Dr. Robert Zaller

Essays, Reviews & Commentary

The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England
“Monumental…a vast exercise in the history of ideas.”
Alexandra GajdaJournal of British Studies
Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime
“The best single critical book about Jeffers…”
Albert GelpiCoe Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
The Cliffs of Solitude
“A triumph of great criticism.”
Whitney HothFanshawe College Ontario
The Discourse of Legitimacy
“Massive and massively learned . . . [an] enormous achievement.”
Janelle GreenbergThe Journal of Modern History
Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime
“Sure to become a mainstay of Jeffers studies…”
Josh WeinsteinJournal of American Literature
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    • Is a Two-Party Solution Possible in the U.S.?
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    • From Vienna to Budapest: The Marlboro Musicians Perform
    • In Memoriam: Michael Tilson Thomas Conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra
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    • Two Quintets, with Haydn in Between: The Aizuri Quartet and Pianist Ignat Solzhenitsyn
    • Love Above All: Opera Philadelphia’s La Traviata
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    • The Fourth Great Crisis: Greece in the Summer of 2016
    • After the Brexit: What Next for Greece?
    • Endgame for the Grexit, or More of the Same?
    • It’s Time for Greece to Leave the Reich
  • About Robert Zaller
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Literary

Literary

Review: Robert Jay Lifton. The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.

June 25, 2018 Robert Zaller 0

Robert Jay Lifton set out long ago to be our catastrophist: the chronicler of the grim age of the twentieth century that included the two most terrible wars in history, and, with the advent of [ Read Article ]

Literary

Weldon Kees and the Postwar World

October 25, 2017 Robert Zaller 0

Weldon Kees belongs to the circle of American authors who left us early, in some cases by their own hand: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Hart Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, David Foster [ Read Article ]

Literary

It’s Time to Retire the Nobel Prize

October 17, 2016 Robert Zaller 0

It’s time, after 115 years, to retire the Nobel Prize. This year’s award in literature proves it. Yes, the Swedish Academy gives out Nobels in a bunch of fields, including the hard sciences and the [ Read Article ]

Literary

Dimitris Lyacos. With the People from the Bridge. Translated by Shorsha Sullivan.

October 15, 2016 Robert Zaller 0

Dimitris Lyacos’ long, tripartite poem, Poena Damni, is one of the most important and challenging literary works to come from Greece in the past generation, and it has achieved an international reputation. With the People [ Read Article ]

Literary

Towards the Post-Modern Novel: The Polyphonic Consciousness of György Sebestyén

October 11, 2016 Robert Zaller 0

The defining works of the Modernist novel, Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, all worked to dethrone the presuppositions of bourgeois consciousness, with its assumption of fixed [ Read Article ]

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About the Author

Dr. Robert Zaller is an American author, playwright, and professor of history at Drexel University. An authority on British political history and constitutional thought, he writes extensively on politics, modern literature, film, music and art. He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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