Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Dr. Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time. In The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2023) Dr. Dames begins with the textual compilations of the Roman world, where chapters evolved as a tool to organise information. He goes on to discuss the earliest divisional systems of the Gospels and the segmentation of mediaeval romances, describing how the chapter took on new purpose when applied to narrative texts and how narrative segmentation gave rise to a host of aesthetic techniques. Dr. Dames shares engaging and in-depth readings of influential figures, from Sterne, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens to George Eliot, Machado de Assis, B. S. Johnson, Agnès Varda, Uwe Johnson, Jennifer Egan, and László Krasznahorkai. He illuminates the sometimes tacit, sometimes dramatic ways in which the chapter became a kind of reckoning with time and a quiet but persistent feature of modernity. Ranging from ancient tablets and scrolls to contemporary fiction and film, The Chapter provides a compelling, elegantly written history of a familiar compositional mode that readers often take for granted and offers a new theory of how this versatile means of dividing narrative sculpts our experience of time. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose  forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford UP, 2023) is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history. Country of Words taps into the power of Palestinian literature to defy conventional linear, chronological, and artificial national frames of representation. Despite the fact that an unprecedented number of the world's population live as refugees, exiles, or stateless people, the logic of the nation-state continues to loom large over literary studies. Delving into the decentralized and deterritorialized history of Palestinian literature, the story of an entire nation-in-exile living through repetitive cycles of occupation and in multiple diasporas can facilitate an understanding of extranational forms of literary production. Ultimately, Country of Words seeks to offer new perspectives and approaches that simultaneously include and transcend national literary frames. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature (Stanford UP, 2022) insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.  Greg Ellermann is Lecturer in English at Yale University. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Epic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors' wives: Penelope, isolated but resourceful as she awaits the return of Odysseus after his lengthy absence; the war widow Andromache, enslaved and displaced from her homeland after the fall of Troy; the unfaithful and murderous Clytemnestra; and Tecmessa, a war captive who witnesses her partner's breakdown and suicide in the aftermath of battle. Warriors' Wives: Ancient Greek Myth and Modern Experience (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Emma Bridges compares the experiences of these mythical characters with those of contemporary military spouses. Dr. Bridges traces aspects of the lives of warriors' wives—mythical and real, ancient and modern—from the moment of farewell, through periods of separation and reunion, to the often traumatic aftermath of war, to consider the emotional, psychological, and social impacts of life as a military spouse. By unearthing a wealth of contemporary evidence for the lives of the often silenced and unacknowledged partners of those who serve in the military, and by examining this alongside the ancient stories of warriors' wives, Warriors' Wives sheds fresh light on the experience of being married to the military. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin are English professors at Brigham Young University. Madden’s latest book is Disperates (U Nebraska Press, 2020) and Franklin’s is The Writer's Hustle: A Professional Guide to the Creativity, Discipline, Humility, and Grit Every Writer Needs to Flourish (Bloomsbury, 2022). They serve as co-editors-in-chief of Fourth Genre. Two guest voices in this episode means twice the fun, as Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin reinforce as well as diverge somewhat in their essay preferences. Madden is more in the Montaigne reflection vein, whereas Franklin admits he can prefer a narrative-driven memoir approach. Together, we worked our way through three essays from a recent issue of Fourth Genre, one of three magazines that spearheaded a renewed appreciation for the essay form beginning a quarter of a century ago. Both editors enjoyed the surprises that bubble up in Peggy Shinner’s essay, “The Rest Is History,” which explores the conflation of female sexuality and nuclear testing during World War Two and on Bikini Atoll subsequently. Kabi Hartman’s essay “Nipple Day” visits and revisits the circumstances surrounding her own father’s leering behavior, trying to make sense of it all. Finally, on a quieter note is “Garden Hunter” by Joanne Hartman, where the beauty of nature contrasts with parents falling apart physically and between themselves prior to their ultimate deaths. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Holly A. Baggett's Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art. Imagism, Dada, surrealism, and Machine Age aesthetics were among the radical trends the Little Review promoted and introduced to US audiences. Anderson and Heap published the early work of the "men of 1914"―Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot―and promoted women writers such as Djuna Barnes, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and the inimitable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the mid-1920s Anderson and Heap became adherents of George I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic, and in 1929 ceased publication of the Little Review. Holly A. Baggett examines the roles of radical politics, sexuality, modernism, and spirituality and suggests that Anderson and Heap's interest in esoteric questions was evident from the early days of the Little Review. Making No Compromise tells the story of two women who played an important role in shaping modernism. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genres-courtly, devotional, and popular-composed in the main languages of the region: Hindavi, Persian, Brajbhasha, and Urdu. Individual chapters focus on narratives, devotional song-poems and didactic works, local courtly literary practices, and multilingual education as recorded in biographical dictionaries-anthologies. This book suggests that the multilingual and multi-genre approach is better suited to capturing the texture, complexity, and dynamics of literature in the world, and of literary history, than approaches that focus only on global circulation or models that draw centers and peripheries on a single global map. Francesca Orsini is Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London. After earning an undergraduate degree in Hindi at Venice University and living in Delhi, she completed her PhD at SOAS. She taught at the University of Cambridge and SOAS and held visiting positions at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, a regional editor of the Murty Classical Library of India, and an editor of the Cambridge Studies in World Literature series. Her previous monographs include the 2009 book Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India and the 2002 book The Hindi Public Sphere 1920-1940, Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. She has recently also been writing on decolonisation, the role of magazines in cold-war internationalisms and rethinking the paradigm of world literature by taking a more multilingual and located approach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

George Floyd's death on May 25th 2020 marked a watershed in reactions to anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere. Intense demonstrations around the world followed. Within literary studies, the demonstrations accelerated the scrutiny of the literary curriculum, the need to diversify the curriculum, and the need to incorporate more Black writers.  Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum (Cambridge UP, 2023), jointly edited by Professor Ankhi Mukherjee and Professor Ato Quayson, is a major collection that aims to address these issues from a global perspective. An international team of leading scholars illustrate the necessity and advantages of reform from specific decolonial perspectives, with evidence-based arguments from classroom contexts, as well as establishing new critical agendas. The significance of Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum lies in the complete overhaul it proposes for the study of English literature. It reconnects English studies, the humanities, and the modern, international university to issues of racial and social justice. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Matthew Rubery's book Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read. This alternative history of reading is one of the few books which tells the stories of "atypical" readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dyslexia, hyperlexia, and alexia to synesthesia, hallucinations, and dementia. Rubery's focus on neurodiversity aims to transform our understanding of the very concept of reading. Drawing on personal testimonies gathered from literature, film, life writing, social media, medical case studies, and other sources to express how cognitive differences have shaped people's experiences both on and off the page, Rubery contends that there is no single activity known as reading. Instead, there are multiple ways of reading (and, for that matter, not reading) despite the ease with which we use the term. Pushing us to rethink what it means to read; Reader's Block moves toward an understanding of reading as a spectrum that is capacious enough to accommodate the full range of activities documented in this fascinating and highly original book. Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His earlier books include The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009) and The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016). He has also edited or co-edited Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011), Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism (Broadview, 2012), and Further Reading (Oxford, 2020). Currently, he is working on a history of “projected reading”, a form of assisted reading that involves projecting books on ceilings which a patient can read while lying in bed. This was first used to help World War 2 soldiers injured on duty who could not read conventionally. Matthew also likes to collaborate with charities and other organisations to think about ways of reading more suited to people with disabilities or neurodivergent readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic literature” at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monsters, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history.  By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies’ tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies’ postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation. Renee Fox is an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz where she also serves as the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair for Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies and Co-Director of The Center for Monster Studies. She’s co-edited quite a number of works in Irish Studies, Irish literature and monster literature as well writing for journals such as Victorian Studies, the Irish University Review and the New Hibernia Review. Aidan Beatty teaches in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live. Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet. Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, among many others. She lives in Bath, England, and teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Recommended Books: Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos Allen Rossi, Our Last Year Miranda Pountney, How to Be Somebody Else  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of the soul coincided? And what if the soul was also the main character of the play?  These questions are at the core of Eugenio Refini's book Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Legenda, 2022), which explores pedagogical uses of allegorical drama in Italy in the decades around 1600, with a focus on the place of theatre in the education of female orphans in the hospitals of Venice. The consumption of morality plays is looked at as a form of spiritual practice modeled on long-lasting theatrical metaphors. In this context, tropes such as the theatrum mundi not only regained their literal meaning by being actually staged, but also turned into rhetorical devices able to promote the inner staging of the ‘world’ on the ‘spiritual’ stage of the soul. Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Derek Askey is an associate editor on staff at The Sun magazine, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. What qualifies as a Sun essay? As noted by my guest, odds are that means an essay that’s intimate, even raw, with an author who dares to leave a lot of themselves on the page. In Derek Askey’ case, he’s often drawn to an essay with a mix of moods and writing that “looks you in the eye.” Of the three essays discussed, “Lawn Skeletons” by Tom McAllister might seem the most whimsical. How much can you learn from your neighbors’ outdoor decorations and lawn signs, after all? A lot is the answer, as the author goes deeper into also questioning his identity. The second essay discussed here, “The Ice Age” takes on the topic of depression and how even peeling an orange can prove difficult. A third essay, Daniel Donaghy’s “Fire” considers the physical, emotional and even spiritual costs of being poor and, at times, literally having to fight your way out of poverty. As James Baldwin has noted, it’s very expensive to be poor in many ways beyond the financial angle. The bonus round here? That would be Derek recounting his interview of Lynn Casteel Harper regarding dementia, which The Sun’s founder Sy Safransky is now beginning to deal with himself. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do fiction and research intersect? In The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2023), Beth Driscoll, an Associate Professor in Publishing, Communications and Arts Management at the University of Melbourne and Claire Squires a Professor in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, reflect on Blaire Squiscoll’s The Frankfurt Kabuff, by bringing together a collection of scholarly and creative responses to the original novella. Playfully critiquing the idea of a critical edition, from its form and content through to the book’s footnotes and index, the book offers a huge range of insights on the publishing industry. Showing how fiction can be research, art, satire, and a political project, the collection of essays and appendices are essential readings across the arts and humanities, as well as for anyone interested in publishing, fiction, and wanting to read a good erotic thriller! Find out more about the writing partnership of Blaire Squiscoll and their philosophy of Ullapoolism and the Ullapoolism manifesto. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Richard Hoffman is the creative nonfiction editor at Solstice and is the author of seven books, including two memoirs and four books of poetry. He’s won a Massachusetts Book Award for his poetry and is an Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College. Over the 16 years that Richard Hoffman has been involved with Solstice, he’s happily seen it evolve to be ever more conscious of including more diverse voices in a literary conversation that was once upon a time literally “segregated.” For him, the essay form is often most attractive when a writer is positioning their personal content in a larger, societal context. In this episode, the focus was on two essays from the magazine and two other essays from Hoffman’s recent essay collection, Remembering the Alchemists. The Soltice essay “How Much Time Do You Want for Your Progress” by Allen M. Price uses repetitions of an entry in his childhood notebook to reflect on the negative impact of racism on his maturing psyche. Adrianna Paramo’s essay “A Minute of Silence” unflinchingly explores a time when her controlling mom had her receive a gynecological exam given her concerns about maintaining her daughter’s virginity. Hoffman’s two essays recounted here, “The Egg” and the title piece deal, respectively, with grieving over a lost opportunity to be closer to his now deceased mom and on how Eisenhower’s warning about the country’s “military-industrial complex” has come to complete, unfortunate fruition. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Meiners is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. He created Sport Literate as a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago in 1995. By day, he works as a reporter for the Gratiot County Herald, a family-owned weekly newspaper, and by night, he teaches academic writing courses at Mid Michigan College For the 25th anniversary of Sport Literate, Bill and his colleague Brian McKenna chose essays for a special anthology edition entitled Game: A Sport Literate Anthology (Pint-Size Publications, 2023). It features essays from across a wide array of sports: heavy hitters like baseball, football, and basketball, but also essays addressing bicycling, fishing, hockey, tennis and even roller skating. Given that Sport Literate essays have earned notable nods over 30 times in two Best American anthologies, Best American Sports Writing as well as Best American Essays, there was plenty of excellent material to choose from. The episode covers four different essays from the sports of baseball, bicycling, fighting, and hockey. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dayna Tororici is the co-editor of n + 1 magazine, located in New York City. She’s been on staff for the past 10 years, following her studies at Brown University. She’s also a new mother. n + 1 positions itself as combining a fine sense for how literature is composed through the use of voice, and an eye for detail and an ear for rhythm, in addition to wanting to address the current political and cultural situation in America and elsewhere. She sees the essay form as giving its authors time to “marinate” on a topic, building up their reflections to a richer outcome. Many of n + 1’s essays offer a mix of the memoir approach combined with reportage and often some historical analysis as context. In this case, we discussed in particular three essays that lean more purely in the memoir vein from three recent editions of the magazine: Jessica Karissa’s “Love and Wizkid” (about Afrobeats and trying to explore one’s sexuality without feeling exploited); Sander Pleij’s voice-driven essay “Cowboy in Sweden” (with travelogue observations that come from traveling as a roadie helping his wife stage her music); and Laura Preston’s “Human Fallback” (about aiding a real estate chatbot without, ideally, beginning to feel too automatic and sterile yourself). Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history’s most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children’s and Household Tales – is one of the world’s most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers were also passionate German nationalists. They insisted that Germans must reject alien regimes and only accept rulers who spoke their language and cherished their traditions.  The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge UP, 2022) is the first book-length study of the Grimms’ political attitudes and ideas. It shows how the Grimms believed that their groundbreaking philological knowledge of grammar and folk narratives allowed them to disentangle cultural and linguistic groups from each other, criticize imperial rule, and even counsel kings and princes. The brothers sought to revive a neglected Germanic culture for a contemporary audience, but they also wished to provide the traditional political elite with an understanding of the resurgent national collective. Through detailed analysis, Norberg reconstructs how the Grimms wished to mediate between culture and politics as well as between sovereigns and peoples. Jakob Norberg is a Professor of German at Duke University. He is the author of Sociability and Its Enemies (Northwestern University Press, 2014), The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Schopenhauer’s Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, Arcadia, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, Textual Practice, Telos, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. His book on the Grimms won the 2023 Best Book award of the Brothers Grimm Society of North America and a recent article, “Schopenhauer and the Injustice of Slavery,” won the 2023 essay prize of the Schopenhauer Society. Amir Engel is currently a visiting professor at the faculty of theology at the Humboldt University in berlin. He is also the chair at the German department at the Hebrew University. Engel studied philosophy, literature, and culture studies at the Hebrew University and completed his PhD. in the German Studies department at Stanford University. He is the author of Grshom Scholem: an Intellectual biography that came out in Chicago in 2017. He also published works on, among others, Jacob Taubes, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas. He is currently working on a book titled "The German Spirit from its Jewish Sources: The History of Jewish-GermanOccultism". The project proposes a new approach to German intellectual history by highlighting marginalized connections between German Occultism, its Christian sources notwithstanding, and Jewish sources, especially the Jewish mystical tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover’s Confession") is one of the most important English works of the fourteenth century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover’s confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, The Lover's Confession: A Translation of John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Medieval Institute Press, 2023) is the first translation of the entire (33,000-line) poem, including its Latin verses and glosses. The book was edited and translated by Brian Gastle and Catherine Carter, with Latin translations by Andrew Galloway. Nikki Roulo received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2023 and her scholarly interests include fools in early modern literature, seventeenth-century drama, poetics, and jestbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and manners of a dominant culture in order to gain visibility and combat negative stereotypes about their subject group. Today respectability politics can be seen in how those within and outside Black communities police the behaviour of Black celebrities, critique protest movements, and celebrate accomplishments by people of African descent who break racial barriers. To study the origins of the complicated relationship between race and respectability, Dr. Smith shows that early American literatures reveal Black communities engaging with issues of respectability from the very beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Concerns about character and comportment influenced the literary production of Black Atlantic communities, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Uncovering the central importance of respectability as a theme shaping the literary development of cultures throughout the early Black Atlantic, Smith illuminates the mechanics of respectability politics in a range of texts, including poetry, letters, and life writing by Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, and expatriates on the west coast of Africa in Sierra Leone. Through these early Black texts, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic considers respectability politics as a malleable strategy that has both energized and suppressed Black cultures for centuries. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The invention of an easily learned Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century sparked an "epistolary revolution" in the following century as letter writing became an indispensable daily practice for elite men and women alike. The amount of correspondence increased exponentially as new epistolary networks were built among scholars and within families, and written culture created room for appropriation and subversion by those who joined epistolary practices. Focusing on the ways that written culture interacts with philosophical, social, and political changes, The Power of the Brush: Epistolary Practices in Chosŏn Korea (U Washington Press, 2020) examines the social effects of these changes and adds a Korean perspective to the evolving international discourse on the materiality of texts. It demonstrates how innovative uses of letters and the appropriation of letter-writing practices empowered elite cultural, social, and political minority groups: Confucians who did not have access to the advanced scholarship of China; women who were excluded from the male-dominated literary culture, which used Chinese script; and provincial literati, who were marginalized from court politics. New modes of reading and writing that were developed in letter writing precipitated changes in scholarly methodology, social interactions, and political mobilization. Even today, remnants of these traditional epistolary practices endure in media and political culture, reverberating in new communications technologies. The Power of the Brush is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Emory University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a Research Assistant Professor at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She can be reached at sarahbr@hku.hk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Roman singer, courtesan, and writer Margherita Costa won prominence and fame across the courts of Italy and France during the mid-seventeenth century. She secured a steady stream of elite patrons – including popes, queens, grand dukes, and influential cardinals – while male poets and librettists wrote celebratory poetry on her behalf. In addition to her appearances as a soprano on the opera stage, Costa published a remarkable fourteen full-length texts across an expanse of genres: burlesque comedy, drama, equestrian ballet, pastoral opera, amorous letters, lyric poetry, and history. Margherita Costa, Diva of the Baroque Court (U Toronto Press, 2023) brings together close textual readings of Costa’s numerous publications with archival materials detailing her performance itinerary and social-cultural networks. The book progresses chronologically through her life, geographically along the routes she travelled, and thematically via the genres in which she experimented. Jessica Goethals illuminates how Costa was unafraid to leap over the boundaries of decorum that delimited what women should and did write about. More than merely a literary biography, this book is also a portrait of seventeenth-century courts, their concerns, and their entertainments. Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out? Helen decides she must go--her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives--and maybe the world. Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Little, Brown, 2023) illuminates the compromises we'll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple--if you could run the numbers. Julius’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and some other places. For a while he was a lawyer. Julius attended Yale Law School and Pomona College. He lives in New York. Recommended Books: Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding Tom Holland, Dominion Kabat, The Eighth Moon  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex. Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Roman imperial epic is enjoying a moment in the sun in the twenty-first century, as Lucan, Valerius Flaccus, Statius, and Silius Italicus have all been the subject of a remarkable increase in scholarly attention and appreciation. Lucan and Flavian Epic (Brill, 2023) characterizes and historicizes that moment, showing how the qualities of the poems and the histories of their receptions have brought about the kind of analysis and attention they are now receiving. Serving both experienced scholars of the poems and students interested in them for the first time, this book offers a new perspective on current and future directions in scholarship. Translations: -Lucan: Jane Wilson Joyce -Valerius Flaccus: P.J. Davis -Statius' Thebaid: Jane Wilson Joyce -Statius' Achelleid: Stanley Lombardo -Silius Italicus: Neil Bernstein and Antony Agoustakis Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, 2023) explores the weight of the devil's bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom. Hugo Contreras's world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo's debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo. One day, Hugo's nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo's debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there's one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn't believe in spirits. Hugo plans to do what he's done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo's old tricks don't work. Memories of his past--his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy--collide with Alexi's demons in an explosive climax. