Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

in Books, History, Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2024

For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm of literature. This is evidenced, in part, by the eagerness to celebrate particular works of sci-fi written by women, like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, or Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (uneasily though it fits within the boundaries of the genre). But those who prefer the early stuff can go all the way back to the mid-seventeenth century, where they’ll find Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, readable and downloadable in all its strange glory free online.

“The Blazing World was first published in 1666 and is often considered a forerunner to both science fiction and the utopian novel genres,” writes book blogger Eric Karl Anderson. “It’s a totally bonkers story of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find herself in a strange bejeweled kingdom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she consults with many different animal/insect people about philosophical, religious and scientific ideas. The second half of the book pulls off a meta-fictional trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of Newcastle) enters the story herself to become the Empress’ scribe and close companion.”

In the video just below, Youtuber Great Books Prof frames this as not just a work of proto-science fiction, but also a pioneering use of the “multiverse” concept that has undergirded any number of twenty-first-century blockbusters.

The Blazing World continues to inspire: actor-director Carlson Young put out a loose cinematic adaptation just a few years ago. Cavendish herself described the book as a “hermaphroditic text,” possibly in reference to its engagement with topics then addressed almost exclusively by men. But it also occupied two categories at once in that she originally published it as a fictional section of her book Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, one of six philosophical volumes she wrote. In fact, her work qualified her as not just philosopher and novelist, but also scientist, poet, playwright, and even biographer. That last she accomplished by writing The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish, who happened to be her husband. Let her life be a lesson to those young girls who simultaneously dream of becoming a princess and a writer whose books are read for centuries: sometimes, you can have it all.

The First Work of Science Fiction: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Century Space Travelogue A True Story

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Possible Kind of Science Fiction Story: An Exhaustive List Created by Pioneering 1920s SciFi Writer Clare Winger Harris (1931)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the American Dream (1925)

in Books, Literature | January 2nd, 2024

When The Great Gatsby was first published, it flopped; nearly a century later, its place at the pinnacle of American literature is almost universally agreed upon. Of the objectors, many no doubt remember too vividly having to answer essay questions about the meaning of the green light on the Buchanans’ dock. Perhaps “the most debated symbol in the history of American literature,” it tends to be interpreted simultaneously as “Gatsby’s love for Daisy, money, and the American dream,” as James Payne puts it in his new Great Books Explained video above. Examined more closely, “what it may suggest is that the American dream’s most un-discussed quality is its inaccessibility.”

“Fitzgerald felt that the American dream has lost its way,” Payne says. “Baseball, America’s pastime and the purest of games, had been corrupted by the Black Sox game fixing of 1919, a real-life scandal mentioned in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald used it as an allegory of America: if baseball is corrupt, then we are really in trouble.”

Hence Gatsby’s ultimate discovery that Daisy, the woman for whom he had wholly reinvented himself (in that quintessentially American way), falls so far short of what he’d imagined; hence how Gatsby’s own “classic rags-to-riches story” is “complicated by the fact that he made his money in bootlegging.” In the end, “the American dream only belongs to establishment figures,” those “who were born into it. Everyone’s class is fixed, just like the World Series.”

Though not well-received in its day, The Great Gatsby offered a premonition of disaster ahead that subsequently came true in both the American economy and Fitzgerald’s personal life. But even in the book, “despite his fear that America is lost, he still offers hope.” Hence the vivid quasi-optimism of the closing lines about how “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” which frames Americans as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — a passage whose interpretation teachers are always liable to demand. If you happen to be a student yourself, saving Payne’s video in hopes of a quick and easy A on your English lit exam, know that there are few more time-honored techniques in pursuit of the American dream than looking for shortcuts.

T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton & Gertrude Stein Tell F. Scott Fitzgerald That Gatsby is Great, While Critics Called It a Dud (1925)

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

83 Years of Great Gatsby Book Cover Designs: A Photo Gallery

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Entire Manuscript Collection of Geoffrey Chaucer Gets Digitized: A New Archive Features 25,000 Images of The Canterbury Tales & Other Illustrated Medieval Manuscripts

in Archives, Books, Literature | November 20th, 2023

Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost certainly heard of her, and perhaps also of her traveling companions like the Knight, the Summoner, the Nun’s Priest, and the Canon’s Yeoman. These are just a few of the pilgrims whose storytelling contest structures Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century magnum opus The Canterbury Tales, whose influence continues to reverberate through English literature, even all these centuries after the author’s death. In commemoration of the 623rd anniversary of that work, the British Library has opened a vast online Chaucer archive.

