Interesting Literature

Cupid Playing Bo-Peep in Stella’s Breasts: Sidney’s Sonnet 11

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

I’m fond of debunking widely believed but factually erroneous ‘truths’ about literature. It’s one reason I began this blog, some years ago when I still had my youthful bad looks. There’s a wonderful word for such truths-that-turn-out-to-be-not-so-true, and it was coined by Norman Mailer in his biography of Marilyn Monroe. It is the word factoid.

A Summary and Analysis of O. Henry’s ‘A Service of Love’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The joy of reading an O. Henry story largely resides in the fun of trying to guess the twist in the tale before the end. No other writer of short stories made the plot twist such an integral part of his art, and he kept this up over numerous stories. The big, fat, cheap collection of 100 of his short stories which I own is only a ‘selected’ stories: he wrote many more.

13 of the Best Songs about Cars and Driving

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Songs about the open road have been around since … well, at least since Walt Whitman wrote his ‘Song of the Open Road’ in 1856. In popular music, too, songs in praise of cars, roads, driving, and the power and speed of automotive engineering have a pretty considerable pedigree.

Where Does the Phrase ‘Poetic Justice’ Come From?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The phrase ‘poetic justice’ is well-known, but its origins are perhaps less familiar to most people. The expression refers, of course, to a situation whereby someone gets what they deserve for their actions. But the ‘poetic’ part of the phrase also suggests that there may be an ironic aspect to the justice served (and deserved).

A Dying Art: T. S. Eliot on Marie Lloyd

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In 1922, the year that his poem The Waste Land was published, T. S. Eliot wrote something that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from the high priest of modernist difficulty and (according to his first wife, Vivienne, at least) a man who could be a bit of a snob. It’s also a fascinating essay because, over a century after he wrote it, Eliot’s words about technological developments in entertainment leading to a feeling of boredom amongst ordinary people now seem to be eerily prescient of our own times.