This is it, my brand new audiodrama, The Greatest Matter. There's murder and mystery, crime and conspiracy, gothic and ghosts - if you are a fan of Words To That Effect, I think you are going to like this! You can listen to all the episodes and subscribe/follow at TheGreatestMatter.com or by simply typing "The Greatest Matter" into your podcast player of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
So it's been a while! Here's a quick update of what's been going on over at WTTE HQ, including an announcement of my brand new audiodrama: The Greatest Matter. You can have a listen to the trailer and, if you like what you here, subscribe to the show wherever you're listening now. All the details at thegreatestmatter.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Unfortunately there aren't going to be any new episodes for a little while but have a listen to this short update letting you know what's going on at WTTE and where things are heading next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dungeons & Dragons plays a huge part in fiction and popular culture more generally, but it is often overlooked or misunderstood. In this episode I gather together an experienced Dungeon Master and some complete novices (including myself) to play D&D for the first time. Joining me to explore this new world is academic, and life-time D&D fan, Professor Curt Carbonell, who has recently published a book on the subject. WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get b...
From medieval ballads to the poetry of John Keats, stage productions to children’s songs, novels to comic books, silent movies to glorious technicolour, Disney classics to Kevin Costner blockbusters to Mel Brooks parodies to gritty reimaginings and lots, lots more, Robin Hood is certainly one of the most recognisable characters in all of western popular culture. Joining me to explore the legendary outlaw is Prof Valerie Johnson, from the University of Montevallo, Alabama. WTTE is part of the Hea...
What does the word "Gothic" mean to you? Gothic cathedrals and castles? Gothic fiction? Teenage goths dressed in black? Horror and the supernatural? This episode explores the origins of the gothic and one man's lasting influence on this most important of genres. Joining me as my gothic guide is Prof Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University. WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becomin...
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: serendipity. WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: cliffhanger! WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of the podcast is wttepodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sensation fiction was a hugely popular genre in the 1860s. The novels were sensationally popular, but they also caused a sensation, with their plots of bigamy and murder, forgery and blackmail. In so many ways the influence of sensation fiction can still be felt today. WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com For full transcripts, links, references, and more the home of t...
Knights in shining armour, damsels in distress, castles, chivalry and courtly love, heroic quests, dragons. King Arthur, Camelot, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail. Think of King Arthur and the medieval romance and a huge number of images and tropes and cliches spring to mind. Where does all this come from? WTTE is part of the HeadStuff Podcast Network. You can support the show and get bonus content and more by becoming a member of HeadStuff+. Go to HeadStuffPodcasts.com For...
Dragons have been around for a very long time. They are one of the very few mythological creatures that have become absolutely central to popular culture; everyone knows what a dragon is. There are other important and well-known mythological creatures, but none are as ubiquitous as dragons, which can be found in Europe and the Americas, in classical and Biblical traditions, in ancient Indian tales and across Asian mythology. So where do dragons come from? Why are they so common across cultures, ...
Words To That Effect is back! Find out what's coming up on Season 6, launching on Jan 25th Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There is a complex and fascinating relationship between humans and the ocean, how people and cultures across the world know and understand the sea, whether through myths and legends, through trade or fishing, exploration or entertainment. This episode explores one particular aspect of all this - our relationship with the undersea, what lies beneath the surface of the oceans. It is the 4th place in a loose miniseries of literary locations: Antarctica, the desert, the forest, and now the undersea....
How do we use fiction in food? What does a character's choice of food reveal about them? Do you simply have to go and make a dish when it's described beautifully in a book? On this very special episode, a collaboration with the wonderful Spice Bags podcast, we discuss everything from 17th century Spanish literature to contemporary American horror, Italian detective novels to Japanese magical realism. Grab yourself a glass of Amarone and have a listen! Support the show and get lots of bonus conte...
The forest is a place we have very mixed feelings about. Forests can be calm and peaceful, full of ancient and natural beauty. Until they’re not. The forest, in so many ways, is a place we fear. They are dark and dense and overgrown, all too easy to get lost in. They hold secrets and mysteries, and creatures we’d rather not meet alone, far from home. And if the monsters of the forest don’t get us, then the forest itself will. The strange, malevolent powers of the trees themselves. The forest can...
How do we imagine and portray the desert? And what does it say about us and our relationship to each other and, crucially, to the planet we live on? In this, the second in a loosely connected series on places in fiction and popular culture, I chat to Dr Aidan Tynan about deserts in fiction and philosophy, from Mad Max to Burning Man, Nietzsche to Baudrillard, Cormac McCarthy to China Miéville. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Strand magazine, in London. He turned to the writer Maurice Leblanc and one of the most memorable and successful characters in French popular fiction was born: the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Lupin is cunning, sophisticated, quick-witted, a master...
