Torn between the competing forces of scholarship as a profession and scholarship as a calling - between Babel and the Ivory Tower - the modern academic faces a dilemma: should she or he try to preserve the soul of higher education by cultivating the Muse of personal knowledge, or renounce the Muse and imitate a technician?

Having come to the end of his own scholarly career, W. David Shaw felt out of place in the technological realm academia has become - where scholars increasingly model their work on that of scientists rather than the classical thinkers of the past, and where...

What is wisdom? Where does it come from? Where can we find it? And what does it mean in our lives? In Secrets of the Oracle, David Shaw explores these questions by turning to the works of wisdom writers, whose words retain their meaning and transformative power even centuries after they were written.

Wisdom literature exists in two shaping forms - the aphorism, geared towards the past, and the oracle, a revolutionary impulse looking to the future. Secrets of the Oracle discusses both types of wisdom, finding them in the works of poets and philosophers from Tennyson...

In The Ghost behind the Masks, W. David Shaw traces Shakespeare's influence on nine Victorian poets: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne, Arthur Hugh Clough, and George Meredith. Often, he writes, the transparency of Shakespeare's influence on Victorian poets and the degree of their engagement with Shakespeare exist in inverse ratio. Instead of imitating a play by Shakespeare or merely quoting his lines, a Victorian poet may embrace more elusive elements of rhetoric and style, adapting...