The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

The History of Literature

Jacke Wilson / The Podglomerate

Amateur enthusiast Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Episodes are not in chronological order and you don't need to start at the beginning - feel free to jump in wherever you like! Find out more at historyofliterature.com and facebook.com/historyofliterature. Support the show by visiting patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. Contact the show at historyofliteraturepodcast@gmail.com.

Mar 19

785 Literature in an Age of Anti-Immigration Sentiment (with Daniel Olivas) | My Last Book with Janet Todd

Daniel A. Olivas, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, book critic, and attorney. In this episode, Jacke talks to Daniel about his lifelong devotion to literature and its ability to humanize the targets of anti-immigra...

Mar 16

784 Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King (with William O. Stephens)

In the fourth century B.C., Plato famously posited a philosopher-king as the ideal ruler for his imagined Republic. Five hundred years later, the Roman Empire was led by Marcus Aurelius, the man often viewed as the best example of this Platonic ideal. In t...

Mar 12

783 Southern Imagining (with Elleke Boehmer) | My Last Book with John McMurtrie

The world has a northern bias: our politics, culture, and literature all tend to view the northern viewpoint as the default position, leaving the far southern latitudes (Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, and Southern Africa among others), as a faraway lan...

Mar 09

782 Consent in the Regency Novel (with Zoë McGee)

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. In this episode, Jacke talks to Dr. Zoë McGee about her new book Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines in the Regency Novel, which compares c...

Mar 05

781 Laurie Frankel's Enormous Wings | My Last Book with Rhodri Lewis

"And one man in his time plays many parts," wrote Shakespeare in As You Like It, "[h]is acts being seven ages." We all know the feeling of passing from one phase to the next. But what happens when something dramatic mashes these acts together? In this epis...

Mar 02

780 Chekhov on Writing (with Bob Blaisdell)

In an 1886 letter to his brother, Anton Chekhov delivered some advice about truthfulness in writing. "Don't invent sufferings you have not experienced," he wrote, "and don't paint pictures you have not seen--for a lie in a story is much more boring than a ...

Feb 26

779 Ernest Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises (with Mike Palindrome) RECLAIMED

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American writers of the twentieth century. His plain, economical prose style--inspired by journalism and the King James Bible, with an assist from the Cezannes he viewed in Gertrude Stein’s apartment-...

Feb 23

778 A History of Aphorisms (with James Geary) | My Last Book with Paul Chrystal

For thousands of years, writers from ancient China to contemporary meme-makers have demonstrated the power of the short, witty, philosophical phrases known as aphorisms. In this episode, Jacke talks to James Geary (The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of...

Feb 19

777 T.S. Eliot's "Preludes" | "The Story of the Marquis de Cressy" by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (with Kate Deimling)

Jacke kicks off the episode with an analysis of T.S. Eliot's underappreciated poem of urban alienation, "Preludes." Then scholar and translator Kate Deimling (The Story of the Marquis de Cressy by Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni) tells Jacke about an eighteenth-cen...

Feb 16

776 Mary Shelley in Bath (with Fiona Sampson) | My Last Book with D.G. Hampton

As fans of the novel know, Frankenstein began with a flash of insight during an ill-fated holiday near Geneva in the summer of 1816, when the young woman then known as Mary Godwin contributed the modern-day Promethean tale to the ghost stories being shared...

Feb 12

775 Celebrity Authorship in the Nineteenth Century (with Sarah Allison) | My Last Book with Emily Van Duyne

When assessing the literature of an era, we tend to think of the works that have made it into the canon - but in so doing, we're in danger of overlooking the many different kinds of books and texts that people were actually reading. In this episode, Jacke ...

Feb 09

774 Robert Louis Stevenson (with Leo Damrosch)

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) suffered from poor health for most of his life, and yet he possessed immense vitality. In this episode, Jacke talks to biographer Leo Damrosch (Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson) about his efforts to bring t...

Feb 05

773 The Films of Rob Reiner (with Mike Palindrome) | My Last Book with Matt Abrahams

In mid-December 2025, the world was shocked by the horrible and tragic news that beloved film director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner had been murdered at their home. In this episode, Jacke and Mike celebrate Reiner's amazing run of indelib...

Feb 02

772 Thucydides and The History of the Peloponnesian War (with Polly Low and Robin Waterfield) | My Last Book with James West

The Ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) called his history of a war between Athens and Sparta "a possession for all time." More than 2,400 years later, his work is still essential reading for anyone interested in the morality of...

Jan 29

771 Shakespeare and the Generation of Genius - The Role of Performing Arts in education (with Robin Lithgow) - RECLAIMED

Robin Lithgow spent her life immersed in the performing arts, including a childhood in the theater and decades spent as an educator and arts administrator. But it wasn't until she read a little-known work by Erasmus that she fully realized the importance t...

Jan 26

770 Shakespeare and Civility (with Indira Ghose) | Robert W. Service and "The Cremation of Sam McGee"

Civility can help a society overcome tribal loyalties and cooperate for the common good--and when political and religious factions threaten to break a society apart, as in Shakespeare's England, understanding the need for civility becomes more important th...

Jan 22

769 The European Byron (with Jonathan Gross) | The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (#3 GBOAT)

The Romantic poet Byron (1788-1824) was more than just the scandal-ridden celebrity who was famously dubbed "mad, bad, and dangerous to know"--he was also a restless seeker of an identity to match his personal and artistic sensibilities. In this episode, ...

Jan 19

768 Young James Baldwin (with Nicholas Boggs) | My Last Book with Bruce Robbins

The American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) spent the second half of his life as a fixture in American intellectual life. But what formed him? In this episode, Jacke talks to Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin: A Love Story, the ...

Jan 15

767 A Black Woman in the Romantic Archive (with Mathelinda Nabugodi) | My Last Book with Richard Kopley

A scrap of Coleridge's handwriting. The sugar that Wordsworth stirred into his teacup. A bracelet made of Mary Shelley's hair... In this episode, Jacke talks to award-winning scholar and literary sleuth Mathelinda Nabugodi (The Trembling Hand: Reflections ...

Jan 12

766 Gertrude Stein (with Francesca Wade) | Ruskin on the Only One Way to Get Art | My Last Book with Holly Baggett

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) has long been one of the most famous - and most polarizing - figures in modernism. Was she a trailblazing genius? Or a literary charlatan? Her bestselling memoir of 1933, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which made her inter...