Today on The Literary Life podcast, we begin a new series of episodes on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling with our hosts Angelina Stanford, Cindy Rollins, and Thomas Banks! After sharing their commonplace quotes, each of them talks about their own reading histories with Rudyard Kipling’s work. Thomas gives us some biographical information about Kipling and sets up the literary period in which he wrote. They then begin talking about the structure and form of this book as it is set up as a series of short stories as beast fables. Angelina shares some of the mythic and fairy tale elements she noticed while reading this first story, “Mowgli’s Brothers.” They also discuss some of the challenges we face reading stories written in a different time and place without imposing our current views on all the literature of the period.

Check out this year’s Back to School Online Conference, “Educating the Freeborn,” over at MorningTimeforMoms.com to get registered and hear all of this year’s amazing speakers!

To view the full show notes for this episode complete with book links, quotes, and today's poem, please visit https://theliterary.life/285.

This week on The Literary Life, we bring you an episode from deep in the archives in which Cindy and Angelina discussed Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party.” After a great chat over their commonplace quotes, Angelina and Cindy dig into this week’s story. They start with how Cindy found this story and the connections she was making to Little Women. Angelina gives a brief biographical sketch of Katherine Mansfield and highlights how Mansfield’s own illness and death give us insight into how she deals with death in this story. Angelina walks us through how she looks at the use of figurative language and images, such as the Garden of Eden. They also touch on “The Garden Party” having the same structure of moving toward a moment of epiphany that we saw in “Araby.”

Cindy brings up the disconnect between the world of the women at home and the working people outside the home, as well as between the classes in this story. They talk about the importance of Laura’s new hat as a symbol of one type of person she can become. Another image that Angelina and Cindy take a look at is the descent from the garden into darkness. They discuss the parallels from the beginning of the story and the end of the story, as well as Laura’s movement from innocence to experience, from blindness to sight.

To view the full show notes for this episode, complete with commonplace quotes, book links, and this week's poem, please visit https://theliterary.life/284.

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas are once again joined Dr. Jason Baxter, author of Why Literature Still Matters. In this episode, our hosts sit down with Dr. Baxter for a chat about a wide variety of topics, including teaching the old books, reading poetry to understand it, the delight of teaching students at HHL, their hot takes on hot takes, making reading recommendations, and translating Dante, and so much more. We will be back next week with a "best of" episode covering Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party," and after that we begin a fun new series on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

To view the full show notes for this episode, please visit our website at https://theliterary.life/283.