Photo by cayusa at Flickr

From Ancient Greece we’re traveling to America….but I’m not yet sure just where in time we’re going to stop! Here are four themed tours. Which would you most like to see featured on an upcoming Circuit?

Please note that we’ve had Americans on the lists in the past; we’ll try to give those authors a chance again at some point for future tours. For now, though, these are the authors/themes we’re going to decide from among.

Colonial and Revolutionary Thought: Defining A New Nation

• Anne Bradford, Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Washington Irving.

American Romanticism: A Unique American Style

• James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, the Transcendentalists.

American Turn-of-the-Century Naturalism: Social Issues in Literature

• Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris

The Lost Generation: Experimentation in Style and Form

• Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Waldo Pierce
  

I’d love your input, regardless of whether you will be able to participate in the tour.

SURVEY CLOSED

Although I haven’t yet determined the exact dates, January’s Classics Circuit will run at the end of January. It’s time for the Classics Circuit to hearken back to the first definition of “Classic,” those works of classical antiquity.

“classic: A literary work of Ancient Greece or Rome” (Merriam-Webster.com, “classic” definition 1)

Our January tour will focus either on the Greek Classics or the Roman Classics.

It’s All Greek to Me: The Ancient Greeks wrote epic poetry, plays, and histories, including Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Sappho.

Roman Holiday: From Virgil to Horace, Ovid, Seneca, and Apuleius, the Romans’ poetry, epigrams, essays, and plays have an integral spot in the Western canon.

Which would you like to see featured on the Circuit?

SURVERY is closed. The next tour will feature the ANCIENT GREEKS.

The next tour will be one of those persons who lost a previous poll for a Classics Circuit. The sign up will be at the end of October and the tour will run the beginning of December, for one of two weeks.

Please let us know which author(s) you’d like the Classics Circuit to feature. This poll will be open until Friday night, October 15.

SURVEY IS NOW CLOSED.

The December Circuit will feature ANTHONY TROLLOPE.

Today’s the last day to take our Feedback Survey! We’re using this as a way to make the Classics Circuit even better, and it’s your chance to influence the future of th

e Circuit. It’s pretty brief, so please take a moment to fill it out if you haven’t yet done so.

To coincide with White Nights (the days around midsummer during which the sun never sets in St. Petersburg), we will be hosting a Russian themed tour beginning mid-June. Rather than selecting an author, this poll is to select a time period:

• Imperial Russia: nineteenth-century authors including Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, and Ivan Turgenev.
• Soviet Russia: early twentieth-century authors including Mikhail Bulgakov, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Nina Berberova, and Leon Trotsky.

The survey has now been closed.

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We love Paris in the springtime, and in April we will be traveling to Paris to visit one of these four classic nineteenth century French authors.

• Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) is one of the most widely read French novelists today. His historical novels of high adventure were often serialized, capturing the attention of the French public then and entertaining generations still.
• Victor Hugo (1802-1885) contributed largely to the romantic movement in France, through his essays, stories, novels, poetry, and plays. His works focus on the social and political issues of his time. Although most well known in France for his poetry, his novels (such as Les Miserables) are more well known outside of the country.
• George Sand (1804-1876) was the pen name for Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin, who is called the first female novelist of France. Although she lived an unorthodox life for nineteenth century France, Sand did not describe herself as a feminist. Her fiction focuses on the restrictions and challenges that women face because of social class and gender.
• Emile Zola (1840-1902) became an important contributor to the literary school of naturalism. He wrote numerous short stories, four plays, and more than a dozen books. His books focus on how environment and heredity inevitably affect human character.

Which author would you like to visit the Circuit in April?

POLL CLOSED

It’s time to vote for the March tour. We decided to go with something a little bit lighter: Modern Genre Classics. While there are many genres represented in the classics, here are just four that we’d love to see on tour. Read the rest of this entry »