicity (1774)

10. Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson

11. Caleb’s Crossing, Geraldine Brooks

12. The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

13. The Coquette, Hannah Webster Foster

14. The Crucible, Arthur Miller

15. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

16. To Capture a Rebel Slave, Mariel Grey

17. Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, Volume 40940

18. Arthur Mervyn, Charles Brockden Brown

Elizabeth (1774)

1. Charlotte Temple, Susanna Rowson

2. The Boarding School, or Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, Hannah Webster Foster

3. Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockden Brown

4. A Mirror for Witches, Esther Forbes

5. Modern Chivalry, Hugh Henry Brackenridge

6. Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon

7. The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare, Kimberly Brock

8. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, M. T. Anderson

Caroline (1812)

19. The Barbary Pirates, C.S. Forester

20. The Captain from Connecticut, C.S. Forester

21. Kelroy by Rebecca Rush

22. Mr Midshipman Easy, Frederick Marryat

23. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, The Grimm Brothers

24. Shirley, Charlotte Brontë

25. Downright Dencey, Caroline Dale Snedeker

26. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving

27. Discipline, Mary Brunton

Josefina (1824)

19. The Mangy Parrot, Fernández de Lizardi

20. Esperanza Rising, Pam Muñoz Ryan

21. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika L. Sánchez

22. The Bewitching, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

23. The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea

24. The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros

25. Mexikid, Pedro Martín

26. The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, Sonora Reyes

27. Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez

Cécile (1850)

1. Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Sojourner Truth

2. The Known World, Edward P. Jones

3. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones

4. Yellow Wife, Sadeqa Johnson

5. The Good Lord Bird, James McBride

6. Washington Black, Esi Edugyan

7. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

8. Season of the Swamp, Yuri Herrera

9. The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez

Marie-Grace (1850)

1. The Feast of All Saints, Anne Rice

2. Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende

3. A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

4. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

5. Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

6. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

7. Sudden Death and Other Plays, Tennessee Williams

8. A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines

9. The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom

Kirsten (1854)

28. Walden, Henry David Thoreau

29. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

30. The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper

31. Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

32. Roughing It, Mark Twain

33. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

34. Prairie Lotus, Linda Sue Park

35. Giants in the Earth, O. E. Rølvaag

36. The Long Winter, Laura Ingalls Wilder

Addy (1864)

37. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

38. Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo

39. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

40. Kindred, Octavia E. Butler

41. The Trees, Percival Everett

42. Jazz, Toni Morrison

43. James, Percival Everett

44. The Fraud, Zadie Smith

45. Roots, Alex Haley

Samantha (1904)

46. Howards End, E. M. Forster

47. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

48. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

49. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

50. The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett

51. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

52. A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

53. The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

54. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein

Nellie (1904)

46. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

47. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

48. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

49. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

50. The Grand Babylon Hotel, Arnold Bennett

51. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

52. A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

53. The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

54. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein

Rebecca (1914)

55. Herzog, Saul Bellow

56. The Rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan

57. The Cut Arts, Maggie Millner

58. The Bridal Canopy, S. Y. Agnon

59. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

60. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

61. Call It Sleep, Henry Roth

62. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride

63. Sons and Daughters, Chaim Grade

Claudie (1922)

64. Passing, Nella Larsen

65. The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes

66. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

67. Plum Bun, Jessie Redmon Fauset

68. Romance in Marseille, Claude McKay

69. Cane, Jean Toomer

70. Cora’s Kitchen, Kimberly Garrett Brown

71. A Kind of Freedom, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

72. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

Kit (1934)

73. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

74. The Hidden Staircase, Carolyn Keene

75. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

76. Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh

77. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

78. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

79. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain

80. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

81. The Antidote, Karen Russell

Nanea (1941)

