The New Criterion
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FeaturesNovember 2012 An old-fashioned picaro by Pat Rogers On The Adventures of Roderick Random and Tobias Smollet. One upon a time, and a very good time it was in many ways, people with a broad education in the humanities would routinely encounter novels like Roderick Random.1 All round the world, students taking courses on Brit Lit had little chance of avoiding Tobias Smollett, unless they managed to track down some alternative option that allowed them to go off piste into a subject like Old Norse. He figured among the early masters of English fiction (women didn’t get a look in, prior to Fanny Burney and Jane Austen). But today the syllabus of a literature program may well include film noir, graphic novels, rap or vampire videos—in most schools it would be easier to get specialist instruction on fans’ responses to Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on the work of, say, George Meredith. This ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 November 2012, on page 10 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/An-old-fashioned-picaro-7469
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by Pat Rogers On The Letters of Laurence Sterne, edited by Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd. The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
Webcasts
Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012
James Panero on price gouging at the Met, with Fred Dicker Weblog 
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