This archive comes as a culmination of what the Guardian’s Caroline Davies describes as “a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.” Among these artifacts are “complete copies of Chaucer’s poems but also unique survivals, including fragmentary texts found in Middle English anthologies or inscribed in printed editions and incunabula (books printed before 1501).”

If you’re looking for The Canterbury Tales, you’ll find no fewer than 23 versions of it, the earliest of which “was written only a few years after Chaucer’s death in roughly 1400.” Also digitized are “rare copies of the 1476 and 1483 editions of the text made by William Caxton,” now considered “the first significant text to be printed in England.”

Four centuries later, designer-writer-social reformer William Morris collaborated with celebrated painter Edward Burne-Jones to create an edition W. B. Yeats once called “the most beautiful of all printed books”: the Kelmscott Chaucer, previously featured here on Open Culture, which you can also explore in the British Library’s new archive (as least as soon as its ongoing cyber attack-related issues are resolved). As its wider contents reveal, Chaucer was the author of not just The Canterbury Tales but also a variety of other poems, the classical-dream-vision story collection The Legend of Good Women, an instruction manual for an astrolabe, and translations of The Romance of the Rose and The Consolation of Philosophy. And his Trojan epic Troilus and Criseyde may sound familiar, thanks to the inspiration it gave, more than 200 years later, to a countryman by the name of William Shakespeare.

Terry Jones, the Late Monty Python Actor, Helped Turn Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Into a Free App: Explore It Online

Discover the First Illustrated Book Printed in English, William Caxton’s Mirror of the World (1481)

40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Public Domain: A Deeper Dive Into the Collection

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Alain de Botton Presents an ASMR Reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way

in Health, Literature | November 3rd, 2023

Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) over many years. The first volume, Swann’s Way (Du côté de chez Swann), came out in 1913, and the last volume, Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé), was published posthumously in 1927. A monumental exploration of memory, time, and human experience, the seven-volume novel consists of 1,267,069 words. That doubles those in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, making it one of the longest novels ever written.

Above, you can hear Alain de Botton (author of How Proust Can Change Your Life) read the opening lines of Swann’s Way, with the goal of … well… putting you to sleep. His YouTube channel writes: Proust’s novel “is very beautiful — and in a way a little boring too. This is for all those among us who suffer from insomnia — to send you into the best kind of sleep.” Make sure you add this 26-minute recording to your sleep/ASMR playlist. For de Botton’s introduction to the literary philosophy of Marcel Proust, watch this video here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Marcel Proust Fills Out a Questionnaire in 1890: The Manuscript of the ‘Proust Questionnaire’

The First Known Footage of Marcel Proust Discovered: Watch It Online

The Cork-Lined Bedroom & Writing Room of Marcel Proust, the Original Master of Social Distancing

6,000 Letters by Marcel Proust to Be Digitized & Put Online

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch the Trailer for the Long-Lost First Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926)

in Film, Literature | November 2nd, 2023

Despite being a perennial contender for the title of the Great American Novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has eluded a wholly satisfying cinematic adaptation. The most recent such attempt, now a decade old, was primarily a Baz Lurhmann kitsch extravaganza showcasing Leonardo DiCaprio; nor did its predecessors, which put in the title role such classic leading men as Robert Redford and Alan Ladd, ever distinguish themselves in an enduring way. But these pictures all met with happier fates than the very first Gatsby film, which came out in 1926 — just a year and a half after the novel itself — and seems not to have been seen since.

The first actor to portray Jay Gatsby on the silver screen was Warner Baxter, who would become the highest-paid star in Hollywood a decade later (and a fixture of Westerns, crime serials, and other B‑movie genres half a decade after that). In the role of Daisy Buchanan was Lois Wilson, an Alabama beauty queen turned all-American silent-era starlet (who would later turn director); in that of Nick Carraway, Neil Hamilton, whom television audiences of the nineteen-sixties would come to know as Batman’s Commissioner Gordon. But none of The Great Gatsby’s casting choices will please the old-Hollywood connoisseur as much as that of a young, pre-Thin Man William Powell as George Wilson.

