Yesterday my 18th Century Couples Comedy class concluded our discussion of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. We spent a lot of time talking about how it was popular with youthful readers in the 18th century, an idea I owe to J. Paul Hunter, my dissertation director at Emory University. Paul explores the issue in Before Novels: […]
Monthly Archives: November 2009
Bridging the 18th-Century Generation Gap
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged adolescence, Child rearing, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Values Comments closed
Faced with Beauty, ‘Tis Folly to Be Wise
Claude Lorrain,”View of La Crescenza” (1648-50) Poetry enhances our lives in a host of little ways. It did so in a walk I took around campus with my wife last week. It was a beautiful fall day and we work at a beautiful campus. There is an incline at the edge of college that we […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College", Landscape, Loss, Nature, Thomas Gray Comments closed
Same-Sex Marriage, a Leap of Faith
Rachel Kranz My novelist friend Rachel Kranz is currently in Maine campaigning with gay friends to save same-sex marriage against attempts to ban it. I mention this because her first novel, Leaps of Faith, is the most intelligent fictional exploration of same-sex marriage that I know. Among the differences between politics and fiction is the […]