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe--to ourselves, our families, and our histories. Raul Palma is a second generation Cuban American, born and raised in Miami. His short story collection In This World of Ultraviolet Light won the 2021 Don Belton prize. His writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Greensboro Review, Hayden Ferry Review and elsewhere. He teaches Fiction at Ithaca College, where he is the associate dean of faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He has also taught at the Elmira Correctional Facility through Cornell University’s prison education program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Ithaca New York. Recommended Books: Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut Claire Jimenez, What Ever Happened to Ruthie Ramirez Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his new book Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (University of Virginia Press, 2023), Miles P. Grier argues that blackness in Othello and the texts that it influenced should be understood as deeply material, transferable, and unstable. The defining of alphanumerical and dramatic characters, while represented as settled, was anything but. As Miles writes in the book, “Before the racial categories of high scientific racism were elaborated in the late eighteenth century, a functional white interpretive community was being forged through the shared exercise of interpretive authority over inky black figures. The stage offered a place in which control over symbols and their interpretation could be celebrated as if it were already a fait accompli, rather than a tense, ongoing battle.” Miles Parks Grier is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Miles’s articles have appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Shakespeare/Text: Contemporary Readings in Textual Studies, Editing and Performance. Along with Cassander L. Smith and Nicholas Jones, Miles co-edited Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, 2018). Inkface is his first monograph. John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For nearly 200 years, people have questioned the identity of Shakespeare; however, this debate is often dismissed by most scholars as “just a conspiracy theory,” with the life of the poet-playwright being “beyond doubt.” And yet, the documented facts related to the man from Stratford are meagre—where they exist at all—forcing biographers to rely heavily on their own imaginations.  The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy: Knowledge, Rhetoric, Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023) by Michael Quinn Dudley moves beyond this debate to understand how we construct our understanding of the author by asking pointed questions. What does it mean to say that the traditional stance on Shakespeare’s authorship is a belief as opposed to a search for knowledge? What are the ethical implications of declaring that some history is “beyond doubt,” and that no debate about it may be permitted? What can theories of knowledge, truth and rhetoric tell us about how knowledge of Shakespeare has been constructed and justified? To the extent that this belief has consequences for society, can it then be said to be an ethical one? Finally, what difference does it actually make—from a pragmatic perspective—who the Author was? Highly original in its scope, The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy sets out the debate’s many profound philosophical dimensions concerning knowledge, historiography, truth and academic freedom—implications that transcend the debate itself. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program and Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rosemary Candwell's past has exploded into her present. Down-and-out and deteriorating, she drifts from anonymous beds and bars in Providence, to a homeless shelter hidden among the hedge-rowed avenues of Newport, and through the revolving door of service jobs and quick-fix psychiatric care, always grasping for hope, for a solution. She's desperate to readjust back into a family and a world that has deemed her a crazy bitch living a choice they believe she could simply un-choose at any time. She endures flashbacks and panic attacks, migraines and nightmares. She can't sleep or she sleeps for days; she lashes out at anyone and everyone, especially herself. She abuses over-the-counter cold medicine and guzzles down anything caffeinated just to feel less alone. What if her family is right? What if she is truly broken beyond repair? Drawn from the author's experience of homelessness and trauma recovery, It's Not Nothing is a collage of small moments, biting jokes, intrusive memories, and quiet epiphanies meant to reveal a greater truth: Resilience never looks the way we expect it to look. Courtney Denelle is the author of IT’S NOT NOTHING (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2022), a novel-in-fragments drawn from her experience of homelessness and recovery, and the forthcoming novel Real Piece of Work, an art world satire that explores image-craft and the unbidden toll of a life lived in persona. Her stories have appeared in the Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Courtney was also winner of the 2021 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen award, and she has been granted a Hawthornden Fellowship and a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, as well as residencies from Hedgebrook and the Jentel Foundation. Recommended Books: Naomi Klein, Doppelganger Kate Doyle, I Meant It Once Isle McElroy, People Collide Kerri Schlottman, Tell Me One Thing Kimberly King Parsons, We Were The Universe Lucas Mann, Attachments Yiyun Lee, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal Sarah Manguso, Liars  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick R. O'Malley's book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U Virginia Press, 2023) analyzes the role of Irishness in nineteenth-century constructions of race and racialization, both in the British Isles and in the United States. Focusing on the years immediately preceding the American Civil War, Patrick O’Malley interrogates the bardic verse epic, the gothic tale, the realist novel, the stage melodrama, and the political polemic to ask how many mid-nineteenth-century Irish nationalist writers with liberationist politics declined to oppose race-based chattel enslavement in the United States and the structures of white supremacy that underpinned and ultimately outlived it. Many of the writers whose work O’Malley examines drew specifically upon the image of Black suffering to generate support for their arguments for Irish political enfranchisement; yet in doing so, they frequently misrepresented the fundamental differences between Irish and Black experience under the regimes of white supremacy, which has had profound consequences. Patrick R. O'Malley is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he teaches Irish and British literature of the long nineteenth century and critical theory. He is the author of two previous books: Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006, and Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and won the Robert Rhodes Prize for books on literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jim Finley--a recently retired English teacher living alone on the shifting edge of San Francisco--has been set, unwittingly, on the back porch of life. Trying to harmonize the voices in his head, he sits most days by his stack of "to-do" books until, one day, his daughter comes home with the worst news of her life. Everything changes. As his broken heart reengages, he steps back into a new world. He sees his ex-wife has launched into a larger life than the one they'd shared. He is surprised to find it easier to talk to his son's immigrant girlfriend, or even the remains of a Russian saint, than to the young man he's raised. He misconnects with Carol--his first date in decades--a woman he enjoys talking with but doesn't quite hear.  Set in the pre-tech calm before the turn of this century, Outer Sunset (U Iowa Press, 2023) is a deeply felt story about the intimate place where long-lasting growth occurs in our lives; how we revise, or live without, our dreams; how to love the flaws of those closest to you and watch a child grow away into someone better than you'd imagined; and how to be shaken by beauty amidst unimaginable loss and remain standing. Mark’s work has won a Nelson Algren Short Story Award, been long-listed for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner — William Wisdom prize, and been published in the Chicago Tribune, LitHub, Santa Clara Review, Connotation Press, Kindle Singles, and elsewhere. Mark grew up in Western Massachusetts and New York's "North Country," earned a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and moved to San Francisco in 1987, where he earned an MFA from SF State. He worked nearly 30 years in nonprofit communications, including a wonderful spell with the California Council for the Humanities. He lives with his wife and kids in San Francisco. Recommended Books: Joy Williams, Harrow Jaime Cortez, Gordo Stuart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jessica Romney's book Lyric Poetry and Social Identity in Archaic Greece (U Michigan Press, 2020) examines how Greek men presented themselves and their social groups to one another. The author examines identity rhetoric in sympotic lyric: how Greek poets constructed images of self for their groups, focusing in turn on the construction of identity in martial-themed poetry, the protection of group identities in the face of political exile, and the negotiation between individual and group as seen in political lyric. By conducting a close reading of six poems and then a broad survey of martial lyric, exile poetry, political lyric, and sympotic lyric as a whole, Romney demonstrates that sympotic lyric focuses on the same basic behaviors and values to construct social identities regardless of the content or subgenre of the poems in question. The volume also argues that the performance of identity depends on the context as well as the material of performance. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that sympotic lyric overwhelmingly prefers to use identity rhetoric that insists on the inherent sameness of group members. All non-English text and quotes are translated, with the original languages given alongside the translation or in the endnotes. Reyes Bertolin is a professor of Classics at the University of Calgary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We see notebooks everywhere we go. But where did this simple invention come from? How did they revolutionise our lives, and why are they such powerful tools for creativity? And how can using a notebook help you change the way you think? In The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books, 2023), Roland Allen reveals all the answers. Ranging from the bustling markets of mediaeval Florence to the quiet studies of our greatest thinkers, he follows a trail of dazzling ideas, revealing how the notebook became our most dependable and versatile tool for creative thinking. He tells the notebook stories of artists like Leonardo and Frida Kahlo, scientists from Isaac Newton to Marie Curie, and writers from Chaucer to Henry James. We watch Darwin developing his theory of evolution in tiny pocketbooks, see Agatha Christie plotting a hundred murders in scrappy exercise books, and learn how Bruce Chatwin unwittingly inspired the creation of the Moleskine. On the way we meet a host of cooks, kings, sailors, fishermen, musicians, engineers, politicians, adventurers and mathematicians, who all used their notebooks as a space for thinking and to shape the modern world. In an age of AI and digital overload, the humble notebook is more relevant than ever. Allen shows how bullet points can combat ADHD, journals can ease PTSD, and patient diaries soften the trauma of reawakening from coma. The everyday act of moving a pen across paper can have profound consequences, changing the way we think and feel: making us more creative, more productive - and happier. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina. At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe-at least fleetingly-that anything could happen. These stories will stay with you. Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023), a collection of thirteen spooky literary stories. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. She has been a resident at Hewn oaks Artist Residency and won a 2020 Maine Literary Award in the short works category. She loves cats, the ocean, and ghost stories. Recommended Books: NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, Chain Gang All-Stars Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why did the New York Public Library ban a novel about women’s independence? What was the Human Potential Movement? And who was Claire Myers Owens? Today’s book is: Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse University Press,, 2019) by Miriam Kalman Friedman, which is a biography of Owens, who grew up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, but sought adventure and freedom. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York’s Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman’s Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its “risqué” content. Drawn to ideals of self-actualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, and published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three. Dr. Friedman’s rediscovery of Owens brings attention to her little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Dr. Friedman chronicles Owens’s robust intellect and her tumultuous private life. Our guest is: Dr. Miriam Kalman Friedman, who is a writing coach, editor, and lecturer. She has published multiple books on feminism, women, and women's studies. She is the author of Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the host and producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may also be interested in: Exploring the Emotional Arc of Turning a Dissertation into A Book Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd This discussion of the book Becoming the Writer You Already Are Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us here to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation. In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super sad, and kind of terrifying, but an economical explanation of plot. She also discusses Max Ophüls’s 1953 film, The Earrings of Madame de... as an example of a film with a potentially liberatory plot. We recommend you watch the latter, not the former. Other texts referenced in this episode include Mary Anne Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Harvard, 2002) and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke, 2011) and Female Complaint (Duke, 2008). The occasion for our conversation was Pardis’s new book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (U Chicago Press, 2023). If you’d like to get yourself a copy there’s a 30% discount on the University of Chicago Press website with the promo code UCPNEW. It’s a book about film and literary modernism, including the work of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner. The cover is really beautiful, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in either of the genres it addresses. Pardis Dabashi is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English and Film Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program (MECANA). She has published everywhere, and is friends with everyone! She teaches courses in twentieth-century literature, film studies, Middle East studies, and theory. She was also one of the first guests on High Theory! You can listen to her 2020 episode on The Autonomous Work of Art if you’re feeling a flashback. The image for this episode is a publicity still from George Cukor’s 1936 MGM film Camille, showing Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor in a tense embrace. Digital image from Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the first translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books appeared in Japan in 1899, Alice has found her way into nearly every facet of Japanese life and popular culture. The books have been translated into Japanese more than 500 times, resulting in more editions of these works in Japanese than any other language except English. Generations of Japanese children learned English from textbooks containing Alice excerpts. Japan’s internationally famous fashion vogue, Lolita, merges Alice with French Rococo style. In Japan Alice is everywhere—in manga, literature, fine art, live-action film and television shows, anime, video games, clothing, restaurants, and household goods consumed by people of all ages and genders.  In Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation (U Hawaii Press, 2023), Amanda Kennell traverses the breadth of Alice’s Japanese media environment, starting in 1899 and continuing through 60s psychedelia and 70s intellectual fads to the present, showing how a set of nineteenth-century British children’s books became a vital element in Japanese popular culture.  Using Japan’s myriad adaptations to investigate how this modern media landscape developed, Kennell reveals how Alice connects different fields of cultural production and builds cohesion out of otherwise disparate media, artists, and consumers. The first sustained examination of Japanese Alice adaptations, her work probes the meaning of Alice in Wonderland as it was adapted by a cast of characters that includes the “father of the Japanese short story,” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa; the renowned pop artist Yayoi Kusama; and the best-selling manga collective CLAMP. While some may deride adaptive activities as mere copying, the form Alice takes in Japan today clearly reflects domestic considerations and creativity, not the desire to imitate. By engaging with studies of adaptation, literature, film, media, and popular culture, Kennell uses Japan’s proliferation of Alices to explore both Alice and the Japanese media environment. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later--long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out--the long shadow of Dylan's trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he's managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan's past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back. Then a groundbreaking new law--the Child Victims Act--opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice--does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers' apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms. By turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz's debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma--and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window. Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School. Recommended Books: Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury), Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films - and likewise his philosophy of photography, culture, semiotics, ethics and theatricality have been immensely important in film theory. Focusing particularly on the essays 'The Third Meaning' and 'On Leaving the Cinema' and the acclaimed book Camera Lucida, Ffrench examines Barthes' writing and traces a persistent interest in films and directors, from Fellini and Antonioni, to Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers and Hitchcock. Ffrench explains that although Barthes found pleasure in "leaving the cinema" - disconnecting from its dangerous allure by a literal exit or by forcefully breaking the trance - he found value in returning to the screen anew. Barthes delved beneath the pull of progressing narrative and the moving image by becoming attentive to space and material aesthetics. This book presents an invaluable reassessment of one of the most original and subtle thinkers of the twentieth-century: a figure indebted to the movies. Bill Schaffer is a semi-retired lecturer in Film Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Are the canonical Gospels historically reliable? The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus’s life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources. Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical Gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography: Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2019), Keener explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the Gospel writers’ method and degree of accuracy in recounting the life and ministry of Jesus. Keener’s Christobiography has far-reaching implications for the study of the canonical Gospels and historical Jesus research. He concludes that the four canonical Gospels are historically reliable ancient biographies. Dr. Craig Keener is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is the author of over 30 books, 6 of which have won awards in Christianity Today. Keener is also the New Testament editor for the award-winning NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, and is serving as the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. With more than a million copies of his books in circulation, Keener also serves the global church by teaching and lecturing all over the world. Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds an MDiv from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a ThM from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and can be reached at jonrichwright@gmail.com, on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and artists to develop a theory of refugee aesthetics as a way of considering how aesthetic forms are created and contested by refugees, nonrefugees, and institutions alike. On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Timothy K. August discusses the contradictions in how refugee stories are read as arising from exceptional circumstances even as the ever-increasing number of refugees renders refugeeness a remarkably everyday experience; the importance of aesthetics as a means by which refugees are able to contest—and reimagine—the refugee narratives that have been created through institutional and bureaucratic definitions of refugees; how refugee writers reconcile demands that they explain their experiences or perform their humanity within their own art and writing; and more. The Refugee Aesthetic examines a range of literary and artistic works by refugees, including poems, novels, graphic novels, and visual art, by writers and artists including Bao Phi, Monique Truong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Mohsin Hamid, Gia-Bao Tran, and more, to argue for the agency of refugees as cultural producers who are redefining a politically, bureaucratically produced refugee image and instead imagining a plural form of refugee aesthetics. Please note that this episode was recorded prior to the events of October 7, 2023. Timothy August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University. Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and researcher based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beginning of the modern age. American author and philosopher David Foster Wallace worked more than two centuries later, in the “post-modern” style. But these two writers shared a common problem: once modernity fractured society’s sense of shared moral norms, how could you write persuasively about morality? This episode looks at how Johnson and Wallace attempted to solve this problem; what struggles plagued their solutions; and why our modern, pluralistic landscape makes their work more valuable than ever. Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Kirsten Hall Herlin Featured Scholars:  Walter Jackson Bate (1918-1999), Professor of English, Harvard University Matt Bucher, Managing Editor, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies Jack Lynch, Professor of English, Rutgers University D. T. Max, Staff Writer, The New Yorker Special thanks: Dutton Kearney For transcript, teaching aids, and other resources, click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world. Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia’s MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By the 1980s, critics and the public alike considered James Baldwin irrelevant. Yet Baldwin remained an important, prolific writer until his death in 1987. Indeed, his work throughout the decade pushed him into new areas, in particular an expanded interest in the social and psychological consequences of popular culture and mass media. In his new book James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Joseph Vogel offers the first in-depth look at Baldwin's dynamic final decade of work. Delving into the writer's creative endeavors, crucial essays and articles, and the impassioned polemic The Evidence of Things Not Seen, Vogel finds Baldwin as prescient and fearless as ever. Baldwin's sustained grappling with "the great transforming energy" of mass culture revealed his gifts for media and cultural criticism. It also brought him into the fray on issues ranging from the Reagan-era culture wars to the New South, from the deterioration of inner cities to the disproportionate incarceration of black youth, and from pop culture gender-bending to the evolving women's and gay rights movements. Astute and compelling, revives and redeems the final act of a great American writer. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explained the 2008 crisis and the financialized economy, was written by an English professor. It was Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016). The book is a masterful exploration of the cultural politics of the financial crisis and a powerful mediation on how to make sense of an era of unrepayable debts. As a review in the LA Review of Books notes, McClanahan has resurrected and repurposed the rich tradition of Marxist literary criticism which brought us Raymond Williams, analyzing post-crisis literature, photography, and cinema as cultural texts registering “a new ‘crisis subjectivity’ in the wake of the mortgage meltdown’s shattering revelations.” Dead Pledges is a must read. For whom? Well, anyone living in the 21st century, concerned about insurmountable debts, thinking of how culture and the economy transect each other, and striving for a radical politics fit for the mortgaged times in which we live. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how managing surplus populations and tapping into fortunes at the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” are twin-logics that undergird poverty alleviation projects in rural Rajasthan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), this led to an itinerant life divided between Mississippi and Hollywood. Rollyson shows how his encounters with the politicized writers and European refugees who populated the film industry helped broaden his outlook, which was reflected in the injection of anti-fascist elements into his scripts and novels. By the end of the Second World War, Faulkner enjoyed a growing international status that culminated with receiving the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, which cemented his place at the forefront of American literature. Though a reluctant celebrity, Faulkner embraced his status by becoming an informal ambassador of American values abroad, while using his position as an unofficial spokesperson of the South to criticize the mistreatment of Blacks in the region and call for improvements in race relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good wives, wise mothers" in support of male empire-building. Although many feminist critics have articulated women's active roles as dutiful collaborators for the Japanese empire, male-dominated narratives of empire-building have been largely supported and rectified. In contrast, the roles of marginalized women, such as sex workers, women entertainers, hostesses, and hibakusha have rarely been analyzed. This book addresses this intellectual lacuna by closely examining memories, (semi-)autobiographical stories, and newspaper articles, grounded or inspired by lived experiences not only in Japan, but also in Shanghai, Manchukuo, colonial Korea, and the Pacific. Chapters further explore the voices of diasporic Korean women (Zainichi Korean woman born in Japan, as well as Korean American woman born in Korea) whose lives were impacted, intervening ethnocentric narratives that were at the heart of the Japanese empire. An appendix presents the first English translation of a memorable statement on comfort women by former Japanese propaganda actress, Ri Kōran / Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki's book Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire (Routledge, 2021) will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature and film studies, as well as gender, sexuality and postcolonial studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As this book intriguingly explores, for those who would make Rome great again and their victims, ideas of Roman decline and renewal have had a long and violent history. The decline of Rome has been a constant source of discussion for more than 2200 years. Everyone from American journalists in the twenty-first century AD to Roman politicians at the turn of the third century BC have used it as a tool to illustrate the negative consequences of changes in their world. Because Roman history is so long, it provides a buffet of ready-made stories of decline that can help develop the context around any snapshot. And Rome did, in fact, decline and, eventually, fall. An empire that once controlled all or part of more than 40 modern European, Asian, and African countries no longer exists. Roman prophets of decline were, ultimately, proven correct-a fact that makes their modern invocations all the more powerful. If it happened then, it could happen now.  Edward J. Watts' The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford UP, 2021) tells the stories of the people who built their political and literary careers around promises of Roman renewal as well as those of the victims they blamed for causing Rome's decline. Each chapter offers the historical context necessary to understand a moment or a series of moments in which Romans, aspiring Romans, and non--Romans used ideas of Roman decline and restoration to seize power and remake the world around them. The story begins during the Roman Republic just after 200 BC. It proceeds through the empire of Augustus and his successors, traces the Roman loss of much of western Europe in the fifth century AD, and then follows Roman history as it runs through the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) until its fall in 1453. The final two chapters look at ideas of Roman decline and renewal from the fifteenth century until today. If Rome illustrates the profound danger of the rhetoric of decline, it also demonstrates the rehabilitative potential of a rhetoric that focuses on collaborative restoration, a lesson of great relevance to our world today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature (Penn State UP, 2023) is about the role literature can play in helping readers cope with our present-day crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the shift toward fascism in global politics. Using the lens of Mennonite literature and their own personal experience as a culturally Mennonite, queer, Latinx person, Daniel Shank Cruz investigates the age-old question of what literature’s role in society should be, and argues that when we read literature theapoetically, we can glean a relational ethic that teaches us how to act in our difficult times. In this book, Cruz theorizes theapoetics―a feminist reading strategy that reveals the Divine via literature based on lived experiences―and extends the concept to show how it is queer, decolonial, and equally applicable to secular and religious discourse. Cruz’s analysis focuses on Mennonite literature―including Sofia Samatar’s short story collection Tender and Miriam Toew’s novel Women Talking―but also examines a non-Mennonite text, Samuel R. Delany’s novel The Mad Man, alongside practices of haiku and tarot, to show how reading theapoetically is transferable to other literary traditions. Weaving together close reading and personal narrative, this pathbreaking book makes a significant and original contribution to the field of Mennonite literary studies. Cruz’s arguments will also be appreciated by literary scholars interested in queer theory and the role of literature in society. Daniel Shank Cruz (they/multitudes) is a queer, disabled boricua who grew up in New York City and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Multitudes is the author of Queering Mennonite Literature: Archives, Activism, and the Search for Community, also published by Penn State University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

George MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how African and non-African Francophone authors, filmmakers, editors, and scholars have packaged, interpreted, and filmed the violent histories of post–Cold War Francophone Africa. This violence, much of which unfolded in front of Western television cameras, included the use of child soldiers facilitated by the Soviet Union’s castoff Kalashnikov rifles, the rise of Islamist terrorism in West Africa, and the horrific genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Through close readings of fictionalized child-soldier narratives, cinematic representations of Islamist militants, genocide survivor testimony, and Western scholarship, George S. MacLeod analyzes the ways Francophone African authors and filmmakers, as well as their editors and scholarly critics, negotiate the aesthetic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of making these traumatic stories visible. MacLeod argues for the need to periodize these productions within a “post–Cold War” framework to emphasize how shifts in post-1989 political discourse are echoed, contested, or subverted by contemporary Francophone authors, filmmakers, and Western scholars. The questions raised in Mediating Violence from Africa are of vital importance today. How the world engages with and responds to stories of recent violence and loss from Africa has profound implications for the affected communities and individuals. More broadly, in an era in which stories and images of violence, from terror attacks to school shootings to police brutality, are disseminated almost instantly and with minimal context, these theoretical questions have implications for debates surrounding the ethics of representing trauma, the politicization of memory, and Africa’s place in a global (as opposed to a postcolonial or Euro-African) economic and political landscape. Annie deSaussure holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.  Thomas Kelly develops a new account of the relationship between Chinese literature and material culture by examining inscribed objects from the late Ming and early to mid-Qing dynasties. He considers how the literary qualities of inscriptions interact with the visual and physical properties of the things that bear them. Kelly argues that inscribing an object became a means for authors to grapple with the materiality and technologies of writing. Facing profound social upheavals, from volatility in the marketplace to the violence of dynastic transition, writers turned to inscriptions to reflect on their investments in and dependence on the permanence of the written word. Shedding new light on cultures of writing in early modern China, The Inscription of Things: Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (Columbia UP, 2023) broadens understandings of the links between the literary and the material. Huijun Mai is an Assistant Professor in Medieval Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives.  In this project, Linton brings a rich archive of medical cases from 1800 to 1902 into dialogue with canonical nineteenth-century authors (Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, and Emile Zola), as well as an impressive range of less well-known writers and popular fictions that captivated French readers during the period. Challenging the (Foucauldian) emphasis on the principle of a "true sex" that apparently preoccupied French doctors following the Napoleonic Code's regulation of sexual identification (within three days of birth), Linton looks at multiple instances in which the instability of sex, the uncertainties of bodies and their stories, came up again and again for medical and other observers. Revisiting the well-known case of Herculine Barbin, Linton situates Barbin's own account within the wider medical and literary worlds of nineteenth-century France. The book's earlier chapters lay a historical groundwork for subsequent closer readings of fictions that responded and contributed to a broader cultural fascination with sexual and gender identities, desires, and ambiguities.  While historically specific in its research and arguments, Unmaking Sex offers much to readers interested in the past and present politics of medical, legal, and cultural debates surrounding intersex people, with implications well beyond the French context. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective on the work of the renowned Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It uncovers Kurosawa's debt to the intellectual tradition of Japanese-Russian democratic dissent, reflected in the affinity for Kurosawa's worldview expressed by such Russian directors as Grigory Kozintsev and Andrei Tarkovsky. Through a detailed discussion of the Russian subtext of Kurosawa's cinema, most clearly manifested in the director's films based on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and Arseniev, the book shows that Kurosawa used Russian intertexts to deal with the most politically sensitive topics of postwar Japan. Locating the director in the cultural tradition of Russian-inflected Japanese anarchism, the book challenges prevalent views of Akira Kurosawa as an apolitical art house director or a conformist studio filmmaker of muddled ideological alliances by offering a philosophically consistent picture of the director's participation in post-war debates on cultural and political reconstruction. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A novel about womanhood, modern family, and the interior landscape of maternal life, as seen through the life of a young wife and mother on a single day. At night, Maisie Moore dreams that her life is perfect: the looming mortgages and credit card debt have magically vanished, and she can raise her four children, including newborn Esme, on an undulating current of maternal bliss, by turns oceanic and overwhelming, but awash in awe and wonder. Then she jolts awake and, after checking that her husband and baby are asleep beside her, remembers the real-world money problems to be resolved amid the long days of grocery shopping, gymnastics practices, and soccer games. From this moment, Eliza Minot draws readers into the psyche of the perceptive and warmhearted Maisie, who yearns to understand the world around her and overflows with fierce love for her growing family. Unfolding over the course of a single day in which Maisie and her husband take their children to pick apples, In the Orchard (Knopf, 2023) is luminous, masterfully crafted, revelatory--a shining exploration of motherhood, childhood, and love. Eliza Minot is the author of the critically acclaimed novels THE TINY ONE, THE BRAMBLES, and IN THE ORCHARD published by Knopf/Vintage. Her books have been named to various lists, including The New York Times Notable, Booksense 76, Nancy Pearl’s, and Oprah’s Top Ten Summer Picks. She went to Barnard College and received her MFA from Rutgers-Newark, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She has taught at Rutgers-Newark, Barnard College, and NYU. She received the Maplewood Library Literary Award in 2023. She grew up the youngest of seven children in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. She lives in Maplewood, NJ, with her family. Recommended Books: Anne Patchett, Tom Lake (audiobook) Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead (audiobook) Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning DOIREANN NIě GHRIěOFA, Ghost in the Throat  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Despite their literary and cultural significance, Afro-Latino memoirs have been marginalized in both Latino and African American studies. Trent Masiki remedies this problem by bringing critical attention to the understudied African American influences in Afro-Latino memoirs published after the advent of the Black Arts movement. In The Afro-Latino Memoir: Race, Ethnicity and Literary Interculturalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) Masiki argues that these memoirs expand on the meaning of racial identity for both Latinos and African Americans.  Using interpretive strategies and historical methods from literary and cultural studies, Masiki shows how Afro-Latino memoir writers often turn to the African American experience as a model for articulating their Afro-Latinidad. African American literary production, expressive culture, political ideology, and religiosity shaped Afro-Latino subjectivity more profoundly than typically imagined between the post-war and post-soul eras. Masiki recovers this neglected history by exploring how and why Black nationalism shaped Afro-Latinidad in the United States. Trent Masiki is assistant professor of Africana Studies at Worchester Polytechnic Institute.  Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the hyphen has persisted, bringing and bridging new words and concepts. Hyphen (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Pardis Mahdavi is part of the Object Lessons series and follows the story of the hyphen from antiquity-"Hyphen” is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning “to tie together” -to the present, but also uncovers the politics of the hyphen and the role it plays in creating identities. The journey of this humble piece of connective punctuation reveals the quiet power of an orthographic concept to speak to the travails of hyphenated individuals all over the world. Hyphen is ultimately a compelling story about the powerful ways that language and identity intertwine. Mahdavi-herself a hyphenated Iranian-American-weaves in her own experiences struggling to find a sense of self amidst feelings of betwixt and between. Through stories of the author and three other individuals, Hyphen collectively considers how to navigate, articulate, and empower new identities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Where were the Brontë sisters actually born? If this was a quiz question, most people would give the wrong answer. Even standard books on the Brontë family often gloss over the fact that Charlotte, Emily and Anne – along with their wayward brother Branwell – were all born between 1815 and 1820 in Thornton, a village on the edge of Bradford, and not at the famous Brontë Parsonage in nearby Haworth. The original hearth in front of which they were born – and the modest terraced property in Market Street, Thornton still housing that historic fireplace – is surprisingly little-known even among Bronte enthusiasts. All that is about to change. A group of dedicated volunteers, backed by a couple of grants and a lot of crowdfunding, has just bought the long-neglected house and will soon embark on transforming it into an arts and education project with a difference. Under the banner ‘Be More Brontë’, local youngsters will be introduced to the Bronte sisters, hear about wonderful books such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and be encouraged to explore their imaginations and their own future dreams. By 2025, the Brontë Birthplace will be open to the public, featuring a café, a lively programme of educational, community and creative events, and even three guest rooms (named after Charlotte, Emily and Anne respectively) where visitors can stay the night. In this podcast, Duncan McCargo talks to two Brontë Birthplace committee members about the project, and about what the Brontes mean to them. Christa Ackroyd is a former regional television news presenter, while Steve Stanworth is a local historian responsible for the restoration of the nearby Brontë Bell Chapel site. Your support is still needed: please visit brontebirthplace.com to offer financial assistance, or to find out how you can get involved. Duncan McCargo is a professor of global affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a host on the NBN Literature Channel. Full disclosure: he is also a patron of the Brontë Birthplace. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Jonathan Kramnick, the author of a new book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Criticism and Truth offers a formal analysis of the particular practices and habits of academic literary criticism, within the context of the transformations brought on by the Great Recession of 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Jonathan describes close reading as a “creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world.” The case for literary study is made not through an appeal to contemporary relevance or intellectual abstraction—but in the material specificity of how literary criticism is done. Though it may share its objects of study with linguistics or history, as a scholarly discipline, literary criticism gains insight from an intimacy with and even mimicry of its object of study. Jonathan Kramnick is Professor of English at Yale University. Previously, he has published the monographs Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford, 2010), and Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge, 1999). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023), Dr. Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor. Dr. Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions”: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness”? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Dr. Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi—the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Dr. Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny. What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity—a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions. Gary Saul Morson is without a doubt one of the leading specialists on 19th and 20th century Russian literature. He is professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. And he is perhaps one of the few writers who has written for both The New Criterion and the New York Review of Books.  Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this interview the distinguished historian Jackson Lears talks about his latest book, Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (FSG, 2023), which explores an alternative American cultural history by tracking the thinkers who championed the individual’s spontaneous energies and the idea of a living universe against the strictures of conventional religion, business, and politics. From Puritan times to today, Lears traces ideas and fads such as hypnosis and faith healing from the pulpit and stock exchange to the streets and the betting table. We meet the great prophets of American vitality, from Walt Whitman and William James to Andrew Jackson Davis (the “Poughkeepsie Seer”) and the “New Thought” pioneer Helen Wilmans, who spoke of the “god within—rendering us diseaseless incarnations of the great I Am." Well before John Maynard Keynes stressed the reliance of capitalism on investors’ “animal spirits,” these vernacular vitalists established an American religion of embodied mind that also suited the needs of the marketplace. In the twentieth century, the vitalist impulse would be enlisted in projects of violent and racially charged national regeneration by Theodore Roosevelt and his legatees, even as African American writers confronted the paradoxes of primitivism and the 1960s counterculture imagined new ways of inspiriting the universe. Today, scientists are rediscovering the best features of the vitalist tradition—permitting us to reclaim the role of chance and spontaneity in the conduct of our lives and our understanding of the cosmos. Have a listen to our conversation here. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time? When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal (Riverhead Books, 2023) is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel. Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Linking literature, philosophy, art, and personal experience, a moving exploration of the wooded landscape’s power. In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State, which had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish, and Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who currently live and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history of forests from prehistory to the present, taking in Gilgamesh, Virgil, Dante, the Gawain poet, medieval alchemists, the Brothers Grimm, Hudson River painters, Latin American folklore, contemporary African novelists, and much more. Combining lyricism with contemporary scholarship, Sax opens new emotional, intellectual, and environmental perspectives on the storied history of the forest. Avery Weinman earned her Master’s in History from UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hunter S. Thompson was never a hippie, but his writing nonetheless helped define the counterculture and the San Francisco scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. In Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo (U California Press, 2022), literary scholar and California historian Peter Richardson examines Thompson less as a cultural figure than as a member of a literary movement. Richardson explores the roots of Thompson's "gonzo journalism" writing style and explains his influences and his influence as a figure in American letters. In doing so, he reveals a portrait of Thompson that extends beyond his Depp-and-Doonesbury shaded cartoonish caricature and shows the writer to be a savvy media critic and adept social commentator. Thompson's literature cuts through the decades of mythology and reveals the id of the west coast counterculture, warts and all, all while being pretty entertaining and, at times, prescient of our own political and cultural moment. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be" )--as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why "auto-fiction" strikes her as a "bad category" and "a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally" since "the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience." Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer's weirdness! Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children's book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor's House William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Between 2000 and 2010, many contemporary US-American women writers were returning to the private space of the kitchen, writing about their experiences in that space and then publishing their memoirs for the larger public to consume. Season to Taste: Rewriting Kitchen Space in Contemporary Women’s Food Memoirs (U Mississippi Press, 2023) explores women’s food memoirs with recipes in order to consider the ways in which these women are rewriting this kitchen space and renegotiating their relationships with food. Caroline J. Smith begins the book with a historical overview of how the space of the kitchen, and the expectations of women associated with it, have shifted considerably since the 1960s. Better Homes and Gardens, as well as the discourse of the second-wave feminist movement, tended to depict the space as a place of imprisonment. The contemporary popular writers examined in Season to Taste, such as Ruth Reichl, Kim Sunée, Jocelyn Delk Adams, Julie Powell, and Molly Wizenberg, respond to this characterization by instead presenting the kitchen as a place of transformation. In their memoirs and recipes, these authors reinterpret their roles within the private sphere of the home as well as the public sphere of the world of publishing (whether print or digital publication). The authors examined here explode the divide of private/feminine and public/masculine in both content and form and complicate the genres of recipe writing, diary writing, and memoir. These women writers, through the act of preparing and consuming food, encourage readers to reconsider the changing gender politics of the kitchen. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do Tulsa, Santa Fe, and New Orleans have in common? When viewed from the perspective of Indigenous arts and culture, the answer is quite a bit. In Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma (U Nebraska, 2023), Oklahoma State University professor of English Lindsey Claire Smith draws connections between Indigenous art, particularly writing, and these two cities to the east and west. By focusing on mobility between urban Native spaces, Smith shows how the vibrant arts scene in Tulsa has influenced artists in Indigenous homelands far removed from Oklahoma. By telling stories through fiction, visual art, and other media, Native artists claim these cities as urban homelands, linking together disparate places through the shared link of Indigeneity.  Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the Assistant Director of the American Society for Environmental History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Paul Fisher Davies' book Comics As Communication: A Functional Approach (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) explores how comics function to make meanings in the manner of a language. It outlines a framework for describing the resources and practices of comics creation and readership, using an approach that is compatible with similar descriptions of linguistic and multimodal communication. The approach is based largely on the work of Michael Halliday, drawing also on the pragmatics of Paul Grice, the Text World Theory of Paul Werth and Joanna Gavins, and ideas from art theory, psychology and narratology. This brings a broad Hallidayan framework of multimodal analysis to comics scholarship, and plays a part in extending that tradition of multimodal linguistics to graphic narrative. Dr. Paul Fisher Davies gained his Ph.D. in 2017 at the University of Sussex, where he has also been an associate lecturer and student mentor. He has published in Studies in Comics, the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, The Comics Grid and INKS amongst others, including sketchnotes and academic work in comics form. He teaches English Language and Literature at East Sussex College in the UK. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In How the News Feels: The Empathic Power of Literary Journalists (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), Jonathan D. Fitzgerald examines a mode of journalistic storytelling dating back nearly two centuries. Literary journalism arose in the decades before the U.S. Civil War alongside the era's sentimental literature. Combining fact-based reporting with the sentimentality of popular fiction, literary journalism encouraged readers to empathize with subjects by presenting more nuanced and engaging stories than typical news coverage. While women writers were central to the formation and ongoing significance of the genre, literary journalism scholarship has largely ignored their contributions. How the News Feels re-centers the work of a range of writers who were active from the 1830s until today, including Catharine Williams, Margaret Fuller, Nellie Bly, Winifred Black, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Alexis Okeowo. Offering intimate access to their subjects' thoughts, motivations, and yearnings, these journalists encouraged readers to empathize with society's outcasts, from asylum inmates and murder suspects to "fallen women" and the working poor. As this carefully researched study shows, these writers succeeded in defining and developing the genre of literary journalism, with stories that inspire action, engender empathy, and narrow the gap between writer, subject, and audience. James Kates is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He has worked as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Dr Darryl Sterk, a Canadian eco-translator who is now based in Lingnan University in Hong Kong and dedicated his work in Taiwanese eco-literature and translation. In our conversation, Darryl told us how he ends up choosing a career path for eco-translation and how he defines “eco-translation” in his own way. He also shared with us his translation experience more in details by drawing reference to Wu Ming-yi’s The Stolen Bicycle. Furthermore, facing challenges of AI (artificial intelligence) in the field of translation, Darryl also chatted with us what kind of unique feature that human translators can offer but a machine is unable to provide so far. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco Press, 2023) probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants. A woman known only to her neighbors as "the Asian recycling lady" collects bottles from the streets she calls home. A young college grad ponders the void left from a broken friendship. An unfulfilled housewife in Shanghai finds a secret outlet for her ambitions in an undercover gambling den. Two strangers become something more through the bond of mistaken identity. These characters, adeptly attuned to the mystery of living, invite us to consider whether it is possible for anyone to entirely do right by another. Tomb Sweeping brims with remarkable skill and talent in every story, keeping a definitive pulse on loss, community, and what it means to feel fully alive. With her debut story collection, Chang further establishes herself as "a writer to watch" (New York Times Book Review). Alexandra Chang is the author of the fabulous novel Days of Distraction. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her writing has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Ventura County, California with her husband, and their dog and cats. Recommended Books: Rachel Kang, The Real Americans Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story Cleo Quian, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Chairman Mao was a librarian. Stalin was a published poet. Evelyn Waugh served as a commando - before leaving to write Brideshead Revisited. Since the advent of modern warfare, books have all too often found themselves on the frontline. In The Book At War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict (Basic Books, 2023), acclaimed historian Dr. Andrew Pettegree traces the surprising ways in which written culture - from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank - has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age. From the American Civil War to the invasion of Ukraine, books, authors and readers have gone to war - and in the process become both deadly weapons and our most persuasive arguments for peace. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, ritual, and most of all, love. Whether they retell foundational myths about the nation, as in The Vaster Wilds, or rethink the relationship between faith, nature, and desire, as does Matrix, Groff puts love for her characters, for the planet, and for the process of writing at the center of all her fiction. She discusses an anticipated triptych of novels beginning with Matrix and continuing with The Vaster Wilds that covers 1,000 years of women, religion, and planetary crisis and care. The Vaster Wilds tells a kind of anti-captivity narrative as it follows a servant girl who has escaped from a colonial settlement in 1609. The novel asks what it means to love the wilderness even when it is hostile to human survival. Groff and McGrath explore how the novel offers a cautionary tale about the intertwined ills of colonialism and climate change without shame or condescension. Constantly rearranging “the detritus of the actual world” into stories of faith and love and care, Groff relies on the rituals of daily life to discover the formal architectures of fiction. Mentioned in this episode By Lauren Groff: The Vaster Wilds (2023) Matrix (2021) Florida (2018) Fates and Furies (2015) Arcadia (2011) The Monsters of Templeton (2008) Also mentioned: William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian Magazine article on the Jamestown Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe John Williams, Stoner Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens  Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most influential poets. This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam's most beloved and haunting poems. Both scholars and general readers will gain a deeper understanding of his poetics, as Probstein situates each poem in its historical and literary context.  