Robots as high-tech labour-saving devices, and as usurpers of human jobs. Robots as distinctly Other and as dangerously indistinguishable from humans. Robots as a means of questioning what it is to be human, and highlighting the ethics behind the creation of artificial life. To help me explore all of this I chatted to a roboticist who also writes about literature, and a literature professor who has worked and published extensively on robotics. Support WTTE by becoming a member of HeadStuff+ For ...
A quick update episode on the new HeadStuff membership platform, HeadStuff+ Have a listen to find out more about what's on it and how you can join (although the joining bit is very straightforward - just click here). I'm really excited to be a part of this and I hope if you are a regular listener and would like to support the show, and the network it is a part of, you'll consider becoming a member. Plus you get a load of extra stuff so it's win-win really! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...
The continent of Antarctica was only discovered two centuries ago, even if it had long been theorized. It's a place shrouded in mystery with no human history and no permanent residents. It’s a land of superlatives: the coldest, the windiest, the driest continent. It is a grand scientific experiment, a habitat for animals, with spectacular icescapes luring tourists and scientists alike. And it’s somewhere that exists in the popular imagination in a multitude of ways, often contradictory and, it m...
In one sense alternate history is a very specific kind of story - sometimes seen as a subgenre of science fiction, more often as a genre onto itself. But in a broader sense alternate history is something we are all interested in. We all think about what might have happened differently in our live and in the wider world, we all feel relief and regret. What if? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In a way it’s maybe strange that the western is such a prominent genre. It's seemingly connected to a very specific time and place: the mid-to-late 19th century American west. And yet we are all so familiar with the many tropes of the western: cowboys and Indians, shootouts and saloons, cattle rustlers and sheriffs, tumbleweed and canyons? The western has a particular hold on the popular imagination, partly for reasons of historical and cultural influence, but ultimately because of its supreme a...
Remix, mashup, sample, adaptation, parody, homage, knock-off. The lines between these, and so many other similar terms, are not always very clear. In one sense, all culture is a remix, nothing exists in a vacuum. On the other hand, some people may take a dim view of lifting almost the entire text of Pride & Prejudice and republishing it with additional zombie action. Which is where Seth Grahame-Smith’s best-selling 2009 classic, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, comes in. For lots more details, l...
WTTE is back! Season 5 launches on Tuesday 10th November. Find out what's coming up this season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Last year Caroline Crampton (of Shedunnit) and I teamed up to create a joint live show, called Words Dunnit: a 200-year history of detective fiction in an hour. We performed the show live at the Dublin Podcast Festival in November 2019, and then again at Pod UK, in Birmingham, in Feb of this year. We had a lot of fun making and performing it, so here it is in full. For notes, links, pictures and more head to the WTTE website Support the show on Patreon! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...
There are countless great works of literature we have tantalizing glimpses of, works we know existed but are, as far as anyone can tell, lost to history. Huge swathes of ancient Greek literature, for example, or a lost Shakespeare play based on the story of Don Quixote. And then there are the works we rescue. Kate Macdonald, at Handheld Press, specialises in finding and reprinting lost classics, works that have fallen out of print but deserve another chance and a new audience. In this episode I ...
Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. Yeti. The Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas Ape-men, cave men, wild men. The Missing Link. The idea of the missing link came about in the mid-19th century, with the rise of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In 1859 Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and it was radical, revolutionary, and highly contentious. The problem, though, was that the mechanism by which it all worked wasn’t really understood yet, and t...
Mills and Boon to bodice rippers , Johanna Lindsey to Nora Robers (and a little bit of Fabio) Why read romance novels? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Time travel fiction is a small subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is a small subset of all the many genres and types of literature. Time machines and time travellers are a niche interest. And yet, in many ways, all fiction is time travel fiction. On this week's episode I chart the history and development of time travel, with Prof David Wittenberg, from utopia to hot tubs. Support the show on patreon and get bonus episodes and more For full show notes, links, transcripts and more head t...
Edgar Rice Burroughs is no longer a familiar name. Like many other authors, the fame of his greatest creation, in his case Tarzan, has long eclipsed his own. But Burroughs was far more than the creator of Tarzan. He was an early pioneer of science fiction, a master of the pulp fiction magazines of the early 20th century, an author whose books, across his lifetime and beyond, sold tens of millions of copies. He was also, among a bewildering array of other things, a journalist, a soldier and war c...