82. Descendants of Darkness, Kaui Hart Hemmings

83. From Here to Eternity, James Jones

84. Local, Jessica Machado

85. Nuclear Family, Joseph Han

86. Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Kawai Strong Washburn

87. In Good Company, Cedric Yamanaka

88. Blu’s Hanging, Lois-Ann Yamanaka

89. Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

90. The Killing Spell, Shay Kaue

Molly (1944)

91. The Lost Weekend, Charles Jackson

92. Betsy and Joe, Maud Hart Lovelace

93. Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White

94. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

95. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

96. Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan

97. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry

98. Atonement, Ian McEwan

99. The Heat of the Day, Elizabeth Bowen

Emily (1944)

1. N or M?, Agatha Christie

2. Animal Farm, George Orwell

3. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis

4. Joy in the Morning, P. G. Wodehouse

5. First Term at Malory Towers, Enid Blyton

6. Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake

7. The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene

8. Doctor Dolittle and the Secret Lake, Hugh Lofting

9. The End of the Affair, Graham Greene

Maryellen (1954)

100. Another Country, James Baldwin

101. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates

102. Light Years, James Salter

103. The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney

104. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

105. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

106. The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin

107. The Mad Wife, Meagan Church

108. 11/22/63, Stephen King

Melody (1964)

109. Rabbit, Run, John Updike

110. The Learning Tree, Gordon Parks

111. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

112. A Different Drummer, William Melvin Kelley

113. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

114. If Beale Street Could Talk, James Baldwin

115. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines

116. Jubilee, Margaret Walker

117. Selected Poems, Gwendolyn Brooks

Julie (1974)

118. Christine, Stephen King

119. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

120. Jaws, Peter Benchley

121. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Böll

122. Oreo, Fran Ross

123. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt

124. Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin

125. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

126. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Tom Robbins

Ivy (1974)

1. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

2. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, C Pam Zhang

3. The Leavers, Lisa Ko

4. Real Americans, Rachel Khong

5. Sex and Rage, Eve Babitz

6. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion

7. Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu

8. Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

9. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

Courtney (1986)

127. The Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis

128. The Disappearing Dwarf, James P. Blaylock

129. The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice

130. Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut

131. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

132. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

133. White Noise, Don DeLillo

134. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

135. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Isabel & Nicki (1999)

136. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

137. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding

138. Possession, A. S. Byatt

139. Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

140. Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel

141. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman

142. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King

143. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky

144. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

During the Q&A, a student asked Martin: “If you could go back and change one thing about the books, what would it be?”

A part of me - the cynical part? - wonders if the question was a set-up, a probe for Martin to address perhaps the greatest controversy of his career: that of his perpetually unfinished blockbuster series. Whether the question was asked in good faith or not, Martin’s answer seemed almost predestined, and elicited some healthy and all-too-aware laughter from the crowd.

“If I could change one thing,” he said, “I’d have them finished.”

Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is a defining piece of literature for contemporary fantasy - and, indeed, for the fantasy genre as a whole. Martin follows a long line of fantasy literature greats: the double R.R. initial in his name, for instance, is a tribute to one of his heroes in J. R. R. Tolkien.

But something haunts Martin, and it’s been haunting him for over a decade. He has not, and may never, complete A Song of Ice and Fire. The sixth installment, titled Winds of Winter, has been stalled for 14 years. The most recent release from the A Song of Ice and Fire universe was Fire and Blood in 2018 (controversially, this might be my favorite work from Martin).

And so one central question surrounding the Thrones legacy has become not merely when the final book may be released, if ever, but who might finish it in the event that Martin cannot.

For my part, I think that Martin himself will finish Winds of Winter. I actually think that he might’ve done it already in the past, at least once, but that the immense pressure of the series’ success has overwhelmed him into revisions and deletions and scrapings. So while I believe that he will finish it, I also know we may never read it.

But who could finish the series, if Martin were ever to sign off on such a thing to begin with?

The question is an interesting one not because any one of us wants someone else to take up the task. Martin’s voice is Martin’s voice, and like other literary greats ranging from T.S. Eliot to Martin Amis to J.R.R. Tolkien, nobody will ever really be able to replicate it.

