Erick DuPree's Blog

Writer Henry James said, "There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea."

Tea has been an intrinsic to me for as long as I can remember. Since I was a little boy, tea - and the ephemera accompanying it, from teapots to kettles, tea cups, saucers, and making the perfect cup- has fascinated me. In truth, can anyone remember a time before tea? Tea has been a staple in our commerce and politics for centuries. The history of tea is complicat...

"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."

The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, by Harold Bloom, explores the lines of influence among American and British poets, particularly emphasizing Walt Whitman and Shakespeare. Much of this is a re-working of Bloom's prior analysis and claims, but it is an excellent consolidation, plus some new thoughts inter...

The Pillow Book, or Makura no Sōshi, has the distinction of being likely the most widely read of all classical Japanese literature.¹ Written by Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book is unlike The Tale of Genji by contemporary, Murasaki Shikibu, in that it issuccinct and accessible. One can easily read it at leisure. The Pillow Book allegedly comes into being through the happenstance of gifted paper² and for centuries, it has been prized for the witty and at times acerbic portraits that Sei Shōnagon pain...

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is one of the best, most erudite books to be published in years. If anyone wants to understand the differences between Blue staters and Red staters, this is the book that does it. Along with making a credible claim that Botticelli, Descartes, Shakespeare, Newton, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Montaigne, the philosophies, Greenblatt demonstrates how Lucretius created the secular culture that is behind the development of human liberty that...

Below is an extract from a contribution to a larger academic work pending publication.

Many children’s books can be read as texts leaning on folklore motifs, characters and poetics. There are many similarities between folk tales and literary works in which doll characters are found. In the nursery and children’s fiction, the doll’s close relation to dowry and clothes is reversed: it is the doll that may be provided with a large dowry.

One of the earliest descriptions of a doll dowry is found in Fr...

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Mansfield Park is Austen's third novel, published in 1814, and perhaps the most controversial. Mansfield Park is like a fairytale gone wrong, with the family embracing misrule in their father's absence, almost akin to A Midsummer Night's Dream.  On the surface, Mansfield Park shares many of the concerns of Austen's other novels. The dramatis personae are drawn from a band of society ranging from the most straitened of the middle class up to the minor nobility. The significant questions are who w...

Harold Bloom's Genius: A Mosaic of 100 Exemplary Creative Minds is a work of remarkable synthesis. One of my all time favorite books for both the breath of content, and ease of read. In its gnostic-inspired, super-sized sequence of hundred-plus chapters, Bloom evaluates, in English, many outstanding literary geniuses of the past 2,500 or more years. Mainly European, these geniuses, which Bloom covers within the book, have names many people have never heard of. Bloom's reading and learning are be...

In The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber crafts a defense of humanistic thinking and literary study in a way that both address contemporary questions about the field while invoking almost old-fashioned answers.

While not as innately pleasurable to read as her most famous book, Shakespeare After All, The Use and Abuse of Literature is informative and oddly captivating. I say "oddly" because there is a distinctively disjointed, discursive quality to the writing itself; her arguments, suc...

Once upon a time, there was a king and a queen who sat down to play a simple game of cards and dice. Maybe it was her wit. Perhaps it was her beauty- but on this day, the king was outmatched, and the queen prevailed to win the game. The king unaccustomed to loosing was angry, and stormed off with his men, leaving his queen alone.

In her solitude, the queen unrobed and began to rub her perfumed body. The oils and radiance of her skin began to mix with the earth, for she was no ordinary queen, but ...

In 2017, James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare In a Divided America, was involved with a staging of "Julius Caesar" that featured an actor dressed as Donald Trump in the lead role. The furor that resulted from the core of this exploration of American engagement with Shakespearean plays is the impetus for this new work.

The Shakespeare In The Park production of Julius Ceasar-as-Trump informs the framework of Shapiro's thesis. Shapiro knew that it would be problematic for liberals (do you want to ro...