Joshua Grasso – Medium

Joshua Grasso

The Godfather of Dark Academia: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James

M.R. James, the writer of a highly cultivated series of ghost stories, including the once-famous Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904)…

12h ago

The Godfather of Dark Academia: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James

12h ago

The Gothic Jane Austen: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Creation of Mary: A Fiction(1788)

In 1785, Mary Wollstonecraft’s life seemed at its lowest ebb. Her dearest friend, Fanny Blood, had died in Portugal after a long illness…

Dec 13

The Gothic Jane Austen: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Creation of Mary: A Fiction(1788)

Dec 13

The Novel That Inspired The Hobbit — and Created a Genre In Its Wake: George MacDonald’s The…

For many readers, the genre of modern fantasy begins with J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel, The Hobbit, which famously opens with…

Dec 2

The Novel That Inspired The Hobbit — and Created a Genre In Its Wake: George MacDonald’s The…

Dec 2

Refusing to Read: A Hunger Strike of the Soul, a Vow of Intellectual Celibacy

In a recent Freshman Composition course, a student had a question about our first reading assignment, a short 8–9 page essay in our class…

Jun 23

Refusing to Read: A Hunger Strike of the Soul, a Vow of Intellectual Celibacy

Jun 23

Wherever You Are Is Someone’s Somewhere Else: Or, Why It’s Okay To Settle Down and Not Move Up

Why is a direction the guiding metaphor for our entire lives? Think about it: what is it about “up” that makes it so appealing?…couldn’t…

Dec 28, 2023

Wherever You Are Is Someone’s Somewhere Else: Or, Why It’s Okay To Settle Down and Not Move Up

Dec 28, 2023

How I Forgot to Flunk My First Semester of College and Found My Life in a Humanities Textbook

Oct 22, 2023

How I Forgot to Flunk My First Semester of College and Found My Life in a Humanities Textbook

Oct 22, 2023

The Novel That Launched a Thousand Childhoods: Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (and what it means to…

Note: all passages from the Bantam/Doubleday edition of the book (1976)

Aug 3, 2023

The Novel That Launched a Thousand Childhoods: Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (and what it means to…

Aug 3, 2023

Fanny Price: Jane Austen’s Greatest Heroine? Or an Insufferable Prude?

Of all of Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park (1814) gets precious little attention and far too little love. Why? Actually, I’m somewhat at a…

Jul 2, 2023

Fanny Price: Jane Austen’s Greatest Heroine? Or an Insufferable Prude?

Jul 2, 2023

Dispatches From the Trenches of World War Humanities

HUMANITIES MAJORS ARE DECLINING…SOME CALL IT THE END OF THE LIBERAL ARTS. IS THE WAR ALREADY LOST? OR ARE WE FIGHTING THE WRONG BATTLES?

Jun 4, 2023

Dispatches From the Trenches of World War Humanities

Jun 4, 2023

The Practice of Surrender: When Work Becomes Art in The Bhagavad Gita

The Story Behind the Story

Feb 13, 2023

The Practice of Surrender: When Work Becomes Art in The Bhagavad Gita

Feb 13, 2023

Joshua Grasso

Joshua Grasso

English professor at East Central University (OK); PhD from Miami University (OH); eternal student and lover of books

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