But this theoretical question does reveal something fascinating about contemporary fantasy. We are living through a remarkable period for the genre, perhaps one of the richest periods in its history. Tolkien, of course, still towers (so to speak) over everything. But there are several living writers producing fantasy work that might have seemed unimaginable even fifty years ago.

So, in the spirit of literary speculation, let’s consider the possibility that the greatest fantasy series of our time remains unfinished, and the slim chance that somebody else might complete Winds of Winter.

Who are our contenders? And what should you read from them?

1. Joe Abercrombie

If publishers had to choose right now, I suspect that Joe Abercrombie would be a favorite.

Both Joe Abercrombie and George R.R. Martin excel at writing people who are simultaneously admirable and awful. Martin focuses on morally grey and complex characters - qualities typically associated with literary fiction - and supplants them into an exciting fantasy world.

Abercrombie, likewise, is interested in moral ambiguity and, ultimately, the deep complexity of his people. It is his characters, and not necessarily just his world, that we are fascinated by.

His books contain some of the most memorable characters in modern fantasy. Sand dan Glokta alone is one of our great fictional characters: a former war hero transformed into a torturer. And yet, he remains sympathetic through his intelligence and humor. He reminds me a bit of Tyrion Lannister.

To get started with Joe Abercrombie’s work, I’d pick up The Blade Itself, which is his debut and the entrance point into his world. But remember: it’s a bit of a slow start, so give it space and room, and know that it will all pick up in the next book.

2. Robin Hobb

I might be getting a bit controversial here.

And maybe even more controversial: Robin Hobb would be my pick.

I believe that she is the greatest living fantasy writer in terms of literary merit and style. To me, Hobb’s books transcend genre, in the same way that Lord of the Rings does. And I think that her Realm of the Elderlings series has serious Literary potential, capital L.

The central character, FitzChivalry Farseer, grows into adulthood across several trilogies. In this sense, the books are quite Dickensian: they get into the mind of a young man throughout his bildungsroman. We spend thousands and thousands of pages inside his mind, and the result is such that you feel like you genuinely know Fitz, have become his friend.

But there are also some important elements of fantasy writing that Hobb lacks, and that’s why this take is controversial. While Martin’s strengths hinge on a combination of complex characters and genuinely genius plots with twists, reveals, conspiracies, betrayals, and unlikely overlaps, Hobb is a lot more about interiority: the intricacies of Fitz’s mind. Could Winds of Winter be finished by an author who eschews the kind of geopolitical stakes that Martin loves?

I think so. But I can see where others might detract.

3. Brandon Sanderson

No discussion of the contemporary fantasy genre would be complete without Brandon Sanderson. You knew he would come up eventually.

After Robert Jordan’s death, Sanderson completed The Wheel of Time, a task that many had previously considered impossible. And that feat is one of the great achievements of modern fantasy.

But there are some key differences between Martin and Sanderson. Sanderson creates complex but highly logical magical systems - these are often called “high” or “hard” magic systems. The magic is inseparable from his world and his characters, who are all aware of it and how it works.

But for George R.R. Martin, the magic is a lot more obscure. Often, the characters themselves don’t understand it - indeed, at the beginning of A Game of Thrones, dragons, magic, and resurrection have all been largely forgotten or assumed obsolete. The series, in a lot of ways, hinges on what happens when a large magical force returns - and how people in an otherwise highly realist and gritty medieval society might deal with it.

In other words, Sanderson’s magic is ordered, logical, clear. Actions have consequences, and we can try to predict them. Martin is different: we learn about the magic alongside everybody else, and it’s a slow-burn to discovery.

Of course, Sanderson is a great contender still. It would be fascinating to see what he could do with Martin’s soft and low magic world, so different from his own.

4. Susanna Clarke

Susanna Clarke rarely emerges in this conversation, but I think she is worthy of consideration. She has published very little compared to the prolific fantasy authors mentioned above, and most people know her by her 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. The book is lauded by critics even outside the fantasy genre because it has literary merit: comedy, immersive history, self-awareness.

