The OWU English Department Blog
George Cruikshank was a 19th century British caricaturist best known for illustrating his friend Charles Dickensâs novels, such as Oliver Twist. One of the more interesting (and amusing) of his works that we have in the library, though, is his Comic Almanack. A little bit like the The Onion today, it contained cartoons and sociopolitical satire.…
Thereâs no shortage of seriousness in the modern landscape of creative nonfiction. Week after week, The New York Timesâ Bestsellers List exalts narratives exploring the horrors of our world: Ta-Nehisi Coatesâs Between the World and Me at 84 weeks on the list, Jeannette Wallsâs The Glass Castle at 436 weeks on the list, and Bryan Stevensonâs Just Mercy at 119 weeks on the list, to name a few.…
 Jane Austen is one of the most influential writers of the Western canon. She wrote novels which were, for their time, rather subversive, – depicting women exercising autonomy, highlighting class differences, and generally challenging the status quo. She was also the age of many college students when she wrote Pride and Prejudice, only 20 years old (which makes me feel like I really ought to hurry up and do something important).…
On a warm evening in early September, approximately eighty Ohio Wesleyan Students and eighty faculty members gathered in the Benes Rrooms for the schoolâs first Diversity Summit. The two dozen round tables were littered with small yellow pads and pens, boxed dinners, and signs with labels proclaiming such topics as âcoalitions across student groups,â âFaculty and Staff collaboration,â and âIntersectionality.â…
Have you ever wondered what it would have been like had you attended OWU 100 years ago? A peak into the 1918-1919 Ohio Wesleyan University Catalog provides some fascinating insight into this question.
Campus life 100 years ago would certainly have looked different than it does now, for a number of reasons.…
Although I read this book for Professor Allison’s ENG 150: Intro to Literary Study class, I found that I could never stop myself just at the assigned pages for the week. I was so consumed by the story that I struggled to put the book down. The World We Found takes place primarily in India, and follows four women who were once best friends during university.…
Homerâs Iliad is a work that almost every student of literature is bound to read at some point in their lives. It has been considered required reading literally for millenia. The Rare Books Collection has an edition of the Iliad published in 1660, translated by John Ogilby. It is a beautiful book, filled with annotations which summarize much of the previous scholarship on the Iliad.…
Bright lights, spinning wheels, ice cream at every corner, and more toys then your heart could desire. Children covered head to toe in unknown sticky substances, while drinking sugar water and shuffling through the dirt roads in awe of everything around them. What more could a kid ask for. The Delaware Fair was heaven on earth.…
This novel captures a historical culture in a unique way. When I first opened this novel I was immersed in the world of 1930s Germany. The story line follows an Englishman living in Berlin just as Hitler rose to power. Throughout the novel there are many twists and turns that shock and engage the reader.…
One of the most exciting parts of the Rare Books section in Beeghly is the Bayley/Walt Whitman Collection. This unique trove of materials includes many first or early editions of Whitmanâs work, photographs of Whitman, and even a scrapbook put together by Whitman himself! Â 
One of the most important pieces we have is a first edition of Whitmanâs Leaves of Grass.…
