The Winter's Tale, one of Shakespeare's last plays, depicts the character of Leontes, King of Sicily, as someone who suddenly becomes jealous. Scholars and readers have often criticised the play because this jealousy appears to be unmotivated, or, at best, insufficiently motivated. While Othello...

The novel A Happy Death, written in the late 1930s and published posthumously in 1971, has a main character named Patrice Mersault. Camus's novel The Stranger, written a few years later and published in 1942, has a main character named Meursault. I was struck by the fact that these two characters...

Are there any recent (last 10 years) large-scale studies on audience genre preferences and how these preferences change with age?

For as long as I can remember, whenever I'm presented with a choice between a small and a large box in a video game or something, I've had the idea that I should pick the small box rather than the large one. It's similar to The Honest Woodcutter, so I imagine it's also from some sort of fairy tal...