There are clear issues with this match. Clarke’s concerns differ vastly from Martin’s. She avoids the political intrigue and the deep, multi-century lore that has made Martin so famous. And where Clarke’s work feels more like speculative history with elements of British folklore, Martin’s low-fantasy world is harsh, cruel, and violent: much like the brutal medieval society which it imitates.

But I think Clarke must be included in discussions of the greatest living fantasy writers. And while most people know of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, her other works go largely forgotten. I’d check out her underrated collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, which is set in the same world as her most famous novel.

Here’s a list of books that I would recommend to anyone who is keen to become familiar with the Greats of modern fantasy:

A Must-Read Fantasy Literature List

The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R.R. Tolkien

A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin

The Blade Itself, Joe Abercrombie

The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman

Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson

A Hero Born, Jin Yong

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

The Lions of Al-Rassan, Guy Gavriel Kay

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Mort, Terry Pratchett

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin

Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

One Last Point

I don’t actually think that anybody should finish A Song of Ice and Fire, except for George R.R. Martin himself.

Readers have always yearned for closure. Ambiguous (or worse, incomplete) endings make us uncomfortable - in literature as in life.

At the same time, unfinished, lost, or incomplete literary works have always haunted readers, and they will continue to do so. The canon is full of unanswered questions and open endings. Last week, I wrote about some of them here: Dickens died before completing The Mystery of Edwin Drood; two of Shakespeare’s plays have vanished from existence; Sylvia Plath’s second novel was potentially destroyed.

We may never get real closure around those works. But I do hope that we might enjoy the speculation, the mystery of it. What’s great literature, after all, without a bit of a cliffhanger?

Lost or unfinished literary manuscripts, especially from the Greats of the canon like Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Sylvia Plath, or even Shakespeare himself, are fascinating literary mysteries. Today I want to explore several of these mysteries and look at what they mean, why they continue fascinate us, and how we can engage with them now.

1. Shakespeare’s Lost Plays

Shakespeare is one of the most mysterious figures in all of literary history - to say the very least. We have always wondered who Shakespeare himself might have been, with some theories veering into the land of the conspiracy. And although there is a lot that we don’t know about Shakespeare, there are also certain facts about his lost works that have been confirmed by scholarship and archival evidence.

We have a specific name for works that are possibly by Shakespeare, and Shakespearean works that have possibly been lost to time. These are the “Shakespeare apocrypha.” This group contains over fifty entries, most of which are plays that have been posthumously attributed to Shakespeare, though these remain largely unproven.

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Can you recall the texts that you read in high school? Your teenage curriculum probably looked something like this: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet. Dickens’ Great Expectations, David Copperfield, or Tale of Two Cities. You might’ve touched on the Romantic poets, perhaps by reading Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” If you’re anything like me, you probably have a huge gap in your earliest literary education, jumping straight from Shakespeare to the Romantics to the Victorians, perhaps ending with a conclusive modernist or early postmodernist in The Sun Also Rises or The Catcher in the Rye.

I can only speak from my American high school experience, but I’d love to know: was the 100 years of literature written between 1660-1760 more or less skipped over for you, too?

There are a few reasons why this century is considered a bit unsexy compared to the great London webs of Dickens or the supernatural darkness of Shakespeare’s witches. First, the novel as we know it today didn’t quite exist yet - it was developing right around this time, which meant that it was messy, inconclusive, and uncertain of itself. Second, much of the literature of this work depended on formalism, rationalism, and logic: the ideals of the Enlightenment. In fact, a little later the Romantics kicked up a big storm about this so-called empiricism and said: no! We care about emotion, and beauty, and the feeling of being awe-struck.

So perhaps some of those reactionary Romantic ideals have stuck with us, even now. But the truth is, these are the very reasons why this literary period is so fascinating.

