Odd Bits
From the Archives: Shin-Kickers from History: Mary Heaton Vorse
As some of you may have noticed, for the last year or so I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Not entirely on purpose. I’ve done a number of Q & As with the authors of books set in the era.) …
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Celebrating the Fourth of July
Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th weekend–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week it falls. It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself. In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of…
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Idols of Perversity
In the course of reading around the edges of the book topic I’m exploring[1], I was surprised to come across a discussion of a book I found useful while writing my dissertation: Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture by literary scholar Bram Dijkstra. I found the way the author used Dijkstra’s…
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