Today, I’m writing over at the Dark Jane Austen Book Club. 
We’re discussing the peculiar language used in Hollow City by Ransom Riggs and how easily one accepts strange new words. In a world of bffs, I guess it’s no surprise.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Peculiar Language (from Tolkien to Riggs)
Posted in Uncategorized on November 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Fanny Price as a Student of Shakespeare
Posted in Uncategorized on November 14, 2014| 3 Comments »
Today on Sarah Emsley’s blog, John Baxter discusses Mansfield Park, Lovers’ Vows, and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.
Twenty-eighth in a series of posts celebrating 200 years of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For more details, open Your Invitation to Mansfield Park.
John Baxter is Professor of English at Dalhousie University, where he teaches classes on Early Modern literature, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, rhetoric, and religion and literature. He’s the author of Shakespeare’s Poetic Styles: Verse Into Drama (Routledge) and many essays on Shakespeare, as well as on several other writers, including Ben Jonson, J.V. Cunningham, Janet Lewis, Yvor Winters, Helen Pinkerton, and George Elliott Clarke. With Gordon Harvey, he edited a collection of essays by C.Q. Drummond called In Defense of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton, and Others (Brynmill Press/Edgeways Books), and with J. Patrick Atherton, he edited George Whalley’s groundbreaking translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
He’s also my father, and I’m absolutely delighted to introduce his guest post on Fanny Price and Shakespeare for…
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The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Posted in Uncategorized on October 4, 2014| 17 Comments »
Just as many faithful readers turn to Dicken’s A Christmas Carol in December, I turn to The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton in October. 
People are surprised to find that the author of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country wrote ghost stories, but she did and frightfully well.
Today I read, The Triumph of Night, one of the eleven short stories within the collection. Wharton wastes no time in telling a ghost story. Right from the start, you get a strange sensation that some poor soul is going to experience a creepy or painful event.
It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveler from Boston, who had counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of nightfall and winter.
As a reader…I’m already uncomfortable.
The train doesn’t arrive, a stranger shows up, the snow prevents the character from getting to his destination, he’s force to stay at the home of another stranger, etc. It’s the perfect set-up for a good ghost story.
All eleven stories offer varying degrees of tension with an omen or an unsettling word that sets the tone.
Thankfully, there is no gore. No horror. No terrorizing, hockey-mask-wearing characters. Just pure, unadulterated fiction with some extra tension and a smattering of the paranormal.
Quote for the day
Posted in Uncategorized on September 12, 2014| 2 Comments »
Mary C. M. Phillips – About
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Music of the Forest
Mary C. M. Phillips
Contributing writer for Chicken Soup for the Soul. Visit CSS to see the good work they’re doing - and be inspired with an encouraging word. -
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