Category: Academic
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Portrayals of Commodus, From the Senate Floor to Hollywood
“Commodus is often portrayed as an inept, spoilt, cowardly, and mentally ill man. None of these are true.”
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Masters of The Craft: Stephen Crane, The Herald of Naturalism
All great writers master the craft, but Crane—like Whitman, like Dickinson, like Hemingway, like Hugo, like Pope, like Voltaire, like Homer, like Kafka, like Woolf—had a touch of the divine; that unteachable it factor, and it is among the company of these writers where he lives forever in the pantheon of literary immortality.
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Book Review: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
“Throughout these pages, the reader finds the brushwork of the master, and like all great artists, James can not only paint a story by the prowess of his craft, but, simultaneously, he hangs a mirror of enigmas and human complexity. Every reader can relate to the figurative handcuff’s persons’ finds themselves confined to.” —W. Alexander
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The Miraculous Rise of Phillis Wheatley
Wheatley achieved the miraculous, the impossible, the unthought of: she a black-African-born-woman did not peel at the edges of prejudice, she slashed it, and all were forced to recognize her gift and confront their misplaced assumptions on the place of women and slavery.
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Reading Old Books: American Literature
If you want to know how a specific set of people, in a specific century, felt over a specific issue, read their popular writing.