“The reckless driving that results in the death of Myrtle Wilson serves to bring out a sterling trait in Gatsby’s character,” New York Times critic Mourdaunt Hall wrote (in 1926) of a memorable scene in the novel that seems to have become a memorable scene in the film. “Powell, while not quite in his element, gives an unerring portrayal of the chauffeur.” Though Hall pronounced The Great Gatsby “quite a good entertainment” on the whole, he also pointed out that “it would have benefited by more imaginative direction” from Herbert Brenon, who “has succumbed to a number of ordinary movie flashes without inculcating much in the way of subtlety.”

For Brenon, a prolific auteur who directed no fewer than five pictures that year, this criticism could only have stung so much. But as later came to light, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald judged this first adaptation of the novel much more harshly. “We saw The Great Gatsby in the movies,” Zelda wrote to their daughter Scottie. “It’s ROTTEN and awful and terrible and we left.” Only its trailer survives today, and the glimpses it offers give little indication of what, exactly, would have spurred them to walk out. But now that the original Great Gatsby has entered the public domain, any of us could try our hand at making an adaptation without having to shell out for the rights. Maybe our interpretations wouldn’t please the Fitzgeralds either, but then, what ever did?

Gertrude Stein Sends a “Review” of The Great Gatsby to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

83 Years of Great Gatsby Book Cover Designs: A Photo Gallery

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

Revealed: The Visual Effects Behind The Great Gatsby

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman & More

in Audio Books, Literature | October 31st, 2023

It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast, the academic poet, can seem like something of a unicorn, or dragon.

…Or like the ominous talking raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.

The divide between theory and practice is a recent development, a product of state budgeting, political brinksmanship, the relentless publishing mills of academia that force scholars to find a pigeonhole and stay there.… In days past, poets and scholar/theorists frequently occupied the same place at the same time—Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and, of course, Poe, whose perennially popular “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illustration for his theory of composition just as thoroughly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objective correlative.”

Poe’s object, the titular creature, is an “archetypal symbol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “unity of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” satisfies all of his other criteria for literature as well, such as achieving its intent in a single sitting, using a repeated refrain, and so on.

Should we have any doubt about how much Poe wanted us to see the poem as the deliberate outcome of a conceptual scheme, we find him three years later, in 1849, the year of his death, delivering a lecture on the “Poetic Principle,” and concluding with a reading of “The Raven.”

John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner remarked after attending one of these talks that “the attention of many in this city is now directed to this singular performance.” At that point, Poe, who hardly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suffer the indignity of having all of his work go out of print during his brief, unhappy lifetime. Moncure and the Examiner thereby furnished readers “with the only correct copy ever published,” previous appearances, it seems, having contained punctuation errors.

Nonetheless, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven“ ‘s first appearances made him semi-famous. His readings were a sensation, and it’s a sure bet that his audiences came to hear him read the poem, not deliver a lecture on its principles. Oh, for some proto-Edison in the room with an early recording device. What would it be like to hear the mournful, grief-stricken, alcoholic genius—master of the macabre and inventor of the detective story—intone the raven’s enigmatic “Nevermore”?

While Poe’s speaking voice has receded irretrievably into history, his poetic voice may live close to forever. So mesmerizing are his meter and diction that many great actors known especially for their voices have become possessed by “The Raven.”

Likely when we think of the poem, what first comes to the mind’s ear is the voice of Vincent Price, or James Earl Jones, Christopher Lee, or Christopher Walken, all of whom have given “The Raven” its due.

And so have many other notables, such as the great Stan Lee, Poe successor Neil Gaiman, original Gomez Addams actor John Astin, and venerable Beat poet/scholar Anne Waldman (listen here). You will find those recitations here at this round-up of notable “Raven” readings, and if this somehow doesn’t satiate you, then check out Lou Reed’s take on the poem, the Grateful Dead’s musical tribute, “Raven Space,” or a reading in 100 different celebrity impressions.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention The Simpsons’ James Earl Jones-narrated parody, a worthy teaching tool for distracted young visual learners. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Halloween yarn fit for the Treehouse of Horror or any number of enjoyable exercises in spooky oratory—rather than the theoretical thought experiment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotisserie in his grave as Homer snores in a wingback chair? Probably. But as the author told us himself at length, the poem works! It still never fails to excite our morbid curiosity, enchant our gothic sensibility, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we never really needed Poe to explain it to us.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017. We’re bringing it back for Halloween.