The English translations presented in Centuries Encircle Me with Fire: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (Academic Studies Press, 2022) are so deeply immersed in the Russian sources and language through the ear of a Russian-born Probstein who has spent most of his adult life in the US, that they provide reader's with a Mandelstam unseen any translations that precede it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the wide realm of Shakespeare worship, the house in Stratford-upon-Avon where William Shakespeare was born in 1564 – known colloquially as the 'Birthplace' – remains the chief shrine. It's not as romantic as Anne Hathaway's thatched cottage, it's not where he wrote any of his plays, and there's nothing inside the house that once belonged to Shakespeare himself. So why, for centuries, have people kept turning up on the doorstep? In Shakespeare’s House: A Window onto his Life and Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2023) Dr. Richard Schoch answers that question by examining the history of the Birthplace and by exploring how its changing fortunes over four centuries perfectly mirror the changing attitudes toward Shakespeare himself. Based on original research in the archives of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, and featuring two black and white illustrated plate sections which draw on the wide array of material available at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book traces the history of Shakespeare's birthplace over four centuries. Beginning in the 1560s, when Shakespeare was born there, it ends in the 1890s, when the house was rescued from private purchase and turned into the Shakespeare monument that it remains today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Geoffrey Sanborn tells us about Plagiarism. A concept emerged with the idea of originality, plagiarism challenges some of our most deeply held notions of individualism and status. Hatred of plagiarism is so baked into our culture that it evokes a gut response of disgust, which prevents us from actually analyzing it as a form of social behavior. In the episode, Geoff talks about websites that promise to “humanize” chatGPT content, like the AI Text Converter and the Plagiarism Remover. He talks about postcolonial theory, as a tool that might help us analyze plagiarism, and invokes Homi Bhabha’s idea of “colonial mimicry,” which appears in his 1984 article “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” He also talks about the actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and references David Graeber’s book Debt, which we ran an episode on way back in 2020. It was in the early days of High Theory, so apologies for the audio quality, but we think you’ll like it. Geoff is a Samuel Williston Professor of English and department chair at Amherst College. He has published many books about nineteenth century American literature, most recently Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetics of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), which was the inspiration for this conversation. It’s a really great book! You should read it. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us? In What the Greeks Did for Us (Yale UP, 2023), Tony Spawforth explores our classical heritage, wherever it’s to be found. He reveals its legacy in everything from religion to popular culture, and unearths the darker side of Greek influence—from the Nazis’ obsession with Spartan “racial purity” to the elitism of classical education. Paying attention to the huge breadth and variety of Hellenic influence, this book paints an essential portrait of the ancient world’s living legacy—considering to whom it matters, and why. Tony Spawforth is emeritus professor of ancient history at Newcastle University. As well as leading cultural tours in Greece, he has presented eight documentaries for the BBC and has published thirteen books, including The Story of Greece and Rome. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker from Bahrain, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world. Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, imagining, and representing black people as a subject of study in Arabic writings. Kadhem explores the narratives of Africanism in the Arab imaginary from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century to show how racism toward black people is ingrained in the Arab world, offering a comprehensive account of the representations of blackness and black people in Arab cultural narratives - including the Quran, the hadith, and Arabic literature, geography, and history.  Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) examines the pejorative image of black people in Arab cultural discourse through three perspectives: the controversial anthropological concept that culture defines what it means to be human; the biblical narrative of Noah cursing his son Ham’s descendants - understood to be darker-skinned - with servitude; and Greco-Roman physiognomy, philosophy, medicine, and geography. Describing the shifting standards of inclusion that have positioned Arab identity in opposition to blackness, Kadhem argues that in the cultural imaginary of the Arab world, black people are widely conflated with the Other. Analyzing canonical Arabic texts through the lens of English, French, and German theory, Africanism traces the history of racism in Arab culture. Africanism digs deep into the cultural constructions of blacks in all aspects of the Arab imaginary, including language, religion, philosophy, literature, geography, and history. Author: Nader Kadhem is a professor emeritus of cultural studies at the University of Bahrain. Kadhim authored many literature and cultural criticism articles and studies published in Bahraini Arabic media. He has published 16 books that can be found here. Translator: Amir Al-Azraki is an Arab-Canadian playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, Associate Professor, and Coordinator of the Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program, Renison University College, University of Waterloo. His research interests include Arab Theatre, Afro-Arab Cultural Heritage and Representation, and Literary Translation (Arabic-English) Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on X @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Affairs and a Professor at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, explores a variety of frameworks for thinking about this question, from liberal and egalitarian justifications, through to communitarian, conservative, and multiculturalist ideas. The book outlines the economic method for thinking about the arts, and uses this as a starting point to understand what various political philosophies might tell policymakers and the public today. A rich and deep intervention on a pressing social and governmental question, the book is essential reading across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in arts and cultural policy. Prof Rushton blogs at both Substack and Artsjournal and you can read open access papers covering some of the key ideas in the book here and here. Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Manchester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode, which is co-hosted with Michael Nishimura, features a conversation with Dr. Diane C. Fujino, the author of Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Reverend Michael Yasutake (University of Washington Press, 2020).  The book traces the activism of two siblings who charted their own paths for what it meant to be Nisei. Reverend Mike was an Episcopal minister whose politics changed with the historical contexts and circumstances surrounding his life, whereas Mitsuye is one of the most widely known Nisei feminists and writers and was among the first writers to discuss the experience of incarceration. Through detailing their half-century of dedication to global movements, including multicultural feminism, Puerto Rican independence, Japanese American redress, and Indigenous sovereignty, Reverend Mike and Mitsuye’s lives complicate the dominant narrative that depicts Japanese Americans moving toward conservatism in the later part of the 20th century. Their lives present, in the words of Fujino, “a song of hope that transforms the ruptures and displacement of incarceration and atomic bombs, that moves from invisibility to insurgent mobilizations, and that rejects the projected polite politics of the Nisei to build, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘a world transcending citizenship’ that demands in/sight for the blind, food for all those who hunger, and liberation for the captive, for all of us bound by colonial, racial, and patriarchal structures” (p.190). Dr. Fujino is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Broadly, her research examines Japanese and Asian American activist history within an Asian American Radical Tradition and shaped by Black Power and Third World decolonization. Nisei Radicals joins her other political biographies including Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). She is also co-editor of Contemporary Asia American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation (University of Washington Press, 2022). Donna Doan Anderson (she/her) is a PhD candidate in History and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Michael Nishimura (he/him) is a graduate student in Sociology and Asian American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, Kat Mustatea's Voidopolis (MIT Press, 2023) is a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City. Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante's Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita. Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec's A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing. A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another. A guide to reading Voidopolis can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2023), Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism’s death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism’s death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Dieshows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Ian Smith urges readers of Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet to develop “racial literacy.” Through both wide social influences and specific professional pressures, Shakespearean critics have been taught to ignore, suppress, and explain away the racial thinking of the plays, a set of evasion strategies that inevitably have political and social ramifications in the contemporary United States. As Ian writes in the introduction, Black Shakespeare is intended to “shift the focus to conditions that shape readers, inform their epistemologies, and influence their reading practices” (3). Today’s guest is Ian Smith, Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Ian is the author of the previous monograph, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave, 2009), as well as one of the most important articles in early modern literary criticism of the last twenty years, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief.” Ian is the current President of the Shakespeare Association of America. John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Earlier this month, Toho Studios released “Godzilla Minus One”—the 37th film in the now almost seven-decade-old franchise. Godzilla has gone through many phases over the past 70 years: symbol of Japan’s nuclear fears, cuddly defender of humanity, Japanese cultural icon and, now, the centerpiece of another Hollywood cinematic universe. But it was 1954’s Godzilla that launched the whole thing, with a story written by Japanese author Shigeru Kayama. He also wrote a novelization for the movie and its sequel Godzilla Raids Again (University of Minnesota Press: 2023), both translated by Jeffrey Angles. In this interview, Jeffrey and I talk about these novels, how they differ from the movies, and how they start Godzilla’s journey to becoming a cultural icon. Jeffrey Angles is a professor and advisor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. He is also a prominent translator of modern Japanese literature, with several volumes of Japanese literature in translation to his name. His book of poetry won the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, making Jeffrey the first American ever to win this prestigious prize for a book of poetry. Jeffrey can be followed on Twitter at @jeffreyangles. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sanskrit narrative is the lifeblood of Indian culture, encapsulating and perpetuating insights and values central to Indian thought and practice. Raj Balkaran and McComas Taylor's edited volume Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative: Studies in the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas (ANU Press, 2023) brings together eighteen of the foremost scholars across the globe, who, in an unprecedented collaboration, accord these texts the integrity and dignity they deserve. The pre-eminent contributors to this landmark collection use novel methods and theory to meaningfully engage Sanskrit narrative texts, showcasing the state of contemporary scholarship on the Sanskrit epics and purāṇas. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (U Toronto Press, 2023) foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighborhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities. Andrew Brandel is an Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.  Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Under the direction of founding editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age series is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative. Focusing on the American cultural context, Alexa Weik von Mossner develops an ecocritical approach that draws on the insights of affective science and cognitive narratology. This approach helps to clarify how we interact with environmental narratives in ways that are both biologically universal and culturally specific. In doing so, it pays particular attention to the thesis that our minds are both embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), not only when we interact with the real world but also in our engagement with imaginary worlds. How do we experience the virtual environments we encounter in literature and film on the sensory and emotional level? How do environmental narratives invite us to care for human and nonhuman others who are put at risk? And how do we feel about the speculative futures presented to us in ecotopian and eco-dystopian texts? Weik von Mossner explores these central questions that are important to anyone with an interest in the emotional appeal and persuasive power of environmental narratives. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find his killer and give his life’s work meaning. This is a historical novel that bends and twists genre and narrative into wondrous and disorienting knots and makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Shehan notes that if anything survives the death of your body, it’s probably the voice in your head, and the voice in his head speaks in the second person.  Moving from philosophy to the politics of fiction, Professor Sangeeta Ray, author of En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke), prompts Shehan to think about Sri Lankan literature’s rise on the global stage, and Shehan makes the case for fiction standing in for the missing records and histories of the dead, lost, and disappeared in a prolonged time of war. The conversation takes us to the surprise Sri Lankan win in the Cricket World Cup of 1996, the role of queer desire in a novel about war tragedies, and whether any story about the Sri Lankan civil war can be optimistic. We end with a signature question that links Shehan and a previous guest, the Argentinian novelist Mariana Enríquez, in their shared (and spooky) writing inspiration.  Mentions: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children  Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes  Shehan Karunatilaka, The Legend of Pradeep Matthew  Kevin Liu  Ted Chiang  1996 Cricket World Cup  Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient   Romesh Gunesekera  Yasmine Gooneratne  Shyam Selvadurai  A. Sivanandan  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Writing Cyprus: Postcolonial and Partitioned Literatures of Place and Space (Routledge, 2021) explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan's humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre's Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empirical, that demonstrates the power of space and place in postcolonial partition cases. The book shows the ways that place and space determine identity so as to create identifications; together these places, spaces and identifications are always in production. In analysing practices of writing, inventing, experiencing, reading, and construction, the book offers a distinct 'solidarity' that captures the 'truth of space' and place for the production of multiple-mutable Cypruses shaped by and for multiple-mutable selves, ending in a 'differential' Cyprus, Mediterranean, and world. Writing Cyprus offers not only a nuanced understanding of the actual and active production of colonialism, postcolonialism and partition that dismantles the dominant binary legacy of historical-political deadlock discourse, but a fruitful model for understanding other sites of conflict and division Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When one thinks of your typical horror movie and it’s usual imagery, a number of tropes may come forward. Graveyards behind old cathedrals, crucifixes and holy water, possessions and exorcisms. The uniting thread of all of these is that they are all tied to the religious. One might then wonder if there is some underlying thread of meaning beneath the facade. Addressing this topic directly is Jonathan Greenaway in his book Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2022). Surveying a number of well known works from this period, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bronte sisters all the way up to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Greenaway finds works filled with various references and discussions of religious scripture, imagery and themes. What’s more, he’s able to follow these various occasions down into deeper territory, finding a subterranean conversation in much of this literature on themes of embodiment, createdness, epistemology, political institutions and ethical transgression. What Greenaway comes away with is insight into a dialogue between these two fields that will be richly rewarding to believers of both of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Five centuries after the forced conversion of Spanish and Portuguese Jews to Catholicism, stories of these conversos' descendants uncovering long-hidden Jewish roots have come to light and taken hold of the literary and popular imagination. This seemingly remote history has inspired a wave of contemporary writing involving hidden artifacts, familial whispers and secrets, and clandestine Jewish ritual practices pointing to a past that had been presumed dead and buried. The Converso's Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford UP, 2020) explores the cultural politics and literary impact of this reawakened interest in converso and crypto-Jewish history, ancestry, and identity, and asks what this fascination with lost-and-found heritage can tell us about how we relate to and make use of the past. Dalia Kandiyoti offers nuanced interpretations of contemporary fictional and autobiographical texts about crypto-Jews in Cuba, Mexico, New Mexico, Spain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. These works not only imagine what might be missing from the historical archive but also suggest an alternative historical consciousness that underscores uncommon convergences of and solidarities within Sephardi, Christian, Muslim, converso, and Sabbatean histories. Steeped in diaspora, Sephardi, transamerican, Iberian, and world literature studies, The Converso's Return illuminates how the converso narrative can enrich our understanding of history, genealogy, and collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Halsall’s Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis (Ohio State UP, 2023) has four primary objectives.  One, it explores this visual and literary medium that is heavily invested in the representation of children and youth, especially in relation to the depiction of particular experiences (social, political, cultural, racial, sexual, ableist, etc.) that young people have undergone and continue to live through. These texts contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, presenting instead children as actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them.  Two, it examines the many circuitous routes that graphic literature for young people takes in and out of discourses of nation, belonging, ableism, and identity, moving with and oftentimes against currents of power.  Three, it participates in a crucial intersectional trend in children’s publishing that looks to complicate and diversify the content and characters produced for young readers in the Global North. Specifically, it highlights visual representations of a range of young people, including child soldiers, migrants, Indigenous peoples in Canada, queers, and young people living with impairments and/or undergoing particular medical life events. In its investigation of such subjects it also considers questions of age and audience.  Finally, it considers the reader as a source tension itself: the reader that is produced by the graphic text and the empirical reader (who might be an adult, child, etc.). Ultimately, this project considers graphic narratives for children and about children, an under-explored field in itself, and one that provides surprising insight into the types of reading material that young readers gravitate towards and that complicate assumptions of readerly innocence. (Halsall 2023: P8) In this interview Dr. Halsall talks about frameworks for analyzing comics aimed at young readers, how contemporary culture and politics can influence access to these works, and hopes for the creation of a new comics archive. Dr. Alison Halsall is an Associate Professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, and the coordinator of the Children, Childhood and Youth Program, part of the Department of Humanities. Her work is interdisciplinary and trans-generic – in addition to children’s literature she specializes in Victorian and modernist literatures, with a particular emphasis on Visual Cultures, which includes the study of paintings and illustrations, contemporary film, comics and graphic novels. Alison Halsall and co-editor Jonathan Warren received the 2023 Will Eisner Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly Work for editing The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Unlocking Scots: The Secret Life of the Scots Language (Luath, 2023), Dr. Clive Young sets out to uncover the secret life of Scots – the centuries of vibrant debate and unconscious bilingualism hidden beneath slang and touristy tea-towels. From 19th-century dictionaries to Twitter rammies, Dr. Young explores the evolution, suppression, and potential revitalisation of Scots. He not only investigates its troubled past, but also looks towards the future with hope and a practical action plan that will allow everyone, however estranged from the mither tongue, to keep it hale and hearty for generations to come. He investigates the deep history of Scots and the linguistic tension surrounding those who naturally spoke it and reflects on how Scots has now been saturated in politics – and what that means for the future of Scots speakers. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature. Barry Reay and Nina Attwood's Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-garde in Mid-century Paris and New York (Manchester UP, 2023) tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures. Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitute's Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian England (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015) Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Auden’s quote has been used for so many purposes, it might be worth remembering what he meant. Auden’s line is importantly from a poem memorializing W.B. Yeats, a politician and a poet. Auden meant that despite Yeats’s poetry, “Ireland [still] has her madness and her weather still.” Yeats’s poetry didn’t stop suffering. But Auden acknowledges that poetry is a “way of happening” that survives and persists. Today’s guest, Caroline Levine, has written a brilliant new book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton UP, 2023). As I read the book, I began asking myself in the manner of Auden: “Does literary criticism make nothing happen? What kind of something might attention to social forms within aesthetic criticism make happen?” I am excited to talk to Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities at Cornell University. Previously, she was Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), which won the winner of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association, as well as The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003) and Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007). John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2023), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Drawing on history, literary studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit philology, narrative studies, and philosophy, Lindquist traces Yājñavalkya’s literary life—from his earliest mentions in ritual texts, through his developing biography in the Upaniṣads, and finally to his role as a hoary sage in narrative literature—offering the first detailed monograph on this central figure in early Indian religious and literary history. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1995, Seamus Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. During his speech, he explained that the adequacy of lyric poetry spoke to the “‘temple inside our hearing’ which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation,’ from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem’s concerns or the poet’s truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet’s ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.” Ten years after his death, we continue to strain with Heaney to hear that pluralizing voice of radiant truth. “Seamus Heaney’s Afterlives” is the subject of an upcoming conference held at Boston College between November 16th, 17th, and 18th, 2023. The four keynote lectures, along with interviews with contemporary poets influenced by Heaney, have been published in the latest issue of the Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. I am excited to speak with the organizer of this conference, Joseph Nugent, and the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, Vera Kreilkamp, about Heaney’s continuing relevance, the conference, the special issue of the journal. Joseph Nugent is Professor of English at Boston College. Joe is the creator of the iPhone app, JoyceWays: Ulysses for You, and the website, The Dubliners Bookshelf. His teaching includes courses on the digital humanities, Joyce, and Irish studies, and he has written the eBook Digital Dubliners, as well as articles on manliness and representations of the Irish saint Colmcill and olfactory domestic identity in rural Ireland. Vera Kreilkamp is Professor of Irish Studies at Boston College. Vera is the co-editor of Éire-Ireland, and is the author of The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse University Press, 1998) and the museum catalogs Éireland (2003), Rural Ireland: The Inside Story (2012) and The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish (2016). Note: Around the 28-minute mark, I quote from Fintan O’Toole’s commemoration of Seamus Heaney, originally published in the New York Review of Books, but the quotation did not record clearly. Here are the uncorrupted lines from O’Toole’s article: “Poetry is language held taut by being stretched between the poles of competing desires. In Heaney’s work, the tensions extend in many directions: the Wordsworthian Romantic at odds with the Joycean realist; the atheist in search of the miraculous; the world-ranging cosmopolitan with his little patch of remembered earth; the lover of the archaic who cannot escape the urgency of contemporary history.” John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Maaheen Ahmed, who has edited a new collection of essays, The Cambridge Companion to Comics (Cambridge University Press, 2023). This book offers both a broad diachronic perspective, reaching back to the earliest print artifacts that could be called “comic books,” and a deep synchronic view, touching on mainstream and alternative comics work, from almost every continent. Contributions include Jaqueline Berndt on the aesthetics of “manga eyes,” Daniel Stein on “racialines” in comics, Kim Munson on the vexed relationship of museums and comics, and Shiamin Kwa on life-writing in comics. Maaheen Ahmed is Professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. Maaheen is the author of Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and the co-editor of Comics Memory, with Benoît Crucifix (Palgrave, 2018). Maaheen is one of the primary investigators of “Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today (COMICS),” a collaborative project which brings together childhood studies and comics studies. John Yargo is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, and John Milton's Paradise Lost. He has published in Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A Lasting Vision: Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a collaborative, interdisciplinary volume that introduces a remarkably long-lasting poetic treatise, the Mirror on Literature (Kavyadarsha), whose impact extended far beyond its origins in the south of India in 700 CE. Editor Yigal Bronner does not merely collect distinct, single-authored essays but rather interweaves the voices of the other twenty-four contributors (and his own voice) through chapters that are edited collections in miniature, as typically the subsections are written by different authors who engage with each other's material. This unusual structure comes partly out of the book's treatment of a wide range of languages, regions, and methodologies. Dandin's treatise is in Sanskrit, but understanding it and its history requires Kannada, Pali, Prakrit, Tamil, Sinhala, Burmese, Bengali, and Chinese; it came from India but spread to Sri Lanka, Tibet, Mongolia, Burma, Bengal, Java, Bali, and China; engagement with the text includes both close readings of poetry and attention to theories of poetics, inquiries into direct commentary on the Mirror and investigations of resistance to it. This open-access work, the outcome of a decade's worth of collaboration, is intended to spark a new field--Dandin studies--and to prompt new approaches to the literary traditions across the complex of languages and cultures today known as "Asia." Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this volume entitled Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2023), Carson Bay focuses on an important but neglected work of Late Antiquity: Pseudo-Hegesippus' On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), a Latin history of later Second Temple Judaism written during the fourth century CE. Bay explores the presence of so many Old Testament figures in a work that recounts the Roman-Jewish War (66–73 CE) and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. By applying the lens of Roman exemplarity to Pseudo-Hegesippus, he elucidates new facets of Biblical reception, history-writing, and anti-Judaism in a text from the formative first century of Christian Empire. The author also offers new insights into the Christian historiographical imagination and how Biblical heroes and Classical culture helped Christians to write anti-Jewish history. Revealing novel aspects of the influence of the Classical literary tradition on early Christian texts, this book also newly questions the age-old distinction between the Christian and the Classical (or 'pagan') in the ancient Mediterranean world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why do politicians write poems? And what does a politician’s poetry tell us about their leadership? In this episode, a collective of researchers from the University of Oslo discuss these questions by focusing on India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Modi has a highly visible and extremely complex public image. He often appears as a firm and decisive defender of the nation, intent on taking India to new global heights. At other times he may emerge as the humble son of a teaseller, who has made it to the top despite all odds. And, at yet other times he may appear almost as a sagacious Hindu holy man and kingly ruler. What is less well known is that Modi is also a poet, with several published collections of poetry to his credit, in both Indian languages and in English translation. What does Modi’s poetry reveal about India’s Prime Minister? What are we to make of a man who is both a staunch Hindu nationalist, a populist, and a self-professed poetic soul? Indeed, what is the relationship between Modi the poet and Modi the politician? Niladri Chatterjee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Deva Nandan Harikrishnan is a Doctoral Student at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo. Guro Samuelsen is an independent researcher with a PhD in South Asia Studies from the University of Oslo. Our host, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about how he wrote a book out of found language.  The conversation reveals why The Nature Book is so compelling: it scrambles the usual distinctions between narrative and database. It is fast-paced, propulsive, full of cliffhangers and yet also a “mood collage” composed of macro, micro, and nanopatterns that Tom identified in his corpus. Writing through a complex set of Oulipo-like constraints, he checked his own authorial freedom to create a book in which the human hand becomes distant and ghostly – its traces felt in the change of seasons and at the bottoms of oceans yet nowhere seen. Deidre connects Tom’s “literary supercut” (his own term for his practice) to the centuries-old tradition of commonplacing in which ordinary readers would cut and paste favored passages into books that then became archives of personal experience and collective memory. The Nature Book thus finds its place in a countercultural tradition of authorship where recycling takes precedence over invention. Copying, curation, and rearrangement become a novelistic style of “degrowth” in which writers discover that, in lieu of developing new language, they can plumb the depths of our already existing language. The episode ends with a series of surprising answers to the signature question: narratives and databases cross paths with hookups and keepsakes! Mentions:  Kota Ezawa Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Fiction for Dummies Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Herman Melville, Moby Dick It Narratives – narratives in which protagonists are often manufactured objects (e.g. Adventures of a Corkscrew (1775)) Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith et al. (edited) Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Recall This Book listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner (Professor of English and Theater at Harvard, editor of more than one Norton Anthology, and author of many prizewinning books) from that fabulous RTB episode about his “deep history” of literature and literacy, The Written World. And you know his feelings about Wodehouse from his Books in Dark Times confessions. Today you get to hear his views on culture as mediation and translation, all the way down. His utterly fascinating new book, Culture: The Story of Us from Cave Art to K Pop (Norton, 2023) argues that mediators, translators and transmitters are not just essential supplements, they are the whole kit and kaboodle—it is borrowing and appropriation all the way down. Mentioned in the episode: Cave art: Chauvet cave "Meaning rather than utility" (cf Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams) Recovery of Gilgamesh retold in David Damrosch's The Buried Book) David Ferry translation of Gilgamesh John Guillory's version of multiple forms of cultural transmission: "Monuments and Documents" William Blake, "Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead" Alex Ross writes eloquently in his book The Rest Is Noise about music's "pulverized modernity"; the revival of ancient culture in a reformulated, fragmented and reassembled from. Creolization as distinctively Caribbean (cf Glissant's notion of creolite ) Orlando Paterson, Slavery and Social Death (cf also Vincent Brown on the syncretism and continuity in Carribean deathways, Reaper's Garden) "Revenants of the past" as a way of understanding what scholars do: a phrase from Lorraine Daston's Rules--and was extensively discussed in the RTB conversation with Daston. Peter Brown Through the Eye of the Needle on monastic wealth and the rise of "mangerial bishops"--a topic that came up in his conversation with RTB. John presses the non-cenobitic tradition of the hermit monk, but Martin insists that most Church tradition shares his preference for the cenobitic or communal monastic tradition --even on Mt Athos. Recallable Books:  Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture Richard Price, First Time (the dad of Leah Price?) Aphra Behn Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688) Roberto Calasso (an Umberto Eco sidekick?) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony  Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends meet. In The Chase and Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Sharony Green uncovers an understudied but important period of Hurston's life: her stay in Honduras in the late 1940s. On the eve of an awful accusation that nearly led to her suicide, Hurston fled to Honduras in search of a lost Mayan ruin. During her yearlong trip south of the US border, she appears to have never found the ruin she was chasing. But by escaping the Jim Crow south to Honduras, she avoided racist violence in the United States while still embracing her privilege—and power—as a US citizen in postwar Central America. While in Honduras, Hurston wrote Seraph on the Suwanee, her final novel and her only book to feature white characters, in an attempt to appeal to Hollywood's growing appetite for "crackerphilia" (stories about poor white folks) and to finally secure herself some financial stability. In a letter to her editor, Hurston wrote that in Honduras, she may not have found the Mayan ruin she was looking for, but she finally found herself. Hurston's experience in Honduras has much to teach us about Black women's lives and the thorny politics of postwar America as well as America's long and complicated entanglement with Central America. In an attempt to find historical meaning in an extraordinary woman's conceptions of herself in a changing world, Green unearths letters, diaries, literary writings, research reports, and other archival materials. The Chase and Ruins encourages us to reckon with and reimagine Hurston's fascinating life in all of its complexity and contradictions. Award-winning writer Sharony Green is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America.  Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy - until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Magazine (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Jeff Jarvis, part of the Object Lessons series is a tribute to all that magazines were. From their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom - enabled by new technologies - as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Leonie Hannan's book Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023) explores the practice of scientific enquiry as it took place in the eighteenth-century home. While histories of science have identified the genteel household as an important site for scientific experiment, they have tended to do so via biographies of important men of science. Using a wide range of historical source material, from household accounts and inventories to letters and print culture, this book investigates the tools within reach of early modern householders in their search for knowledge. It considers the under-explored question of the home as a site of knowledge production and does so by viewing scientific enquiry as one of many interrelated domestic practices. It shows that knowledge production and consumption were necessary facets of domestic life and that the eighteenth-century home generated practices that were integral to 'Enlightenment' enquiry. Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Drawings and sequential images are so pervasive in contemporary society that we may take their understanding for granted. But how transparent are they really, and how universally are they understood? Combining recent advances from linguistics, cognitive science, and clinical psychology, Who Understands Comics?: Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension (Bloomsbury, 2020) argues that visual narratives involve greater complexity and require a lot more decoding than widely thought. Although increasingly used beyond the sphere of entertainment as materials in humanitarian, educational, and experimental contexts, Neil Cohn demonstrates that their universal comprehension cannot be assumed. Instead, understanding a visual language requires a fluency that is contingent on exposure and practice with a graphic system. Bringing together a rich but scattered literature on how people comprehend, and learn to comprehend, a sequence of images, this book coalesces research from a diverse range of fields into a broader interdisciplinary view of visual narrative to ask: Who Understands Comics? In this interview, Dr. Cohn discusses some common misconceptions about comics, the ability to read and make comics, and how drawings are at the core of so many creations. Who Understands Comics? was Nominated for the 2021 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work Dr. Niel Cohn is currently an Associate Professor at the Tilburg center for Cognition and Communication at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, Neil Cohn is an American cognitive scientist best known for his pioneering research on the overlap in cognition between graphic communication and language. His books, The Visual Language of Comics (2013) and the 2021 Eisner-nominated Who Understands Comics? (2020), establish a foundation for the scientific study of comics' structure. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Medievalist Comics and the American Century (UP of Mississippi, 2016), Chris Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context. Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century. In this interview Dr. Bishop talks about the uses and abuses of classical and medieval texts in popular media, the value of studying flops, and how we all might misunderstand history for our own reassurance. Dr. Chris Bishop is a honorary lecturer at the Australian National University. He has published widely on the history of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, as well as on comic book studies. In 2012 Bishop was awarded a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his research, which led to the publication of the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth century, as merchants from South Asia traded goods in the ports of Yemen, noblemen from Safavid Iran established themselves in the courts of the Mughal Empire, and scholars from across the region came together to debate the Islamic sciences in the Arabian Peninsula's holy cities of Mecca and Medina.  James White's book Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India (Bloomsbury, 2023) demonstrates that the globalising tendency of migration created worldly literary systems which linked Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula through the production and circulation of classicizing Arabic and Persian poetry. By close reading over seventy unstudied manuscripts of seventeenth-century Arabic and Persian poetry that have remained hidden on the shelves of libraries in India, Iran, Turkey and Europe, the book examines how migrant poets adapted shared poetic forms, imagery and rhetoric to engage with their interlocutors and create communities in the cities where they settled. The book begins by reconstructing overarching patterns in the movement of over a thousand authors, and the economic basis for their migration, before focusing on six case studies of literary communities, which each represent a different location in the circulatory system of the Arabian Sea. In so doing, the book demonstrates the plurality of seventeenth-century aesthetic movements, a diversity which later nationalisms purposefully simplified and misread. James White is Departmental Lecturer of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis UP, 2023), Marat Grinberg argues that in an environment where Judaism had been all but destroyed, and a public Jewish presence routinely delegitimized, reading uniquely provided many Soviet Jews with an entry to communal memory and identity. The bookshelf was both a depository of selective Jewish knowledge and often the only conspicuously Jewish presence in their homes. The typical Soviet Jewish bookshelf consisted of a few translated works from Hebrew and numerous translations from Yiddish and German as well as Russian books with both noticeable and subterranean Jewish content. Such volumes, officially published, and not intended solely for a Jewish audience, afforded an opportunity for Soviet Jews to indulge insubordinate feelings in a largely safe manner. Grinberg is interested in pinpointing and decoding the complex reading strategies and the specifically Jewish uses to which the books on the Soviet Jewish bookshelf were put. He reveals that not only Jews read them, but Jews read them in a specific way. Amber Nickell is Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University, Editor at H-Ukraine, and Host at NBN Jewish Studies, Ukrainian Studies, and Eastern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I am talking today to Mingwei Song about his new book, Fear of Seeing: A Poetics of Chinese Science Fiction (Columbia UP, 2023). The book is a sweeping account of contemporary Chinese science fiction that begins by asking, has “anything new arrived with the new century that redefined contemporaneousness?” As listeners might guess, in Song’s account, the aesthetics of science fiction are the new and invigorating arrival on the scene of Chinese literature. Whether it be the technological sublime of Liu Cixin or the bodily horrors of Han Song, new wave Chinese science fiction engages with the problem of representing China with what Song identifies as the poetics of the invisible. Song shows how the invisible functions in chapters dedicated to both the major contemporary figures mentioned above, as well canonical writers like Lu Xun, and the newest and edgiest science fiction writers that have recently emerged onto the literary scene in China. Fear of Seeing shows how science fiction given “a country deprived of liberal imagination” a “multitude of new dreams.” At the same time, he suggests, the utopian (as well as quite dystopian) possibilities, political and aesthetic, opened up by new wave Chinese science fiction exist in an ambivalent relationship to state power. We will discuss these points as well as many others in detail in the following interview. Julia Keblinska is a postdoc at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Simon Grennan's book A Theory of Narrative Drawing (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) offers an original new conception of visual storytelling, proposing that drawing, depictive drawing and narrative drawing are produced in an encompassing dialogic system of embodied social behavior. It refigures the existing descriptions of visual story-telling that pause with theorizations of perception and the articulation of form.  The book identifies and examines key issues in the field, including: the relationships between vision, visualization and imagination; the theoretical remediation of linguistic and narratological concepts; the systematization of discourse; the production of the subject; idea and institution; and the significance of resources of the body in depiction, representation and narrative. It then tests this new conception in practice with two original visual demonstrations to clarify the particular dialectic relationships between subjects and media, in an examination of drawing style and genre, social consensus and self-conscious constraint. The book's originality derives from its clear articulation of a wide range of sources in proposing a conception of narrative drawing, and the extrapolation of this new conception in these two visual demonstrations. In this Interview Dr. Grennan discusses different strategies for reading this book, explains the graphiotactic array, and talks about how one can draw in drag. Dr. Simon Grennan is a Professor of Art and Design, at the University of Chester and has been practicing internationally as an artist since 1990. As part the collaborative team Grennan & Sperandio (Kartoonkings.com), he is well known as a pioneer of interventionist, New Genre and post-relational practice, through publishing, television and social action projects. Dr. Grennan is also an educator and an awarded scholar of narrative drawing, with particular expertise in the histories of drawing, comics, remediation and inter-media. He is a recognised theorist of the pedagogic relationship between practice and research and is an experienced, public facing practitioner. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters: Undocumented Migration in Hispanophone Caribbean and Latinx Literature and Art (U Texas Press, 2022) relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown. Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees. An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone. Marisel C. Moreno is the Rev. John O'Brien Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland.  Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father's footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives. But in the midst of their disillusionment, they'll discover their own capacity for resilience, connection, and, ultimately, hope. Andrew’s debut novel, The Altruists, was published by Viking in the United States and in seventeen other countries. The Altruists was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week. Andrew is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Andrew lives in Brooklyn, New York. Recommendations: Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach Joyce Carol Oates, Wonderland Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Réka Máté's Portrayals of Women in Pakistan: An Analysis of Fahmīdah Riyāẓ's Urdu Poetry (de Gruyter, 2023) examines the connection between progressivism and feminist movements in the Indian subcontinent, scrutinizing shifting portrayals of women in Fahmīdah Riyāẓ’s poetry at the time of her writing from a historical perspective, and the historical, political, social and personal influences reflected in her work and life. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Believed to have emerged in the French Caribbean based on African spirit beliefs, the zombie represents not merely the walking dead, but also a walking embodiment of the region's history and culture. In Haiti today, the zombie serves as an enduring memory of enslavement: it is defined as a reanimated body robbed of part of its soul, forced to work in sugarcane fields. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, the zombie takes the form of a shape-shifting evil spirit, and represents the dangers posed to the maroon or 'freedom runner.'  Lucy Swanson's book The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study of the literary zombie in recent fiction from the region. It examines how this symbol of the enslaved (and of the evil spirits that threaten them) is used to represent and critique new socio-political situations in the Caribbean. It also offers a comprehensive and focused examination of the ways contemporary authors from Haiti and the French Antilles contribute to the global zombie imaginary, identifying four 'avatars' of the zombie-the slave, the trauma victim, the horde, and the popular zombie-that appear frequently in fiction and anthropology, exploring how works by celebrated and popular authors reimagine these archetypes. Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting was published in the “Podcasting Disruptive Voices” issue of CFC Intersections in July 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays A lesbian partnership, a “bastard” son, an aunt who is a prostitute, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unravelled a family at an earlier moment in history. In Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s (NYU Press, 2023), Dr. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger. Drawing on over 150 memoirs describing childhoods in the period between the aftermath of World War II and the 1960s, Dr. Nelson highlights the importance of history in creating family secrets and demonstrates the use of personal stories to understand how people make sense of themselves and their social worlds. Keeping Family Secrets uncovers hidden stories of same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies among teenage girls, the institutionalisation of children with mental and physical disabilities, participation in left-wing political activities, adoption, and Jewish ancestry. The members of ordinary families kept these issues secret to hide the disconnect between the reality of their own family and the prevailing ideals of what a family should be. Personal accounts reveal the costs associated with keeping family secrets, as family members lie, hurl epithets, inflict abuse, and even deny family membership to protect themselves from the shame and danger of public knowledge. Keeping Family Secrets sheds light not only on decades-old secrets but pushes us to confront what secrets our families keep today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length. David C. Atherton offers a new approach to understanding the relationship between the challenging formal features of early modern popular literature and the world beyond its pages. Focusing on depictions of violence—one of the most fraught topics for a peaceful polity ruled over by warriors—he connects concepts of form and formalization across the aesthetic and social spheres. Atherton shows how the formal features of early modern literature had the potential to alter the perception of time and space, make social and economic forces visible, defamiliarize conventions, give voice to the socially peripheral, and reshape the contours of community. Through careful readings of works by the major writers Asai Ryōi, Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Ueda Akinari, and Santō Kyōden, Writing Violence: The Politics of Form in Early Modern Japanese Literature (Columbia UP, 2023) reveals the essential role of literary form in constructing the world—and in seeing it anew. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the October 12, 2023 issue of The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg offered an annotated list of the 100 greatest film books of all time. Drawing on a jury of 322 people who make, study, and are otherwise connected to the movies, Feinberg assembled an annotated list that reads like the ultimate film study syllabus. In this interview, Dan Moran asks him about the voting process, top winners, some omissions, and what the list reveals about the industry as a whole. Scott Feinberg has led The Hollywood Reporter’s awards coverage since 2011 (he covered awards for the Los Angeles Times before that). He is best known for his “Feinberg Forecast,” through which he assesses the standings of various showbiz awards races, and for Awards Chatter, the interview-centric podcast that he started in 2015, for which he has conducted career-retrospective interviews with some 500 of Hollywood’s biggest names. An alumnus of Brandeis University, he is also a trustee professor at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, serves on the board of the Los Angeles Press Club and is a voting member of BAFTA and the Critics Choice Association. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke UP, 2023), Grant Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends. Kaveh Rafie is a PhD candidate specializing in modern and contemporary art at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation charts the course of modern art in the late Pahlavi Iran (1941-1979) and explores the extent to which the 1953 coup marks the recuperation of modern art as a viable blueprint for cultural globalization in Iran. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. Most recently, Ring Shout (2020) maps Lovecraftian horror into the Ku Klux Klan’s 1920s terrorism in the U.S. South, while A Master Of Djinn (2021) brings angels and the titular djinns into a steampunk version of Egypt focalized around a pair of female detectives with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. The conversation probes the way Clark’s work limns “the supernatural and the mundane,” delving into his formative experiences with the everyday presence of ancestors in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the way he writes deities into mortal stories without flattening free will, and why he is committed to writing stories that talk about nations, politics, and racism, even in worlds where the supernatural is just as present. As the episode wraps up, Clark talks about the process that led to his celebrated 2018 story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” which consists of nine vignettes imagining the lives of the enslaved people whose teeth Washington used for his dentures. Stay tuned for Clark’s iconic answer to this season’s signature question—a must-listen for anybody who has always suspected there’s something weird lurking beneath the surface of children’s television! Mentioned in this Episode andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction Them! The Day the Earth Stood Still Boris Karloff Vincent Price Star Trek The Twilight Zone The Bayou Classic Toni Morrison Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Edward Said’s Orientalism The Battle of Algiers The Maxim gun The George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia Michel-Rolph Trouillot National Museum of African American History and Culture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Plotz of Recall This Book spoke in 2020 with Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar about his marvelous new book on that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul’s Journeys. Krishnan sees the “contrarian and unsentimental” Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority within postcolonial societies. He talks with John about Naipaul’s early focus on postcolonial governments, and how unusual it was in the late 1950’s for colonial intellectuals to focus on “the discomfiting aspects of postcolonial life….and uneven consequences of the global transition into modernity.” Most generatively of all, Sanjay insists that the “troublesome aspect is what gives rise to what’s most positive in Naipaul.” Discussed in the Episode Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country (2012) George Lamming, e.g. (In the Castle of My Skin, 1953) V. S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira (1957) Miguel Street (1959) Area of Darkness (1964) The Mimic Men (1967) A Bend in the River (1979) V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State (1971) Aya Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” Nobel Acceptance Speech Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (1989 theoretical work on postcolonialism) Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008) Marlon James (eg. The Book of Night Women, 2009) Beyonce, “Formation“ Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1961) Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1966) Willa Cather “Two Friends” in Obscure Destinies  Read Here: 43 Sanjay Krishnan on V. S. Naipaul: To make the Deformation the Formation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for "somatic reading," a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences. Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting back to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for relevant textual interpretation. Livia Arndal Woods earned her PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). As a scholar, she focuses on Victorian literature and culture, women and gender studies, and the medical humanities. Dr. Woods is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer “embargoed” from Anglophone cultural spaces, as Edward Said once famously claimed that it was. As Arabic literary works are translated into English in ever-greater numbers, what alternative model of translation ethics can account for this literature’s newfound readability in the hegemonic language of the world literary system? Anna Ziajka Stanton's book The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability (Fordham UP, 2023) argues that an ethical translation of a work of Arabic literature is one that transmits the literariness of the source text by engaging new populations of readers via a range of embodied and sensory effects. The book proposes that when translation is conceived of not as an exchange of semantic content but as a process of converting the affective forms of one language into those of another, previously unrecognized modalities of worldliness open up to the source text. In dialogue with a rich corpus of Arabic aesthetic and linguistic theory as well as contemporary scholarship in affect theory, translation theory, postcolonial theory, and world literature studies, this book offers a timely and provocative investigation of how an important literary tradition enters the world literary system. Anna Ziajka Stanton is Caroline D. Eckhardt Early Career Professor of Comparative Literature and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Philological Encounters, the Journal of World Literature, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Stanton is the translator of Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut, which was longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. She has been an editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2014. Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana University Press, provides deserving scholars with a wide range of academic-themed drink recipes. Philipp Stelzel shares more than 50 recipes for all palates, including The Dissertation Committee (rum), The Faculty Meeting (rye), The Presidential Platitude (gin), and more. Offering cocktails for every academic occasion along with spirited, amusing commentary, The Faculty Lounge is the perfect gift for graduate students, tenure-track professors, and disillusioned administrators. Philipp Stelzel is a specialist in post-World War II German, West European, and transatlantic political and intellectual history. After earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Stelzel taught at Duke University and Boston College before coming to Duquesne in 2014. His first book first book, History after Hitler: a Transatlantic Enterprise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians of modern Germany from the end of World War II to the 1980s. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

