By Fred Kaplan (NHC Fellow, 1985–86) From a bitter childhood mired in poverty and hard work to a career as the most acclaimed and best-loved writer in the English-speaking world, Charles Dickens had a life as tumultuous as any he created in his teeming novels of life in Victorian England. And no one has captured … Continued
By Martha Woodmansee (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) Analyzing the rise of art in the 18th century, this treatise demonstrates how painting, sculpture and literature were not regarded as valuable art forms before the emergence of a new bourgeois culture. The author reveals how Romantic poets and philosophers invented art as we know it today.
By Lewis M. Dabney (NHC Fellow, 2001–02) From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history … Continued
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (NHC Fellow, 1989–90; 1998–99) The novels of Walker Percy–The Moviegoer, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome to name a few–have left a permanent mark on twentieth-century Southern fiction; yet the history of the Percy family in America matches anything, perhaps, that he could have created. Two centuries of wealth, literary accomplishment, political leadership, depression, … Continued
By R. Jackson Wilson (NHC Fellow, 1984–85)
By Laurie Langbauer (NHC Fellow, 2011–12) A juvenile tradition of young writers flourished in Britain between 1750 and 1835. Canonical Romantic poets as well as now-unknown youthful writers published as teenagers. These teenage writers reflected on their literary juvenilia by using the trope of prolepsis to assert their writing as a literary tradition. Precocious writing, … Continued
By Jonah Siegel (NHC Fellow, 1998–99) For centuries, southern Europe, and Italy in particular, has offered writers far more than an evocative setting for important works of literature. The voyage south has been an integral part of the imagination of inspiration. Haunted Museum is a groundbreaking, in-depth look at fantasies of Italy from the late eighteenth to … Continued
By Norman Sherry (NHC Fellow, 1982–83) Unquestionably one of the greatest novelists of his time, Graham Greene had always guarded his privacy, remaining aloof, mysterious and unpredictable. Nonetheless, he took the surprising step of allowing Norman Sherry complete access to letter and diaries, and gave his consent to this full and frank biography in three … Continued
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (NHC Fellow, 1989–90; 1998–99) From Edgar Allan Poe’s “dark forebodings” to Kate Chopin’s lifelong struggle with sorrow and loss, depression has shadowed southern letters. This beautifully realized study explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation. … Continued
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown (NHC Fellow, 1989–90; 1998–99) The Percys, one the most distinguished families in the South, are notable not only for their prominence in the political and economic development of the Mississippi Delta but also for their literary creativity. In The Literary Percys, noted historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown examines the role of gender and family history … Continued