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Supernatural Poem to 3D Paper Life

A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebrity Voices

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

in Art, Books, Literature | October 26th, 2023

When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anything quite large. But we actually owe the word itself to Rabelais, or more specifically, to the nearly half-millennium-long legacy of the character into whom he breathed life. But there’s so much more to Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel, or The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose enduring status as a masterpiece of the grotesque owes much to its author’s wit, linguistic virtuosity, and sheer brazenness.

Nor has it hurt that the books have inspired vivid illustrations from a host of artists, one of whom in particular stands out: Gustave Doré, whom Richard Smyth calls “one of the most prolific — and most successful — book illustrators of the nineteenth century.”

Here at Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the art he created to accompany the work of Dante, Cervantes, and Poe, each a writer possessed of a highly distinctive set of literary powers, and each of whom thus received a different but equally lavish and evocative treatment from Doré.

For Rabelais, says the site of book dealer Heribert Tenschert, the 22-year-old artist produced (in 1854) “100 images that oscillate between the whimsical and the uncanny, between realism and fantasy,” a count he would expand to 700 in another edition two decades later.

You can see a great many of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel at Wikimedia Commons. The simultaneous extravagance and repugnance of the series’ medieval France may seem impossibly distant to us, but it can hardly have felt like yesterday to Doré either, given that he was working three centuries after Rabelais.

As suggested by Heribert Tenschert, perhaps these imaginative visions of the Middle Ages — like Balzac’s Rabelaisian Les contes drolatiques, which he also illustrated — “resonated with Doré because they reminded him of the mysterious atmosphere of his childhood, which he had spent in the middle of the medieval city of Strasbourg.” Whatever his connection, Doré created images that still bring to mind a whole range of descriptors: somberly jocular, rigorously voluptuous, compellingly repellent, and above all pantagruelist. (Look it up.)

The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained

in Books, History, Literature | October 17th, 2023

Here on Open Culture, we’ve often featured the work of gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, creator of the channel Great Art Explained. Not long ago we wrote up his examination of the work of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist painter responsible for such enduring images as Le fils de l’homme, or The Son of Man. Payne uses that famous image of a bowler-hatted everyman whose face is covered by a green apple again in the video above, but this time to represent a literary character: Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It is that much-scrutinized literary masterwork Payne has taken as his subject for his new channel, Great Books Explained.

Indeed, few great books are regarded as needing as much explanation as Ulysses. It was once described, Payne reminds us, as “spiritually offensive, anarchic, and obscene,” yet “in the hundred years since, the book has triumphed over criticism and censorship to become one of the most highly regarded works of art in the twentieth century.”

The strength of both this acclaim and this condemnation still today inspires a mixture of curiosity and trepidation. But as Payne sees it, Ulysses is ultimately “a novel about wandering, and we as readers should feel free to wander around the book, dip in and out of episodes, read it out aloud, and let the words wash over us like music.” It’s also “an experimental work, often strange and sometimes shocking, but it is consistently witty, and packed with a tremendous sense of fun.”

That latter quality belies the seven years of literary labor Joyce put into the book, all of it distilled into the events of a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, as experienced by Bloom, an “ordinary advertising agent” and a Jew among Catholics; the “rebellious and misanthropic intellectual” Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego and the hero of his previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; and Leopold’s “passionate, amorous, frank-speaking” wife Molly. (Payne represents Dedalus with Raoul Haussman’s The Art Critic and Molly with Hannah Höch’s Indian Dancer.) In this framework, Joyce delivers kaleidoscopic detail, from the quotidian to the mythological and the sexual to the scatological, all with a formal and linguistic bravado that has kept the reading experience of Ulysses fresh for 101 years and counting.

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Animation Makes the Case

Everything You Need to Enjoy Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the American Dream (1925)

The Entire Manuscript Collection of Geoffrey Chaucer Gets Digitized: A New Archive Features 25,000 Images of The Canterbury Tales & Other Illustrated Medieval Manuscripts

Alain de Botton Presents an ASMR Reading of Proust’s Swann’s Way

Watch the Trailer for the Long-Lost First Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby (1926)

Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman & More

Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

What Makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a Masterpiece: Great Books Explained

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search