If you’re interested in literary or book history in particular, this is a curriculum to look into: any book that vies for the title of the first English novel was published in this century. With that said, lets get into the master list, complete with generalist and academic nonfiction, novels, drama, poetry, satire, and philosophy. Skip to the end for my top 5 most important reads from this period, and a compact personal curriculum.

I. Historical & Cultural Foundations

If you’ve read any of my stuff in the past, you know that, to me, context is king. So I’m starting this reading list off with trade nonfiction, which is a wonderful genre of writing - often by academics - that demystifies complex subjects. Here’s what I’d read to orient yourself around the literary period 1660-1760:

A. Trade Nonfiction & Accessible History

Liza Picard, Restoration London (1997)

Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City (2021)

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain (2017)

Peter Furtado, Restoration England (2011)

John Matusiak, The Tudors in 100 Objects (2016)

Suzannah Lipscomb, A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England (2012)

Sophie Shorland, Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England (2022)

Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman, Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (2022)

B. Academic Historical Scholarship

Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006)

Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (1994)

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (1985)

Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (1982)

II. Intellectual & Philosophical Foundations

A. Primary Philosophy Texts

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

B. Religious, Cosmological, & Spiritual Writing

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793)

Here’s where we get into the real meat of the curriculum: the primary literature reading list.

III. Core Literary Canon

A. Restoration & Eighteenth Century Drama

Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance (1686)

John Dryden, Marriage A-la-Mode (1673)

John Dryden, All for Love (1677)

William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)

George Etherege, The Man of Mode (1676)

Thomas Otway, Venice Preserv’d (1682)

Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718)

Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722)

George Lillo, The London Merchant (1731)

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)

William Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (1706)

Richard Sheridan, The School for Scandal (1777)

B. Novels & Prose Fiction

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722)

Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1725)

Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (1719)

Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740)

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748)

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767)

Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752)

Frances Burney, Evelina (1778)

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1704)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

C. Poetry, Satire, & Verse

John Dryden, Alexander’s Feast (1697)

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712/1714)

Alexander Pope, Essay on Man (1733–1734)

Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735)

Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, selected poems (1670s)

Samuel Butler, Hudibras (1663–1678)

Anne Finch, poetry

Mary Leapor, Poems Upon Several Occasions (1748)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, selected poems and letters

IV. Academic Literary Scholarship & Theory

A. Generalist Overviews (great for context!)

The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature, edited by Matthew C. Augustine and Steven N. Zwicker (2013)

A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, edited by Cynthia Wall (2005)

The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook, edited by Robert C. Evans and Eric J. Sterling (2008)

B. Academic & Critical Works on Satire & Poetry

Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (2013)

Paddy Bullard, editor, The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2021)

Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit (1974)

Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity (2001)

B. Academic & Critical Works on the Rise of the Novel

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957)

Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1987)

J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (1990)

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987)

Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (1982)

C. Academic & Critical Works on Drama

Katherine Mannheimer, Restoration Drama and the Idea of Literature (2022)

David Womersley, editor, Restoration Comedy (Blackwell Essential Literature)

V. Suggested Reading Sequence (& compact curriculum)

Phase 1: Historical and Cultural Context

1. Mortimer, Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

2. Picard, Restoration London

3. Lincoln, London and the 17th Century

4. Purkiss, The English Civil War

5. Hutton, The Restoration

Phase 2: Political Philosophy & Religion

1. Hobbes, Leviathan

2. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding

3. Milton, Paradise Lost

4. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

5. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees

Phase 3: Restoration Drama & Libertine Culture

1. Behn, The Rover

2. Wycherley, The Country Wife

3. Etherege, The Man of Mode

4. Congreve, The Way of the World

5. Gay, The Beggar’s Opera

Alongside:

• Womersley, Restoration Comedy

• Marshall, Practice of Satire

Phase 4: Rise of the Novel

1. Behn, Oroonoko

2. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

3. Richardson, Pamela

4. Fielding, Tom Jones

5. Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Alongside:

• Watt, The Rise of the Novel

• Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction

Phase 5: Augustan Satire & Poetry

1. Pope, Rape of the Lock

2. Pope, Essay on Man

3. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

4. Rochester, selected poems

5. Johnson, Rasselas

Alongside:

• Battestin, Providence of Wit

• Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire

★My top 5: the 5 key texts from this list that I suggest reading to understand English literature (1660-1760)★

1. Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature

2. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel

3. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

4. Milton, Paradise Lost

5. Hobbes, Leviathan

I bolded the title just then because we often leave Shelley’s subtitle out when we talk about Frankenstein. But Prometheus - the figure from Greek mythology who stole fire from the Olympians to bestow upon humankind - is the beginning of literature’s engagement with technology: what we now call AI. And Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a nineteenth century iteration of that story, and still perhaps our most pertinent literature about rogue technology: our great Artificial Intelligence allegory.

If this all seems like a bit of a stretch - what can AI have to do with the foibles of the Greek Gods, or a 200 year old novel from a time before even the steam engine? - here’s a quick literary history of AI technology, followed by a Literature & Technology reading list for more in-depth research.

Prometheus, a Titan god, does not merely steal fire from Zeus to give to humans. He’s actually the one who creates humans to begin with: he builds them from earth, and they are animated by Athena. It is because Prometheus creates humans - helpless, cold, and desolate - that he feels obliged to bring them fire. And we also tend to leave out the fact that, along with fire, Prometheus brings humans other technological advancements of the time: math, architecture, astronomy, navigation.

This is, in the myth, the origin of human intelligence. And, of course, human power. Empires rise and fall. Something happens when humans gain intelligence and, therefore, autonomy: they begin to ask questions about who rules, and to what ends. Is it the Olympians? Is it human Kings? Is it another God altogether?

Probably unsurprisingly, this makes Zeus very unhappy. Prometheus is fed to a vulture every day for eternity as punishment.

If this sounds a lot like the story of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, you’re exactly right: the 1818 novel is a retelling of the Prometheus myth. And although Mary Shelley is concerned with a different worldview, and a different God, she’s asking the same kinds of questions: from where do we derive intelligence, and autonomy? Is intelligence a burden, or a gift? A right?

And when I write the word intelligence here I mean complex thought: that which is captured in Prometheus’ symbolic fire. Innovation, creation, discovery, curiosity. The human impulse to move ourselves and the world forward through predominantly technological advancements: intelligence, in this specific context.

In 1818, then, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein raises the same panic that Zeus felt, back when he watched as humans developed by virtue of fire. The novel’s dominant question: should Dr. Frankenstein have created such a monster - one of the saddest and loneliest characters in all literature - in the name of scientific advancement? And, even more broadly: what makes something human? Must they have a human body, or can they contain merely the essence of humanity?

In 1889, Paul Laurence Dunbar, a now almost obscure African American poet and novelist, writes the following poem called “Prometheus”:

Prometheus stole from Heaven the sacred fire
    And swept to earth with it o'er land and sea.
    He lit the vestal flames of poesy,
  Content, for this, to brave celestial ire.

  Wroth were the gods, and with eternal hate
    Pursued the fearless one who ravished Heaven
    That earth might hold in fee the perfect leaven
  To lift men's souls above their low estate.

  But judge you now, when poets wield the pen,
    Think you not well the wrong has been repaired?
    'Twas all in vain that ill Prometheus fared:
  The fire has been returned to Heaven again!

  We have no singers like the ones whose note
    Gave challenge to the noblest warbler's song.
    We have no voice so mellow, sweet, and strong
  As that which broke from Shelley's golden throat.

  The measure of our songs is our desires:
    We tinkle where old poets used to storm.
    We lack their substance tho' we keep their form:
  We strum our banjo-strings and call them lyres.”

He references Shelley at the end, but he’s referring to Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy. Nevertheless, I find this poem to be a remarkable amalgamation of the short literary history I’ve discussed here. Through the poem, Dunbar argues that poets and artists of his time have done the gods a disservice - their poetry is bad music compared to the godly stuff of yore.