While globalization is often credited with the eradication of 'traditional' constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians. This book explores the contraction of what it means to be free in post-liberalization India, examining how global capitalism has exacerbated existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities, while also creating new hierarchies. Mukti Lakhi Mangharam's book Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) argues that post-1990s literature and culture frequently represents and reinforces the equation of free-market capitalism with individual freedom within the new 'idea of India.' However, many texts often also challenge this logic by pointing to more expansive horizons of autonomy for the gendered self. Through readings of texts as diverse as Dalit women's life-writing, pop fiction, realist novels, self-help, regional film, and Netflix TV shows, Mukti Mangharam investigates how notions like 'free trade,' 'entrepreneurship,' and 'self-help' are experienced, embodied, and challenged by disadvantaged peoples, and by women differently than men. In the process, Freedom Inc. explores how different literary forms illuminate alternative and buried pathways to fuller freedoms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. Anne Duggan presents a recovery of the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales. People often associate fairy tales with Disney films, and with the male authors from whom Disney often drew inspiration – notably Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In these portrayals the princess is a passive, compliant figure. By contrast, The Lost Princess shows that classic fairy tales such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ have a much richer, more complex history than Disney’s saccharine depictions. Dr. Duggan recovers the voices of women writers such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Charlotte-Rose de La Force, who penned popular tales about ogre-killing, pregnant, cross-dressing, dynamic heroines who saved the day. This new history will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text? In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) as a positive example of a post-internet apocalypse. In the episode he references a paper by Beder et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623. And several apocalyptic scenarios, including the dead internet theory and the gray goo hypothesis. Matthew Kirschenbaum is Distinguished University Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. His books include Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). With Kari Kraus, he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, library, and press devoted to what is surely our discipline's most iconic artifact, the codex book. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter (or X?) as @mkirschenbaum for more. Because we are hoping to encourage the text apocalypse, we made today’s image using generative AI. Specifically Saronik made it using the prompt “Text” in Canva’s AI interface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action. Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region. He reveals how a "poetics of solidarity" promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame. Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world. Matthew D. Pauly is an associate professor at Michigan State University. His focus is Russia and Eastern Europe. @MatthewDPauly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Andrea Celli explores the complex ways in which Dante’s Comedy could be considered ‘Mediterranean,’ ranging widely from Orientalist scholarship to prison wall graffiti in Palermo. He presents both a history of criticism that explores the 20th-century debates around Dante and Islam as well as a novel approach to interrogating Mediterranean possibilities in the reception and appropriation of Dante’s poem. Celli’s Mediterranean Dante is neither given over to the ‘clash of civilizations’ model nor to the idealized notion of a cultural melting pot, but instead to a nuanced perspective that moves beyond traditional binaries and paradigms. In a medieval mode, he draws attention to the possible use of Islamic sources in the punishment of Muhammad in Inferno 28 and explores affinities between Ibn Hazm’s 11th-century Andalusian work Ring of the Dove and Dante’s Vita Nuova. With an orientation to reception, he dwells at length on the 17th-century drawings and grafitti on the prison walls of the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri in Palermo that see a blending of high and low culture and connect Dante to broader Mediterranean culture in early modern Sicily. Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy breaks new ground in assembling such materials and critical perspectives; it urges us to both read the Comedy through the heuristic tool of the Mediterranean and to read the field of Mediterranean studies through Dante. Akash Kumar is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature through the lens of Mediterranean and global culture, from the history of science to the origins of popular phenomena such as the game of chess. Recent work on a global Dante has appeared in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester UP, 2022), MLN (2022), and the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020). Akash also serves as Editor of Dante Notes, the digital publication of the Dante Society of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that—as Linda Hutcheon has put it—both “enshrine and question” history are also an important area of study. By bringing narratology and psychological theory to bear on a range of graphic narratives, Kate Polak seeks to question how the form utilizes point of view and the gutter as ethical tools that shape the reader’s empathetic reactions to the content. This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics. Dr. Kate Polak is a writer, artist, performer, and scholar specializing in comics, poetry, 21st century women writers, and the literatures of genocide. She is an instructor and research associate in the English Department at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches writing and literature, focusing on poetry, the representation of violence, and graphic narrative. Her book, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, was nominated for an Eisner Award. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Part 3, Professor Simon Palfrey offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll hear the play’s dark energies emerge through Mercutio’s speech about “Queen Mab”; see how Juliet discovers a new, eroticized vision of the world and of herself as she awaits her wedding night, and witness one of the most iconic scenes in literature, when Juliet on her balcony imagines the possibility of love transforming identity: “What’s in a name?” Speeches and performers: Mercutio, 1.4, “O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you …” (Mark Quartley) Juliet and Romeo, 2.2, “O Romeo, Romeo …” (Katy Stephens) Juliet, 3.2, “Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds …” (Katy Stephens) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research—trauma studies and comics studies—to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible. Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma. Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time and confront traumatic events, be they personal or shared, through a myriad of both literary and visual devices. As a result, comics can represent trauma in ways that are unavailable to other narrative and artistic forms. With themes such as dreams and mourning, Earle concentrates on trauma in American comics after the Vietnam War. Examples include Alissa Torres’s American Widow, Doug Murray’s The ’Nam, and Art Spiegelman’s much-lauded Maus. These works pair with ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. Through these examples and others, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War (UP of Mississippi, 2017) proves that comics open up new avenues to explore personal and public trauma in extraordinary, necessary ways. Dr. Harriet Earle is a senior lecturer in English at Sheffield Hallam University and a Research Fellow at the Centre for War, Atrocity, and Genocide at the University of Nipissing.  Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Geraint D'Arcy's book Mise en scène, Acting, and Space in Comics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores some of the less frequently questioned ideas which underpin comics creation and criticism. “Mise en scène” is a term which refers to the way in which visual elements work together to create meaning in comics. It is a term that comics have borrowed from cinema, which borrowed it in turn from theatre. But comics are not film and they are not cinema, so how can this term be of any use? If we consider comics to have mise en scène, should not we also ask if the characters in comics act like the characters on film and stage? In its exploration of these ideas, this book also asks what film and theatre can learn from comics. Dr. Geraint D'Arcy is a lecturer in Media Practice, at the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia in the UK and a member of the Comics Studies Research Group. he also wrote Critical Approaches to TV and Film Set Design in 2018, published with Taylor and Francis. He currently works across several courses at the University of South Wales. Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

If you are reading this, it’s probably hard—nearly impossible—to imagine a world without writing—without print, books, newspapers, signs, graffiti, advertisements, forms, letters, texts, internet memes, and New Books Network blogposts like this one. How would you do your work? How would you communicate with your friends and family? How would you learn about the world around you? The historians in this conversation have written path-breaking books that deepen our understanding of an age when the written word was still emerging as a feature in everyday life. These books focus on different places—Russia and the Netherlands—where writing and print emerged quite differently but they share a deep erudition and ambitious methodological creativity in endeavoring to account for the ephemeral. Simon Franklin is emeritus professor of Russian history at University of Cambridge, Clare College. His books include Writing Society and Culture in Early Rus, 950–1300 (2002), The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (1996), co-authored with Jonathan Shepard, and Information and Empire: mechanisms of Communication in Russia, 1600–1850 (2017), co-edited with Katherine Bowers. In The Russian Graphosphere, 1450–1850 (Cambridge UP, 2019) Franklin reconstructs with deep erudition and carefully contextualized sleuthing the concrete and conceptual ways in which people in Russia from the mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries encountered various types of writing. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen are historians at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Pettegree’s books include The Invention of News (2014), Brand Luther: 1517, printing and the making of the Reformation (2015), and most recently, The Book at War: Libraries and Readers in an Age of Conflict (2023). Arthur der Weduwen followed up his award-winning first monograph, Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century with the newly released State Communication and Public Politics in the Dutch Golden Age (2023). As has Simon Franklin, they have brought great creativity to the history of texts. Known for its now world-famous still life paintings produced by the affluent incubator of capitalism that was the seventeenth-century Netherlands, Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale UP, 2020) shows us that what was going onto the canvases in the Dutch Golden Age paled in comparison to what was coming off the printing presses. With many unexpected revelations, this ambitious attempt to account for the (perhaps?) countless texts that did not survive demonstrates how the production, distribution, and consumption of books was central to economic, political, and cultural life in seventeenth-century Netherlands. They continue to collaborate on the Universal Short Title Catalogue and have also co-authored The Library: A Fragile History (2021). Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A full transcript of the interview is available for accessibility. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez's Crip Authorship: Disability as Method (NYU Press, 2023)is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media. Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published. The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative work: practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars. Mara Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she co-founded and co-directs the Center for Disability Studies. Rebecca Sanchez is Professor of English and director of the disability studies program at Fordham University. An open access version of Crip Authorship can be found at Open Square of NYU Press. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives at the nexus of research, policy implementation, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Clayton is also a host for the Un/Livable Cultures podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics (Stanford UP, 2021) makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe. Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia. S.D. Chrostowska is Professor of Humanities and Social & Political Thought at York University. She is the author of Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia, 1700-1800 (2012), among other titles. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Guillory (NYU English author of the pathbreaking Cultural Capital) is here to discuss his amazing new Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (U Chicago Press, 2022) He speaks with John and with Nick Dames, co-editor of Public Books, Professor of Humanities at Columbia and most recently author of The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton 2023). The gap between criticism and scholarship looms large, as does the utility of Panofsky's 1940 distinction between "monuments" and "documents." they ask what sorts of cultural documents achieve aesthetic memorability, for good or for ill. Mentioned in the episode: W. B Yeats, "Monuments of unageing intellect"; a line from "Sailing to Byzantium" (1933). George Eliot, in Middlemarch (1871-2): "Would it not be rash to conclude that there was no passion behind those [Samuel Daniels] sonnets to Delia which strike us [nowadays] as the thin music of a mandolin?" Hannah Arendt, Lectures of Kant's Political Philosophy (1982) on judgment, and how general categories can be brought to bear on particulars. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925) Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954; John has a short "B-Side" appreciation in Public Books). Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction Alvin Gouldner , The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979) Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Our season of the weird starts off with a conversation between the writer The New Yorker called “the weird Thoreau”, Jeff VanderMeer, and a scholar of the modernist weird, Alison Sperling (FSU). With ND host Chris Holmes, Jeff and Alison delve into how the ugly politics of Lovecraft’s “old” weird gives rise to the stylistic panoply of the New Weird movement. Jeff discusses the ways in which nature writing's sublime and ecstatic moments are their own category of the weird. The three consider ways to represent unrepresentable species, the limits of human intelligence in perceiving animal intelligence, the nonhuman narrative perspective, and the infinite weirdness of government bureaucracy. Along the way, Alison and Jeff dig into the “Florida man” trope and investigate Jeff’s attempts to outwit Florida zoning to re-wild his backyard with native plants. And if you harbor any suspicions about the temperaments of penguin researchers, you won’t want to miss Jeff’s answer to this season’s signature question. Mentions: China Miéville Clive Barker H.P. Lovecraft -The Case of Charles Dexter Ward Annihilation Dead Astronauts Sunshine State Biodiversity Group Rachel Carson Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Tom Boomershine, one of the pioneers of performance criticism for biblical texts, joined the New Books Network to discuss the publication of First-Century Gospel Storytellers and Audiences: The Gospels as Performance Literature (Cascade Books, 2022), a collection of his essays dating back to 1981. On this episode, we discuss his life and career in scholarship, his conviction that the New Testament be studied as an oral/aural (spoken/heard) experience, and his compelling argument that the Gospel of Mark was not first written and not merely experienced as a performance but also composed in a performance setting concurrent with the major events of the Jewish-Roman War (ca. 66–73 CE). Among other findings, Boomershine’s work provides insight into the narratively dissatisfying ending of the Gospel of Mark, which he performs on this episode, and although the extension of performance theory to other books of the New Testament is only presently in its infancy, he makes a case for its broad applicability beyond just the Gospel of Mark—even if, as can be argued, the composition of other gospels, letters, and books betrays their production within a more explicitly textual culture. Thomas E. Boomershine (Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary, 1974) is the Founder of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media group (1982) at the Society of Biblical Literature and the Network of Biblical Storytellers International (1977). He has taught both in the academy and the church since his graduate studies, including serving as the G. Ernest Thomas Distinguished Professor of Christianity and Communication at United Theological Seminary (Dayton, Ohio) from 2004–2006 and as Professor of New Testament for over 20 years before that. His passions and research interests include telling the stories of Jesus by heart, the pedagogy of performing the gospels, and situating the gospels—especially the Gospel of Mark—in the context of ancient media culture as performance literature. His prior publications include Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling (Abingdon, 1988), The Messiah of Peace: A Performance-Criticism Commentary on Mark’s Passion-Resurrection Narrative (Cascade, 2015), and numerous journal articles and book chapters. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an exciting, eventful life, the letters are especially interesting. Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she abhorred "objectivity shit" and wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due. Gellhorn's work and personal life attracted a disparate cadre of political and celebrity friends, among them, Sylvia Beach, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Bethune, Robert Capa, Charlie Chaplin, Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, Colette, Gary Cooper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Maxwell Perkins, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Orson Welles, H.G. Wells -- the people who made history in her time and beyond. Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn's Letters of Love and War 1930-1949 (Firefly Books, 2022) is a curated collection of letters between Gellhorn and the extraordinary personalities that were her correspondents in the most interesting time of her life. Through these letters and the author's contextual narrative, the book covers Gellhorn's life and work, including her time reporting for Harry Hopkins and America's Federal Emergency Relief Administration in the 1930s, her newspaper and magazine reportage during the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War, and her relationships with Hemingway and General James M. Gavin late in the war, and her many lovers and affairs. Gellhorn's fiction of the time sold well: The Trouble I've Seen (1936) -- her Depression-Era stories based on the FERA activities, with an introduction by H.G. Wells; A Stricken Field (1940) -- a novel inspired by the German-Jewish refugee crisis and set in 1938 Czechoslovakia; The Heart of Another (1941) -- stories edited by Maxwell Perkins; and The Wine of Astonishment (1948) -- her novel about the liberation of Dachau, which she reported for Collier's. Gellhorn's life, reportage, fiction and correspondence reveal her passionate advocacy of social justice and her need to tell the stories of "the people who were the sufferers of history." Renewed interest in her life makes this new collection, packed with newly discovered letters and pictures, fascinating reading. Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. @JaneScimeca1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War (U Iowa Press, 2015) explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century. Eric Bennett is professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. He is the author of A Big Enough Lie, and his writing has appeared in A Public Space, New Writing, Modern Fiction Studies, Blackwell-Wiley’s Companion to Creative Writing, The Chronicle of Higher Education, VQR, MFA vs. NYC, and Africana. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Moving from the aftermath of Reconstruction through the AIDS crisis, a new cultural history of the United States shows how artists, intellectuals, and activists turned political disappointment--the unfulfilled desire for change--into a basis for solidarity. Sara Marcus argues that the defining texts in twentieth-century American cultural history are records of political disappointment. Through insightful and often surprising readings of literature and sound, Marcus offers a new cultural history of the last century, in which creative minds observed the passing of moments of possibility, took stock of the losses sustained, and fostered intellectual revolutions and unexpected solidarities. Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard UP, 2023) shows how, by confronting disappointment directly, writers and artists helped to produce new political meanings and possibilities. Marcus first analyzes works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers that expressed the anguish of the early Jim Crow era, during which white supremacy thwarted the rebuilding of the country as a multiracial democracy. In the ensuing decades, the Popular Front work songs and stories of Lead Belly and Tillie Olsen, the soundscapes of the civil rights and Black Power movements, the feminist poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, and the queer art of Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz continued building the century-long archive of disappointment. Marcus shows how defeat time and again gave rise to novel modes of protest and new forms of collective practice, keeping alive the dream of a better world. Disappointment has proved to be a durable, perhaps even inevitable, feature of the democratic project, yet so too has the resistance it precipitates. Marcus's unique history of the twentieth century reclaims the unrealized desire for liberation as a productive force in American literature and life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“[W]hat is our relationship to the Korean War and to the affinities” of different institutions that produce knowledge about the Korean War? (130) In her book, Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple UP, 2022), Joo Ok Kim “conceptualizes racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War as a problem of knowledge” (4). Through a close reading of Chicanx and Asian American cultural productions as well as archives produced by white penitentiary prisoners and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Joo Ok considers how Chicanx and Korean diasporic works critique white supremacist expressions of kinship that emerge from the official memorialization about the war. Further critiquing the division in disciplines and periodization in academia that forecloses discussions about colonialism spanning multiple geographic locations and temporalities, Joo Ok examines how queer hermeneutic helps us to reconsider “minor” and humble instances of kinships between Asian-Latino cultural productions. This book will be a wonderful addition to any interdisciplinary scholarship that critically thinks about US militarism, knowledge production, and the Korean War, as well as anyone who is interested in learning more about the Korean War.  Joo Ok Kim is an assistant professor of cultural studies at UCSD, and her research and teaching interests include transpacific critique, literatures and cultures of the Korean War, and United States multiethnic literature and culture. Her selected publications include Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War (Temple University Press, 2022), which is part of Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality Series, and contributions to “Keywords for Comics Studies” (2021), a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and a special issue of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (2020). Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Debapriya Sarkar’s new book, titled Possible Knowledge: The Literary Forms of Early Modern Science (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) is a study of how poets and philosophers took up the “the possible” as an alternative to the actual. By pushing back against the positivism we associate so strongly with the scientific revolution, the literary texts examined in this book—Margaret Cavendish’s poetry and prose, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Milton’s Paradise Lost—invited their readers to inhabit worlds-not-yet-known, to take up uncertainty and contingency as habits of thought. I am excited to welcome Debapriya Sarkar to the podcast to discuss Possible Knowledge. Debapriya is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Debapriya has published articles in English Literary Renaissance, Spenser Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. She has received long-term fellowships from the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What was special about 1845 and why does it deserve particular scrutiny? In The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 (Cambridge UP, 2022), one of the leading authorities on the Victorian age argues that this was the critical year in a decade which witnessed revolution on continental Europe, the threat of mass insurrection at home and radical developments in railway transport, communications, religion, literature and the arts. The effects of the new poor law now became visible in the workhouses; a potato blight started in Ireland, heralding the Great Famine; and the Church of England was rocked to its foundations by John Henry Newman's conversion to Roman Catholicism. What Victorian England became was moulded, says Michael Wheeler, in the crucible of 1845. Exploring pivotal correspondence, together with pamphlets, articles and cartoons, the author tells the riveting story of a seismic epoch through the lives, loves and letters of leading contemporaneous figures. Michael Wheeler is a leading cultural and literary historian and presently a Visiting Professor of English Literature at the University of Southampton. His many critically acclaimed books include the prize-winning Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990), Ruskin's God (1999), The Old Enemies (2006) and St John and the Victorians (2011) – all published by Cambridge University Press – and, most recently, The Athenæum, published by Yale University Press in 2020. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Michael Kochenash published his revised dissertation from Claremont School of Theology as Roman Self-Representation and the Lukan Kingdom of God (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic) in 2020. A student of Dennis R. MacDonald, Kochenash has continued to pursue a similar brand of mimetic criticism as his Doktorvater—that is, a branch of source criticism that sees the composition of early Christian and Jewish narratives as deliberate reconfigurations, imitations, and subversions of existing Greco-Roman cultural stories, models, and ideologies of the elite, governing class—with excellent results. Although the positionality of author to empire is more complex than can be characterized in a convenient soundbite, Kochenash argues that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written in part from their author’s narrative opposition to certain facets of Roman imperial logic, particularly those expressed in the recorded deeds of Augustus, propaganda spread through numismatic evidence, and in Virgil’s Aeneid, among other places, chiefly to spread an inclusive, pro-Gentile, and universalizing salvific message about the Lukan Kingdom of God. Kochenash joined the New Books Network to discuss all these topics and more from his unique comparison of Luke-Acts to cultural and political themes known to the author that scholars have continued to remember as “Luke.” Rob Heaton, this episode’s host, has also written a critical review of Kochenash’s book, forthcoming with Rhea Classical Reviews. Michael Kochenash (Ph.D., Claremont, 2017) is a Radboud Excellence Initiative Fellow at Radboud University (Nijmegen, Netherlands) specializing in the New Testament and early Christian literature. He previously held teaching and research appointments in the United States and China. His research interprets early Christian and Jewish narratives as products of ancient Mediterranean literary production, with a special focus on their use of literary models from Jewish Scriptures and classical Greek literature. Among his previous publications are numerous journal articles and book chapters relating to Luke-Acts and other early Christian narratives, and he also co-edited Christian Origins and the New Testament in the Greco-Roman Context (Claremont Press, 2016), a Festschrift for Dennis MacDonald. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, please see his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jessica Lowell Mason and Nicole Crevar's Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art (Vernon Press, 2023) boldly reasserts the importance of the Madwoman more than four decades after the publication of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal work in feminist literary criticism, 'The Madwoman in the Attic'. Since Gilbert and Gubar's work was published, the Madwoman has reemerged to do important work, rock the academic boat, and ignite social justice agency inside and outside of academic spaces, moving beyond the literary context that defined the Madwoman in the late 20th century. In this dynamic collection of essays, scholars, creative writers, and Mad activists come together to (re)define the Madwoman in pluralistic and expansive ways and to realize new potential in Mad agency. This collection blazes new directions of thinking through Madness as a gendered category, comprised of a combination of creative works that (re)imagine the figure of the Madwoman, speeches in which Mad-identifying artists and writers reclaim the label of "Madwoman," and scholarly essays that articulate ambitious theories of the Madwoman. The collection is an interdisciplinary scholarly resource that will appeal to multiple academic fields, including literary studies, disability studies, feminist studies, and Mad studies. Additionally, the work contributes to the countermovement against colonial, sanist, patriarchal, and institutional social practices that continue to silence women and confine them to the metaphorical attic. Appealing to a broad audience of readers, 'Madwomen in Social Justice Movements, Literatures, and Art' is a cutting-edge inquiry into the implications of Madness as a theoretical tool in which dissenting, deviant, and abnormal women and gender non-conforming writers, artists, and activists open the door to Mad futurities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A noted literary scholar traverses the Russian canon, exploring how realists, idealists, and revolutionaries debated good and evil, moral responsibility, and freedom. Since the age of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, Russian literature has posed questions about good and evil, moral responsibility, and human freedom with a clarity and intensity found nowhere else. In Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Harvard University Press, 2023), Dr. Gary Saul Morson delineates intellectual debates that have coursed through two centuries of Russian writing, as the greatest thinkers of the empire and then the Soviet Union enchanted readers with their idealism, philosophical insight, and revolutionary fervor. Dr. Morson describes the Russian literary tradition as an argument between a radical intelligentsia that uncompromisingly followed ideology down the paths of revolution and violence, and writers who probed ever more deeply into the human condition. The debate concerned what Russians called “the accursed questions”: If there is no God, are good and evil merely human constructs? Should we look for life’s essence in ordinary or extreme conditions? Are individual minds best understood in terms of an overarching theory or, as Tolstoy thought, by tracing the “tiny alternations of consciousness”? Exploring apologia for bloodshed, Dr. Morson adapts Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the non-alibi—the idea that one cannot escape or displace responsibility for one’s actions. And, throughout, Dr. Morson isolates a characteristic theme of Russian culture: how the aspiration to relieve profound suffering can lead to either heartfelt empathy or bloodthirsty tyranny. What emerges is a contest between unyielding dogmatism and open-minded dialogue, between heady certainty and a humble sense of wonder at the world’s elusive complexity—a thought-provoking journey into inescapable questions. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Balthrop-Lewis's Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge UP, 2021) presents a ground-breaking interpretation of Henry David Thoreau's most famous book, Walden. Rather than treating Walden Woods as a lonely wilderness, Balthrop-Lewis demonstrates that Thoreau's ascetic life was a form of religious practice dedicated to cultivating a just, multispecies community. The book makes an important contribution to scholarship in religious studies, political theory, English, environmental studies, and critical theory by offering the first sustained reading of Thoreau's religiously motivated politics. In Balthrop-Lewis's vision, practices of renunciation like Thoreau's can contribute to reforming social and political life. This book transforms Thoreau's image, making him a vital source for a world beset by inequality and climate change. Balthrop-Lewis argues for an environmental politics in which ecological flourishing is impossible without economic and social justice. Alda Balthrop-Lewis is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University and has taught Religious Studies at Brown University. Her research, which focuses on religious ethics and the circulation of ideas among theological, artistic, and popular idioms, has appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the Journal of Religious Ethics. Ilana Maymind is a lecturer at the Religious Studies Department at Chapman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Archives of War: Technology, Emotion and History (Routledge, 2023) offers a comparative analysis of British Army Unit War Diaries in the two World Wars, to reveal the role played by previously unnoticed technologies in shaping the archival records of war. Despite thriving scholarship on the history of war, the history of Operational Record Keeping in the British Army remains unexplored. Since World War I, the British Army has maintained daily records of its operations. These records, Unit War Diaries, are the first official draft of events on the battlefield. They are vital for the army’s operational effectiveness and fundamental to the histories of British conflict, yet the material history of their own production and development has been widely ignored. This book is the first to consider Unit War Diaries as mediated, material artefacts with their own history. Through a unique comparative analysis of the Unit War Diaries of the First and Second World Wars, this book uncovers the mediated processes involved in the practice of operational reporting and reveals how hidden technologies and ideologies have shaped the official record of warfare. Tracking the records into The National Archives in Kew, where they are now held, the book interrogates how they are re-presented and re-interpreted through the archive. It investigates how the individuals, institutions and technologies involved in the production and uses of unit diaries from battlefield to archive have influenced how modern war is understood and, more importantly, waged. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Secret History of the Mongols is one of the literary wonders of the world. Writing in the thirteenth century, the Secret Historian - whose identity remains unknown - combines insider history and verse to chronicle the life of Chingghis Khan and the empire he founded. In an evocative new translation, Chris Atwood brings to life for contemporary readers the world of the Mongol steppe, the Mongol conquests, and life within the tent cities of the Mongol empire. In this episode, Prof. Atwood joins me to discuss what we know about the identity of the Secret Historian; the circumstances of the epic’s creation, reception, and transmission; how Mongol identity is constructed and portrayed in The Secret History; and his work as a historian and translator. Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Tracy Rutler's Queering the Enlightenment: Kinship and Gender in Eighteenth-Century French Literature (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Liverpool UP, 2021) explores the imaginaries of novels and plays from the "liminal" period that followed the end of Louis the XIV's reign in France. Examining a range of French works from the 1730s and 1740s, including writing by Antoine François Prévost, Claude Crébillion, Pierre de Marivaux, and Françoise de Graffigny, Rutler traces a set of utopian themes and impulses that questioned and resisted heteronormativity and bourgeois family relations during this period. Interrogating gender, sexuality, and kinship in both the content and the form of their work, these authors challenged patriarchal power and relations as the foundations of state and society in France. At once intimate and political, the characters, scenes, and narratives these authors produced also posed questions about (the) Enlightenment more broadly. In readings informed by thinkers like Foucault and Rancière, as well as the work of psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theorists, Queering the Enlightenment is divided into three sections: Family Remains, Prodigal Sons, and Narrative Spinsters. Beginning with an analysis of eighteenth-century powerhouses Montesquieu and Voltaire on patriarchal decline and repair, Rutler goes on to consider literary representations of reproduction, masculinity, the public sphere, marriage, maternity, and same-sex community. The book will be of great interest to literary scholars and historians alike, particularly anyone interested the legacies of the Enlightenment and how historical struggles/debates over kinship, gender, and sexuality continue to resonate in the present. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of the CEU Press Podcast Series, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press/CEU Review of Books) sat down with biographer and historian Michael O’Sullivan to discuss his latest book with CEU Press, The Poet & Baroness: W.H. Auden and Stella Musulin, a Friendship (CEU Press, 2023). In his book, Michael explores the warm relationship between W.H. Auden, the celebrated British-American poet (1907–1973), and his fellow expatriate, the Welsh-Austrian journalist, translator and writer Stella Musulin (1915–1996). The friendship blossomed when Auden resided in the small town of Kirchstetten, close to Vienna, from 1958 until Auden’s death in 1973. The book is based on the unpublished letters of Auden to Musulin and her private journals. In the episode Michael introduces us to Stella Musulin, we talk about how Auden ended up in a small village near Vienna and about Michael’s personal relationship with Stella. Click here to purchase the book. The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books. Interested in the CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.  Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We kick off Season 6 with Kate Marshall, friend of the show and author of the forthcoming book Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century. Hosts and producers Chris Holmes and Emily Hyde ask Kate about the pulpy literary history of weird tales and learn how in the 21st-century weirdness emerges as both genre and mood. The conversation roves from the weirdness of the weather to novels that long for the nonhuman and reach for alien perspectives to the genres responding to our climate crisis. Join us to hear about the novelists and critics appearing in Season 6 of Novel Dialogue and to explore our contemporary state of weird.Mentions: --Sheila Heti, Pure Colour --Roberto Bolaño on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian --Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character --David Herman, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind --Kasuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun --Elvia Wilk, Oval --Olga Ravn’s The Employees --Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable --Colson Whitehead, Zone One Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Godzilla emerged from the sea to devastate Tokyo in the now-classic 1954 film, produced by Tōhō Studios and directed by Ishirō Honda, creating a global sensation and launching one of the world’s most successful movie and media franchises. Awakened and transformed by nuclear weapons testing, Godzilla serves as a terrifying metaphor for humanity’s shortsighted destructiveness: this was the intent of Shigeru Kayama, the science fiction writer who drafted the 1954 original film and its first sequel and, in 1955, published these novellas. Although the Godzilla films have been analyzed in detail by cultural historians, film scholars, and generations of fans, Kayama’s two Godzilla novellas—both classics of Japanese young-adult science fiction—have never been available in English. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama (U Michigan Press, 2023) finally provides English-speaking fans and critics the original texts with these first-ever English-language translations of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The novellas reveal valuable insights into Kayama’s vision for the Godzilla story, feature plots that differ from the films, and clearly display the author’s strong antinuclear, proenvironmental convictions. Kayama’s fiction depicts Godzilla as engaging in guerrilla-style warfare against humanity, which has allowed the destruction of the natural world through its irresponsible, immoral perversion of science. As human activity continues to cause mass extinctions and rapid climatic change, Godzilla provides a fable for the Anthropocene, powerfully reminding us that nature will fight back against humanity’s onslaught in unpredictable and devastating ways. Shigeru Kayama (1904–1975) was a science fiction writer and scenarist whose early stories about monsters and mutated sea creatures attracted the attention of Tōhō Studios, which asked him to draft the first two Godzilla films. Jeffrey Angles is professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishonen Culture in Modernist Japanese Literature (Minnesota, 2011) and the award-winning translator of Orikuchi Shinobu’s The Book of the Dead (Minnesota, 2017) and Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers and articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Recent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. Engaging Violence: Civility and the Reach of Literature (Stanford UP, 2022) sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put. Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence. David Simpson is Distinguished Professor and G.B. Needham Chair, emeritus, at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature (2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lenora Hanson's The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford UP, 2022) provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism. Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession. Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever. Lenora Hanson is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Deanne Williams's newest book, Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Performance and Pedagogy (Bloombury, 2023), is a groundbreaking study of the girl actor in the medieval and early modern world, demonstrating the existence of the girl performer in England long before the Restoration. Challenging existing academic assumptions about the supposed male dominance of the early modern stage, this book reveals girls' participation in a host of areas, from medieval religious drama to pageants and royal entries under the Tudors, country house entertainments, and Jacobean masques. Williams situates her historical study of the girl actor within the wider contexts of 'girl culture', including singing, translating, and writing. By examining the impact of the girl actor in Shakespeare's various constructions of girlhood– those girl characters which play upon the precedent of the performing girl in the medieval world– Girl Culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance argues that girls' actively shaped culture in the middle ages and Renaissance through their various performances. Interweaving her study of literary texts with the lives of girls who wrote, collected, and performed them—people like Hroswitha of Gandersheim, Anne Boleyn, Jane Lumely, the Russell sisters, and Elizabeth Carey—Williams centers the lived reality of girl children as they interacted with dramatic culture. Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ainsley Morse's book Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (Northwestern UP, 2021) traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‑garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time. Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‑cum‑children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways. Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Edgar Garcia. Garcia’s new book Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Emergency takes nine words—“birds,” “wealth,” “caves,” “television,” “demons,” “migrations,” “love,” “the sun,” and “Mormons”—and weaves a rich transhistorical narrative about the Popul Vuh sacred narrative. In these pages, Garcia explores how this text emerged in conditions of historical violence and persisted through over three hundred years, becoming a touchstone for Mesoamerican religious studies, decolonial activism, and literary adaptation. Edgar Garcia is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. His previous books are Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography (Fence Books, 2019). He has also served as the guest editor of Fence, a literary magazine. Written during the COVID pandemic, Emergency was published in 2022. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Pallavi Narayan's book Pamuk's Istanbul: The Self and the City (Routledge, 2022) reconstructs Istanbul through the prism of Orhan Pamuk’s fiction. It navigates the multiple selves and layers of Istanbul to present how the city has shaped the writings of Pamuk and has, in turn, been shaped by it. Through everyday objects and architecture, it shows how Pamuk transforms the city into a living museum where different objects converse along with characters to present a rich tapestry across space and time. Further, the monograph explores the formation of communal and literary identity within and around nation-building narratives informed by capitalism and modernization. The book also examines how Pamuk uses the postmodern city to move beyond its postmodern confines, and utilizes the theories and universes of Bakhtin, Benjamin, and Foucault to open up his fiction and radically challenge the idea of the novel. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, literary theory, museum studies, architecture, and cultural studies, and especially appeal to readers of Orhan Pamuk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dženita Karić's new book Bosnian Hajj Literature: Multiple Paths to the Holy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) maps the diverse understandings of the hajj in relation to Islamic geography by Bosnian Muslim authors who wrote in different genres from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The study captures how hajj was imagined and constructed in relation to Islamic cosmology, rituals, Sufi saints, and political and temporal realities, while remaining unchanged in other ways. The book generatively theorizes geographies in relation to mobilities but also in relation to emotion, body, and embodiment, materiality, and the sacred. The book will be of interest to scholars of Bosnian studies, Islamic studies, and especially pilgrimage and ritual studies.  Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Under a Bloodred Sky: Avigdor Hameiri’s War Stories and Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2023) represents an anthology of Avigdor Hameiri’s ten most compelling war stories and poetry. His war stories are unique, and different from his Hebrew writer contemporaries in that they mix the supernatural and macabre with war, pogroms, and antisemitism. These stories and poems reflect like no other the unique complexity of the Jewish soldier’s experience of the most vicious and shocking war the world had witnessed to date — the battles, the agony, the dilemmas faced by the Jewish soldier, bravery versus cowardice, the notion of imminent death, breaking the sixth commandment (Thou Shalt Not Murder), elements of pacifism (particularly involving camaraderie between the common soldiers on both sides of the battlefield and their shared hatred for rank), and more. Peter Appelbaum is a retired microbiologist who is spending his retirement years writing and translating books about Jewish history during World War I and the immediate post-war period. He is the recipient of the 2019 Rise Domb Porjes prize for his translation of Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth. Dan Hecht is a doctoral student at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University who wrote an extensive Masters thesis on the writings of Avigdor Hameiri, focusing on his dual national loyalty to his Hungarian heritage and his Hebrew homeland. He is currently writing his PhD on the essayistic prose of Eliezer Steinmann. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Throughout the early modern period, political theorists in France and England drew on the works of Plutarch to offer advice to kings and princes. Elizabeth I herself translated Plutarch in her later years, while Jacques Amyot's famous translations of Plutarch's The Parallel Lives led to the wide distribution of his work and served as a key resource for Shakespeare in the writing of his Roman plays, through Sir Thomas North's English translations.  Rebecca Kingston's Plutarch's Prism: Classical Reception and Public Humanism in France and England, 1500–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2022) explores how Plutarch was translated into French and English during the Renaissance and how his works were invoked in political argument from the early modern period into the 18th century, contributing to a tradition she calls 'public humanism'. This book then traces the shifting uses of Plutarch in the Enlightenment, leading to the decline of this tradition of 'public humanism'. Throughout, the importance of Plutarch's work is highlighted as a key cultural reference and for its insight into important aspects of public service. Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Published earlier this year from Running Press, Kristen Lopez’s But Have You Read the Book?: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films looks at almost a hundred years of film adaptations of novels. The book offers a survey of how directors, actors, and screenwriters have transformed the raw material of fiction into works that were sometimes transgressive, sometimes reverential, and always compelling. Among the adaptations are William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939) from the Emily Bronte novel; Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) from Michael Crichton’s novel; Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) from Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”; and Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) from Jeffrey Eugenides 1993 novel. I am excited to have Kristen Lopez on the podcast to discuss the book. Kristen has been the Film Editor at The Wrap since 2022 and the creator of the podcast Ticklish Business. Kristen’s work has also been published in Culturess, Forbes, The Movie Isle, Citizen Dame, and Remezcla. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings delighted so many of us as children, yet it and its vast body of accompanying work, such as the Silmarillion, contain a rich depth not well understood by most adults. Tolkien's work reflects his academic interests in the history of language and the Medieval world, as well as his Catholic faith. What purpose and religious message does his writing contain? Does his work carry a political meaning? Here to discuss is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago. In addition to her work on the history of Christianity, medieval liturgy, and the cult of the Virgin Mary, she teaches a popular course "Tolkien: Medieval and Modern," and has a series of lectures and writings mining the depths of Tolkien's thought and writing. More on Rachel Fulton Brown here. The syllabus to her course is here. Her lecture series, "The Forge of Tolkien" is here.  Her blog, "Fencing Bear at Prayer" is here.  Dragon Common Room, which contains more lectures and information about creative writing, is here.  Annika Nordquist is the Communications Coordinator of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and host of the Program’s podcast, Madison’s Notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities.  Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose.  By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each poem, Spiritual and Material Boundaries in Old French Verse: Contemplating the Walls of the Earthly Paradise (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) advances the thesis that the exterior walls of the Earthly Paradise served evolving purposes as contemplative objects that implicitly engaged complex notions of economic solidarity and idealized community. These visions of the Earthly Paradise stand to provide a striking contribution to a historically informed response to the contemporary legacies of colonialism and the international refugee crisis. Jacob Abell is Assistant Professor of French at Baylor University. His work focuses on ecocriticism, religious studies, and the digital humanities. Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Disney Princesses are a billion-dollar industry, known and loved by children across the globe. In The Disney Princess Phenomenon: A Feminist Analysis (Bristol University Press, 2023) Dr. Robyn Muir provides an exploratory and holistic examination of this worldwide commercial and cultural phenomenon in its key representations: films, merchandising and marketing, and park experiences. Muir highlights the messages and images of femininity found within the Disney Princess canon and provides a rigorous and innovative methodology for analysing gender in media. Including an in-depth examination of each princess film from the last 83 years, the book provides a lens through which to view and understand how Disney Princesses have contributed to the depiction of femininity within popular culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The stories in the Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights, are familiar to many of us: from the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and his forty thieves, to the framing story of Scheherazade telling these stories to her homicidal husband, Shahrayar.  Muḥsin Jāsim Mūsawī's The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures: Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry (Cambridge UP, 2021) offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the power of this collection of tales that penetrates so many cultures and appeals to such a variety of predilections and tastes. It also explores areas that were left untouched, like the decolonization of the Arabian Nights, and its archaeologies. Unique in its excavation into inroads of perception and reception, Muhsin J. al-Musawi's book unearths means of connection with common publics and learned societies. Al-Musawi shows, as never before, how the Arabian Nights has been translated, appropriated, and authenticated or abused over time, and how its reach is so expansive as to draw the attention of poets, painters, illustrators, translators, editors, musicians, political scientists like Leo Strauss, and novelists like Michel Butor, James Joyce and Marcel Proust amongst others. Making use of documentaries, films, paintings, novels and novellas, poetry, digital forums and political jargon, this book offers nuanced understanding of the perennial charm and power of this collection. Professor Muhsin al-Musawi is a literary critic and a scholar of classical and modern Arabic literature and comparative cultural studies. He taught for over two decades at universities in the Arab world before moving to Columbia University. He is the author of twenty-eight books (including four novels) and over sixty scholarly articles. He has been the editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature (Brill Academic Publishers) since 2000. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure; we know that he was born into a modest rural family, that he led a private and solitary life, and that, in spite of poor health and unusual emotional vulnerabilities, he worked tirelessly to achieve exquisite new effects in verse. Vergil’s most famous work, the Aeneid, was commissioned by the emperor Augustus, who published the epic despite Vergil’s dying wish that it be destroyed. In Vergil: The Poet's Life (Yale UP, 2023), Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings in an endeavor to reconstruct his life and personality. Through her intimate knowledge of Vergil’s work, she evokes the image of a poet who was committed to creating something astonishingly new and memorable, even at great personal cost. Benjamin Phillips is an MA student in History at Ohio University. His primary field is Late Antique Cultural and Intellectual History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global Christianity?  L. M. Ratnapalan's book Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity (Edinburgh UP, 2023) re-orients the intellectual biography of Robert Louis Stevenson by presenting him in the distinctive cultural environment of the Pacific. The book argues that Stevenson was religiously literate within a Scottish Presbyterian tradition and therefore well placed to grasp with subtlety the breadth and dynamics of a Christianized Pacific culture. It considers his legacy with respect to issues of indigenous sovereignty and agency and positions him within an important and wide-ranging modern debate about inculturation, defined as the emergence of Christianity from within a particular culture rather than imposed on it from outside. Through this study of a major Scottish writer, the book offers a model of interdisciplinary scholarship. L. Michael Ratnapalan is Associate Professor of History at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. He has published widely on modern intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on Britain’s interactions with the wider world. Joseph Gaines can be reached at jgaines1091@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

