Within the world of stories, there is one kind of character which seems to cross every boundary- blurring lines of distance and time to greet us from many lands with many different faces, but with the same familiar voice. In Robin Hood, in the 108 outlaws of Liangshan marsh, in the Cowboys of the Wild West, in King David and…
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Less well-known than the Narnia books dedicated mostly to the Pevensy siblings, The Horse and His Boy is a tale of lost and recovered identity that traverses a foreign desert landscape filled with oriental gardens, bustling market places, fishermen with mouths full of the words of poet sages, tyrannical kings, and battle-worn heroes inconveniently appearing on horseback to retard the…
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This is an audio-only recording of a previous talk by Angelina Stanford. This talk is available free to students in our "How to Read Fairy Tales" mini-class. To register for the mini-class and access this talk for free, click here. Runtime: 1 session, 72 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk by Angelina Stanford. This talk is available free to "Fellows" tier members of The Literary Life Podcast Patreon. To become a supporter and access this talk for free, visit www.Patreon.com/theliterarylife. Runtime: 1 session, 72 minutes
This is a bundle of previously recorded talks from Angelina Stanford as part of the Literary Life Online Conferences from 2019-2025. My, What Big Teeth You Have: Little Red Riding Hood's Journey to Hell Part of the 2019 Conference; Runtime: 1 session, 76 minutes The Fairy Tale World of Lewis, Tolkien, and Sayers Part of the 2020 Conference; Runtime: 1…
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2025 Literary Life Online Conference - "Living Language: Why Words Matter." Runtime: 1 session, 126 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2024 Literary Life Online Conference - "Dispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination." Runtime: 1 session, 137 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2023 Literary Life Online Conference - "Shakespeare: The Bard for All and for All Time." Runtime: 1 session, 126 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2022 Literary Life Online Conference - "The Battle Over Children's Literature." Runtime: 1 session, 122 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2021 Literary Life Online Conference - "Reading in an Age of Crisis." Runtime: 1 session, 88 minutes
This is recording of a previous talk from Angelina Stanford as part of the 2020 Literary Life Online Conference - "Re-Enchanting the World: The Legacy of the Inklings." Runtime: 1 session, 84 minutes
Shepherds and their flocks have a special place in the literary tradition as singers and poets, appearing not only in the Biblical world but also in the classical world. The Roman poet Vergil, best known for his epic The Aeneid, first tried his hand at a genre called "pastoral poetry" before he turned his attention to writing epic. In Vergil's…
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Edgar Allan Poe, while one of America’s most popular authors, is also America’s most deeply misunderstood author. The French have long admired Poe for his mythopoeic powers, but Americans largely think of him as the Stephen King of his day, revelling in fright, horror, and nihilistic violence. Or, as one critic put it, “his tales are nothing more than complicated…
Great Britain, in the middle of the 17th century, became the site of a turbulent and destructive civil war, in which the rival armies were those of King and Parliament. Of the many historic personalities brought forth by those violent times, none has been so extravagantly praised or severely condemned as Oliver Cromwell, who rose from being a little-noticed Member…
From 800 to 1066, the people we know as “The Vikings” reshaped the history, politics, and culture of Europe, raiding, conquering, settling, and trading from Byzantium in the east to North America in the west, and Iceland to the coasts of Spain and Italy. 800 years later the rediscovery of their literature and mythology took European culture by storm, inspiring…
Enlightenment broke the Chain of Being, “untenanting creation of its God.” The Medieval Reason snapped through the clouds into the heavens, and eighteenth-century England wallowed in materialistic and utilitarian philosophy, “scoffing ascent / Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat.” The veil between earthly and heavenly things became an iron curtain, and material things were stripped of symbolical understanding…
For centuries, writers have drawn inspiration from the literary tradition as well as the living page of nature to shape their literary lives. But what about the composer? How does attention to nature as well as a deep understanding of folktales and myth affect a person whose first language is music? Join Querida Thompson as she guides us through Bedrich…
Why has nature been called the first book? And what does it mean to say that we must know nature to know stories? These are the questions we will be exploring in this webinar. It may be that this “book of nature” is the common tongue between us and an older age, and we must recover our eyes to see…
“The Inklings”—it is a name we love, and, for many of us, it conjures up a whole cosmos of worlds and imaginings. But when C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield called themselves “the Inklings,” they had something specific in mind. Despite their great differences in temperament and vocation, this circle of friends—which grew to include Charles…
By the time of Lewis Carroll’s death in 1898, Macmillan had printed over 150,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and over 100,000 of its companion Through the Looking Glass. The Alice books remain the most translated into foreign languages after the Bible and Shakespeare. It has become one of the most widely quoted books in the Western world. There were…
“You refer to the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the Force. You believe it’s this boy?” During the production of the original Star Wars series, writer/director George Lucas conceived of a score of other films about the mythological beginnings of his 20th century medieval romance, chronicling the origins of the villainous Darth Vader and his fall…
In 1897, in a small town in the north of France, there ended the life of a young woman known to almost nobody. Her existence had not been marked by any visible greatness or any exceptional act. Within a few decades of her death, a pope would describe her as "the greatest of modern saints" and her exceptional holiness would…
Plato's Republic stands as one of the most influential texts in the literary and philosophical tradition, and many of its key ideas still capture our imaginations. In this webinar, Dr. Anne Phillips will explore the background of the Republic and the flow of its argument, with a particular focus on the metaphorical and allegorical imagery that Plato uses to paint…