Humans, he says, don’t deserve Prometheus’ fire, because they create such awful things with it. And they should give it back.

To me, this poem is especially pertinent to the present moment. Like Dunbar, we ask: what do we do with such innovation? Do we deserve it at all?

And if something goes wrong with our use of intelligence, who is to blame? The thing itself, or the people who created and bestowed it?

That all makes me think of another famous literary moment, which feels a lot like 2026, when we are at the cusp of something new. In Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest (1611), Miranda leaves her secluded island, a kind of paradise that’s untouched by human civilization. She’s off to the world of courts and balls and intrigue, with her new Prince. She says: “O brave new world, that has such people in it.”

We all know which dystopian novel reuses that phrase to question technology in its own fascinating ways. AI can feel bleak, strange, unknown. We are accompanied by a long literary history that thinks so too.

Thank you for reading this short literary history of AI and technology!

Here’s a Literature & Technology reading list for further study:

Fiction:

• Tomorrow's Eve by Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1886)

• Erewhon by Samuel Butler (1872)

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920)

• Helen O'Loy by Lester del Rey (1938)

• After World's End by Jack Williamson (1939)

• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (1950)

• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein (1966)

• The Cybernetic Samurai by Victor Milán (1985)

Non-Fiction:

• "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin (1935)

• The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science

• On Wonder: Literature and Science in the Long Eighteenth Century (Elements in Eighteenth-Century), Chico

• Literature and Science, Aldous Huxley

• Technology, Literature and Culture, Alex Goody

• Technology, Modernity, and Democracy, by Andrew Feenberg

April was a great month for reading-for-pleasure. Throughout my graduate studies in English Literature, I have often found it difficult to read simply for the joy of it. Studying literature or the humanities means that all of your consumption within that topic area becomes Work. I have worked hard over the past few years to overcome that, and to make reading genuinely pleasurable again. Here’s what I read to achieve that in April:

✰ Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky

✰ Throne of Glass, Crown of Midnight, & Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas

—> Yes, I read fairy romantasy literature.

✰ Kin by Tayari Jones

✰ The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

2. Listening

Mitski released her 8th album, “Nothing’s About To Happen To Me,” at the end of February and it became the soundtrack to my April. I might go out on a limb and say that I think it’s Mitski’s greatest album yet - I’m conscious that I might still have recency bias. But Pitchfork rated it a 7.7 (very strong from their tough critics), and Treblezine agrees with me: Langdon Hickman writes that it’s the best album of her career so far. If you haven’t listened yet, give it a go. But it’s the type of album that needs some marination - which will pay off.

And if you need more convincing, the cover is brilliant. A stroke of genius that, in my mind, reflects the imagery o one of my hyperfixations: cat illustrations in medieval manuscripts. Here’s the cover by painter Marc Burckhardt followed by some such cats.

Maybe I’m just seeing ghosts, but I’ve found the cover artist on IG, so I might reach out re: medieval cats.

3. Looking

In April I spent some time with Rococo art. This wasn’t for any particular reason. In fact it started as an inane whim: many beautiful Rococo paintings are public domain, and they also happen to be beautiful, replete with pastels and springlike imagery. So they were perfect for my social media content this month, which focused a lot on how poets engage with this time of year. I ended up looking at quite a online museum collections and becoming familiar with some of the key artists of this era, which emerged in 18th century France. Here’s a few paintings that I was especially taken by:

And that’s my literature, music, and art recap from April!

This is something new I’m trying out, where I’ll send monthly letters that go over the art, literature, and music that stood out to me that month. I’d love to hear what you think, if you’re interested, or if you think I should just get a damn journal.

If you enjoy my content and wish to support me but can’t commit to a subscription, consider buying me a coffee here!

