British Literature Lectures and Online Courses

Historical painting showing Alexander Pushkin (Image: By Orest Kiprensky /Public Domain)

How Pushkin Discovered Shakespeare

February 19, 2017

By Irwin Weil, PhD, Northwestern University In 1825, a group of aristocrats attempted an uprising on a St. Petersburg square. Naïvely, given that they had […]

Photo of a detective with a magnifying glass

The Detective Is Born

December 21, 2016

Where the crime damages the social fabric, the detective makes the repair. […]

Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s Taste in Heroes

December 20, 2016

By Timothy Spurgin, PhD, Lawrence University As one might expect, Charlotte and Emily have many things in common. Their novels challenge social values and also reveal […]

"Galvagin" depicted in the early 12th-century Italian Modena Archivolt

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Dense Forest of Symbols

December 19, 2016

By Dorsey Armstrong, PhD, Purdue University An anonymous poem of 2,530 lines, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, survives in a single manuscript containing three other Middle […]

A young man dressed in black with a skull in his hands.

Hamlet and the Problem of Inaction

December 14, 2016

By Peter Saccio, Ph.D., Dartmouth College Hamlet is a young prince whose father has been murdered, who has difficulty finding an appropriate response. Severely criticized […]