Dr. Mark Canada will email you on Saturdays with a column on the world of ideas, especially literature and history. The newsletter will also include details about upcoming events and publications.
You don’t have to be a horror story all your life. You can be a pastoral poem! What’s the difference between a pastoral poem and a horror story? Even if you are not an English professor, you probably know—or at least sense—that those two kinds of literature are different—very different, we should hope. One idealizes life in a rural setting, perhaps a pasture, and the other is designed to scare you with, say, a ghost or a crazed madman in a dark, unsettling locale, perhaps a c