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

And this passage, in a nutshell, explains a lot of what the literary modernists were all about: subversion, fragmentation, disorientation. They were concerned with making sense of the new world around them - a world which often did not make much sense, and lacked logic and meaning. In the absence of our old familiar world, writers create new systems and structures: this is where, for instance, the stream-of-consciousness form emerges, perhaps most famously established by the works of Virginia Woolf; or where Kafka’s omnipresent bug-like creature in The Metamorphosis comes to represent a truly modern sense of alienation. This modern alienation, for Kafka, only be captured through extremes and absurdities: Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning as a gigantic insect (note: we don’t have an exact translation for the German term used by Kafka, ungeheueres Ungeziefer, which broadly means a monstrous vermin or pest). Samsa, as this vermin creature, is neglected by his family and loses his sense of humanity. Before he dies in a corner of his bedroom, he is deeply moved by the sound of his sister’s violin. Despite it all, the vermin loves music.

To me, this is not only a masterwork of modernist writing. It’s also a shockingly apt representation of our present moment. Now, more than ever, modernist literature speaks to our issues, fears, anxieties. It articulates our existentialism, malaise, and careful optimism. Here’s why modernist literature (1890-1925) matters today:

1. A Healthy Suspicion of Technology

The early twentieth century was a critical time for technological development, and not all modernist writers were excited about the social, cultural, and political implications of new inventions like the automobile, the assembly line, broadcast radio, and mass electricity. And, of course, there was the way in which industrialization contributed to global violence in a way that had never really been seen before: the machine gun, the tank, and toxic gas were all new technologies that changed the course of WWI and the world.

Some modernists even predicted the sort of anxieties that we feel today, especially due to the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence. In E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops” (1909), the author predicts a society in which individuals are entirely reliant on some omniscient machine: they are like drones, trapped inside their bedrooms. Their individuality is gone, their free thought, their human idiosyncrasies. It’s not a reach to say that a story like this matters now, more than ever, not only as a prescient warning but as a glimmer of hope: that in the midst of technological anxiety, we can still make great art.

You can read the story for free here.

2. A Reminder to Practice Empathy

In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the author gets inside the minds of several disparate characters throughout a single summer day in London. Before the modernists, authors didn’t really get deeply into characters’ minds: with people like Woolf, readers became privy to secret anxieties, depressions, and individual oddities in a way that literature hadn’t shown us before.

There’s one scene from Mrs. Dalloway that I think about often, especially when it comes to empathy in the modern world. Septimus, a WWI veteran who struggles with PTSD, is having anxiety attacks in the park. He is tortured by the memory of a dead comrade - nobody understands this, apart from himself and the readers inside his head. When Peter Walsh walks by and observes Septimus’ behavior, he has a passing thought: “And that is being young, Peter Walsh thought as he passed them. To be having an awful scene—the poor girl looked absolutely desperate—in the middle of the morning.”

Of course, Walsh could never guess the magnitude of Septimus’ trauma, the precise nature of his struggles and torments on that random day in the park. This modernist interiority is an important reminder to contemporary readers: you never know what anybody else is going through, what they’re carrying. You can never be inside their head, and extending empathy goes a long way in bridging that dissonance. Give people the benefit of the doubt: we are all in some way struggling, even the most put-together figures you know - like Mrs. Dalloway herself.

3. From Crisis Emerges Beauty

I’ll conclude this newsletter with a bit of optimism. The modernists saw and heard of horrors that they could not compute - horrors which seemed incompatible with reality. For the first time, war footage was a part of mass media: dismembered bodies, nonsensical death, constant violence. The world was moving quickly into the new millennium, and this was intimidating and anxiety-inducing. But from that moment - the horror, the disgrace, the panic - emerged some of our most wonderful literature. Modernist writing is a think of beauty in a lot of ways. To me, it sounds musical in a way that not much other writing does. Part of its beauty comes from the way in which its creators were forced to confront and interpret crisis. This gives me hope for the art and literature that will emerge from our contemporary moment. We still have much to look forward to.

Thank you for reading my literary newsletter!