I noticed three types of women in Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. First, the preexisting heroines given a new voice, like “Little Red-Cap,” “Thetis,” “Pilate’s Wife” (Matthew 27:17-19) and others. Second, the apocryphal wives of famous male characters, as in “Mrs Midas” or “Mrs Quasimodo.” The third category is most intriguing to me: the original …

It’s almost like Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t want us to read her poems. From the beginning, they’re obscure and discomforting. Open the book, provocatively titled Standing Female Nude, and you first encounter Pakistan. You may not know that, of course. I didn’t at first. The first two poems allude often to Islam, which doesn’t narrow …

So I had one haunting question as I read Franco Moretti’s essay, which proposes “a transformation in the study of literature…a shift from the close reading of individual texts to the construction of abstract models.” He makes a compelling case for the fusion of literary studies with data visualization, and for what it’s worth, I …