To mark the publication of John's book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea (My Reading), with Oxford University Press (2023), John and Elizabeth take to the airways to share their love of Le Guin's "speculative anthropology," gender politics, and goats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Richard Waugaman is an emeritus supervising and training analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. He is also a well-respected author. With regard to his career he has said, “I have practiced clinical psychoanalysis for over 40 years. Initially, my publications were mostly on psychoanalysis.” In 2002, he made a discovery when he learned that the traditional theory about who wrote Shakespeare is faith-based, not evidence-based. As he plunged deeply into primary research on this exciting topic, he learned that the Geneva Bible owned by the Earl of Oxford, now at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has marginalia and under-linings that Roger Stritmatter shows correspond closely with biblical echoes in Shakespeare. He then researched the Whole Book of Psalms and discovered it was the largest Psalms literary source for Shakespeare. He has also published evidence that many other Elizabethan works were also written by the Earl of Oxford anonymously, using pen names, or allonyms. Now he has contributed to a new book that was recently published by Routledge entitled New Psychoanalytic Readings of Shakespeare. Cool Reasons and Seething Brains (Routledge, 2023). The title of his chapter is “What Shakespeare Teaches Us about Psychological Complexity.” Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Stephen Ramsey's On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) is a witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities. Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media.  Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities. A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives.  The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist. These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry. Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Is the raw material of literature the paper, ink, vellum, paphyrus, and increasingly electronic data that it is inscribed on? Or is the stuff of literature the storehouse of tropes, techniques, and plots that authors draw from? And what kind of labor is the process of transforming that matter into literature? Earlier this year, Taylor Cowdery published an academic study on just this subject. The title of Taylor’s book is Matter and Making in Early English Poetry: Literary Production from Chaucer to Sidney (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through case studies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, and Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, Taylor captures a wide discourse around creativity and originality. Taylor is Associate Professor of English and Robert M. Lumiansky Fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Taylor also serves as the Director of the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and Taylor’s writing has been published in ELH, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Twelfth Night, named for the celebration that is both the culmination and the close of the Christmas festivities, is a bittersweet romantic comedy at once melancholy and merry. Through its central plot, in which the female Viola takes on the guise of the male Cesario and becomes beloved of both men and women, this play is also one of Shakespeare’s most modern approaches to identity and sexuality. In this course, you’ll learn the story and context of Twelfth Night, explore the questions it raises around genre and gender, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith offers key historical context for understanding the wide variety of relationships depicted in the play. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse UP, 2022), contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experiences in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics. The volume features established figures including Emil Ferris, Amy Kurzweil, Miriam Libicki, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and Ilana Zeffren, alongside works by artists translated for the first time into English, such as artist Rona Mor. Exploring topics of family, motherhood, miscarriages, queerness, gender and Judaism, illness, war, Haredi and Orthodox family life, and the lingering impact of the Holocaust, the contributors present unique, at times intensely personal, insights into how Jewishness intersects with other forms of identity and identification. In doing so, the volume deepens our understanding of Jewish women’s experiences. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Murder of Andrew Johnson (Forge, 2023) is the third in Burt Solomon’s John Hay Mystery trilogy. Our conversation explores the art and craft of writing historical fiction. What licenses are taken? Solomon invented the murder of Johnson, who assumed the presidency on Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, became America’s first impeached president and died in 1875 from an apparent stroke. But there are no invented characters: Protagonist John Hay, Solomon’s alter ego, truly was Lincoln’s private secretary, a diplomat and a journalist. As in this tale, historical fiction rewards when it reveals the lineaments of an era—the seamy Gilded Age presents bountiful possibilities for a research-driven writer like Solomon—and captivates with a tight plot. Our conversation wraps up on a salubrious note, with Solomon’s riff on the scene in which the vice president of the United States is taking his bath in the marble tubs in the crypt-like basement of the U.S. Capitol building. Did those bathtubs truly exist? You bet they did. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Creatures like Lilith, the seductive first wife of Adam, and mermaids, who lured sailors to their death, are familiar figures in the genre of monstrous temptresses who use their charms to entice men to their doom. But if we go back 4,000 years, the roots of these demons lie in horrific creatures like Lamashtu, a lion-headed Mesopotamian demon who strangled infants and murdered pregnant women, and Gello, a virgin ghost of ancient Greece who killed expectant mothers and babies out of jealousy. Far from enticing men into danger and destruction, these monsters were part of women's ritual practices surrounding childbirth and pregnancy. So how did their mythology evolve into one focused on the seduction of men? In Women's Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents, and Succubi (Apollo, 2023) Dr. Sarah Clegg takes us on an absorbing and witty journey from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day, encountering a multitude of serpentine succubi, a child-eating wolf-monster of ancient Greece, the Queen of Sheba and a host of vampires. Dr. Clegg shows how these demons were appropriated by male-centred societies, before they were eventually recast as symbols of women's liberation, offering new insights into attitudes towards womanhood, sexuality and women's rights. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Aaron Kunin, Professor of English at Pomona College. We will discuss two books Aaron published in 2019: the first is Character as Form (Bloomsbury), a re-examination of the early modern understanding of “character” as stereotype, generalization, and convention. In Character as Form, Aaron braids together close readings of furniture in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, a reflection on the concept of negative anthropology from Raul Ruiz’s Three Lives and Only One Death, and insight into formalism and anti-formalist views of fictive personhood. The second we discuss is Love Three: A Study of a Poem by George Herbert (Wave Books), a “reading diary” that takes a seventeenth-century poem as a springboard for a meditation on love, sexual experience, and power. Herbert’s poem is a fraught dialogue between a speaker and Love, which is unfolded to touch on the politics of eating, the allure of rhetorical power, and the nature of crowds. Aaron’s research focuses on English Renaissance literature. In addition to his scholarship, he is the author of five books, including Cold Genius: A Book of Poems (2014), The Mandarin (2008), and Folding Ruler Star: Poems (2005), all from Fence Books. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In February 1848, a book auction took place in Astor House, No. 7, on the corner of Broadway and Vesey in lower Manhattan, New York. By all accounts, the books were shabby and books like them were discarded every day from private and public libraries: one observer described some of the books as “beyond a certain investure of raggedness and dilapidation, backs without covers, mutilated title pages, and missing colophons, on ordinary occasions.” Another observer writes, “They were so positively wretched that they really became fascinating in that very account—as your halfway beggars are despised by every body, while your thoroughgoing pestiferous, rag and filth accumulation sits to Murillo and the Masters.” Despite their ragged and pestiferous condition, these books drew the attention of booklovers throughout the United States. In some ways, the point was in the discontinuity between their deeper significance and their condition—and in the rare discernment of a true bibliomaniac which could see through to their real quality. The afterlife of this collection is, in part, the subject of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America (Yale UP, 2022), by today’s guest, Denise Gigante. Denise is the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in the Humanities. She is the author of the previous books, The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George (Harvard UP, 2011), Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005). This book follows the sixty books in Charles Lamb’s collection as they flowed through the hands of collectors and eventually became the foundation of modern collections such as the New York Public Library and the Boston Public Library. The dramatis personae of Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America includes Robert Balmanno (1780-1861), the secretary of the American Shakespeare Society of New York; the actor and theater manager William Evans Burton (1804-1860); and Joseph Green Cogswell (1786-1871), the first superintendent of the Astor Library in New York. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Thy Power, O Liberty, make strong the weak, And (wond’rous instinct) Ethiopians speak. At the age of 19, Phillis Wheatley published the first book in English by a person of African descent and the third book of poetry by a North American Woman. She was a poet but also a political actor and celebrity – the most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution. George Washington wrote to her. Thomas Jefferson ridiculed her.  In The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (FSG, 2023) – a joint exercise in history and literary criticism, Dr. David Waldstreicher writes that Wheatley is “Homer and Odysseus and the slaves and the women they knew or imagined. She aimed for the universal without forgetting who was suffering most and why.” Reading Wheatley’s poetry in historical context reveals the extent to which the American Revolution both strengthened and limited black slavery – and also how Wheatley herself affected the debates about American slavery and independence. Mastering the Bible, Greek and Latin translations, and the works of Pope and Milton, Wheatley composed elegies for local elites, celebrated political events, and praised warriors. Despite her skill, knowledge, and fame, she often had to write indirectly about subjects that mattered deeply to her – race, slavery, and discontent with British rule. During a period in which writing was central to political conversation, she used her verse to lampoon, question, and assert the injustice of her enslaved condition. As Waldstreicher demonstrates, Wheatley wrote about events and people – turning what was available and acceptable for a person in her position into poetry that could be read for its art – but also subversively for its political ideas. He concludes that her work proves that the story of the American revolution and Phillis Wheatley are inextricably joined – and that story is one of “resilience and creativity, of antislavery and antiracist possibilities, and of backlash and loss, dreams dashed and deferred.”  Dr. David Waldstreicher is distinguished professor of history, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include U.S. cultural and political history, colonial and early US, African American history, slaver, and antislavery. He is the author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill and Wang) and Runaway American: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). His public facing writing includes contributions to The New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, and The Atlantic. Susan Liebell is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Karima K. Jeffrey-Legette's book Speculative Film and Moving Images by or about Black Women and Girls (Lexington Books, 2022) examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the promise of characters, relationships, and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraft Country, and HBO’s Watchmen series; and a closing chapter that considers the legacy of Black women in horror. Jeffrey-Legette illustrates the ways in which recent texts explore the trauma endured by people of African descent in the United States of America in evocative ways. In doing so, she provides a compelling interpretation of prevalent, well-received, and recurring images of Black women and girls in American popular culture. Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Vanessa I. Corredera’s book Reanimating Shakespeare's Othello in Post-Racial America (Edinburgh Univeristy Press, 2022) looks at how that seventeenth-century play and its protagonist was imagined in theatre, television, and other media between 2008 and 2016. Corredera’s analysis ranges from the sketch comedy Key & Peele to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play American Moor, from ever-persistent tradition of minstrel Othello to the reimagining of Shakespeare’s play by writers of color. Bringing together examples of cultural texts that perpetuate anti-black racism and other artifacts that offer anti-racist possibilities, Corredera’s book helps us to understand this recent moment in U.S. history. At times, to quote Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America, creators like Serial’s Sarah Koenig “have operationalize[d] what this book demonstrates is in fact the common Othello narrative without truly thinking about its force, wielding Shakespearean authority without any regard as to the potentially subjugating purpose for which she is employing it” (127). Other reanimations invite us to shift our perspective and, by extension, reconsider our identifications with characters such as Desdemona or Iago. Vanessa I. Corredera is Department Chair and Professor of English at Andrews University. Corredera’s scholarship has appeared in Literature Compass, Borrowers and Lenders, Shakespeare Quarterly, and The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. Corredera also just published Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation, which is co-edited with Geoffrey Way and L. Monique Pittman (Routledge, 2023). In addition to scholarship, Corredera is a celebrated teacher having won campus-wide honors including the Daniel S. Augsburger Excellence in Teaching Award and the Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. During the conversation, Vanessa discusses Brandi K. Adams’s article “Black ‘(un)bookishness’ in Othello and American Moor: A Meditation” (Shakespeare, 2021), Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor (Methuen, 2020), Carol Anderson’s White Rage (Bloomsbury, 2016), Kim Hall’s edition of Othello (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), Imani Perry’s Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004), Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003). John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As I learned from Hollis Robbins’s monograph Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (U Georgia Press, 2020), there has been a long-standing skepticism of the sonnet form among Black writers and literary critics. Langston Hughes wrote that “the Shakespearean sonnet would be no mold to express the life of Beale Street or Lenox Avenue.” Ishmael Reed condemned sonneteering, alongside ode-writing, as “the feeble pluckings of musky gentlemen and slaves of the metronome.” And yet African American poets such as Terrance Hayes and Natasha Trethewey continue to contribute to a tradition of sonnet-writing that includes Robert Hayden, Phyllis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Amiri Baraka, and James Corrothers. Today’s guest is Hollis Robbins, the author of Forms of Contention, published with the University of Georgia Press in 2020. Hollis is the Dean of Humanities at the University of Utah. Previously, she served as Dean of Arts and Humanities at Sonoma State University, Professor of Humanities at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at Millsaps College. Hollis is also the co-editor of a number of field-defining books including The Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers (Penguin, 2017); The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton, 2006); and the Works of William Wells Brown (Oxford University Press, 2006). Forms of Contention tests the premise that a literary form such as the sonnet can both offer opportunities for reimagining society and politics and pose perils of constraint. This book captures the complexity and longevity of a vibrant tradition of Black poets taking up the sonnet form to explore race, liberation, enslavement, solidarity, and abolitionism. It also invites us to find new directions for the intersection of literary formalism and African American cultural studies. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data.  Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age. Lawrence Goldman was born in London and educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught British and American History for three decades in Oxford, where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College, and Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-2014. Latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. His publications include books on Victorian social science and the history of workers' education, and a biography of the historian and political thinker R. H. Tawney. He is now Emeritus Fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

First introduced in the pages of X-Men, Storm is probably the most recognized Black female superhero. She is also one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe, with abilities that allow her to control the weather itself. Yet that power is almost always deployed in the service of White characters, and Storm is rarely treated as an authority figure. Hero Me Not: The Containment of the Most Powerful Black, Female Superhero (Rutgers UP, 2023) offers an in-depth look at this fascinating yet often frustrating character through all her manifestations in comics, animation, and films. Chesya Burke examines the coding of Storm as racially “exotic,” an African woman who nonetheless has bright white hair and blue eyes and was portrayed onscreen by biracial actresses Halle Berry and Alexandra Shipp. She shows how Storm, created by White writers and artists, was an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. With chapters focusing on the history, transmedia representation, and racial politics of Storm, Burke offers a very personal account of what it means to be a Black female comics fan searching popular culture for positive images of powerful women who look like you. Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I am joined on “America and Beyond” by historian Peter Fritzsche for an appreciation of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books), the landmark book published by the late Svetlana Boym in 2001. I do not use the word “landmark” lightly. The Future of Nostalgia is, first, impressively prescient. Pages, as in Boym’s chapter on “Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return to Origins,” sound eerily present day. But even more than that, Boym, who died in 2015 from cancer, at the age of 56, bequeathed a rich vocabulary for plumbing the contemporary meanings of nostalgia. Her essential distinction between restorative nostalgia, the politically-toxic desire to “rebuild the lost home,” and reflective nostalgia, the often-sentimental longing for shards of the personal past, endures. In these terms, nostalgia can be a poison—or a cure. My conversation with Peter Fritzsche, author of the 2004 book Stranded in the Present, revisits Boym’s wonderful work and meanders its way into topics like nostalgia as a frame for grasping Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Enjoy. Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His latest book, Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports) will be published in January. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

At a moment when the world has tipped over into irreversible violence and corruption, a divinity contacts a righteous man. The man is directed to build a giant ship and bring aboard animals, who will spend an indefinite amount of time living, sleeping, and eating alongside Noah and his family. The rain begins to fall, and these survivors take refuge on the ark. After forty days, the survivors disembark and then have to figure out how to create a new settlement as the waters recede. This cryptic, elliptical ancient story has inspired theological commentary, architecture, and children’s toys, giving us an abundance of metaphors and narratives to understand our past, present, and future climate crises. Our continuing attempts to critically examine the ark narrative and its long afterlife in our imagination is the subject of Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates’s new book Noah’s Arkive, just published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2023. Jeffrey Cohen is Dean of Humanities at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Jeffrey’s previous books include Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: Of Difficult Middles (Palgrave, 2006); and Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota, 1999). Julian Yates is H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture at the University of Delaware. Julian’s previous books include Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression (2017); and Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (2002), both from the University of Minnesota Press. More about the book: In Noah's Arkive (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates examine the long history of imagining endurance against climate catastrophe—as well as alternative ways of creating refuge. They trace how the elements of the flood narrative were elaborated in medieval and early modern art, text, and music, and now shape writing and thinking during the current age of anthropogenic climate change. Arguing that the biblical ark may well be the worst possible exemplar of human behavior, the chapters draw on a range of sources, from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ovid’s tale of Deucalion and Pyrrah, to speculative fiction, climate fiction, and stories and art dealing with environmental catastrophe. Noah’s Arkive uncovers the startling afterlife of the Genesis narrative written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and those excluded and left behind to die. This book of recovered stories speaks eloquently to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene. Following a climate change narrative across the millennia, Noah’s Arkive surveys the long history of dwelling with the consequences of choosing only a few to survive in order to start the world over. It is an intriguing meditation on how the story of the ark can frame how we think about environmental catastrophe and refuge, conservation and exclusion, offering hope for a better future by heeding what we know from the past. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It's 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm's reach--writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home--Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin's nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and--against her political convictions and better judgment--begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father's ghost still haunting their lives?While she waits for the German court's verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. The Applicant is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut. Nazli’s debut novel, The Applicant, was published on February 14, 2023. While writing The Applicant, Nazli worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, and bookseller in Berlin, South Bend, Chicago, and New York. She has taught and studied Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Denver. Her previous work has appeared in Narrative, The Threepenny Review, Bookforum, Second Factory, QSQOQST, books without covers, and The Chicago Review of Books. Recommended Books: Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth Ebru Ojen, Lojman  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagination: Morbid Anatomies (U Wales Press, 2022) demonstrates a little-studied crossover between the Gothic imagination and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. Unafraid to explore the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, Laura R. Kremmel argues, Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and chapbooks expanded the possibilities of medical theories by showing what they might look like in a speculative space without limits. In comparing the Gothic’s collection of unsavory tropes to morbid anatomy’s collection of diseased organs, Kremmel shows that the Gothic’s prioritization of fear and gore gives it access to non-normative bodies, shifting medical and narrative agency to bodies considered powerless. Each chapter pairs a familiar gothic trope with a critical medical debate; the result is to give silenced bodies power over their own narratives. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kevin Landis's One Public: New York’s Public Theater in the Era of Oskar Eustis (Methuen Drama, 2022) tells the story of the remarkable first 17 years (2005-2022) of Oskar Eustis's tenure as the Artistic Director of The Public, the theatre sometimes called America's de facto national theatre. But it is not a book about Eustis. Instead, it is a book about the hundreds of artists and administrators who, guided by Eustis's leadership, create extraordinary theatre at The Public's Astor Place headquarters, at the Delacorte in Central Park, and in touring productions around the city and across the country.  A central organizing principle in the book is the contradiction (and Eustis is not afraid of contradiction) between the theatre's left-wing, Marxian ambitions and the reality that it exists in a hyper-capitalist country with little public support for the arts. Is it possible to keep tickets affordable, salaries liveable, and the work on stage exciting? If The Public hasn't figured out how to do all three, it isn't for lack of trying, and One Public provides detailed case studies of a series of attempts live up to this theatre's inspiring, impossible, necessary ideals. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Thinking of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, it is hard to think of him without imagining him in very particular contexts. One will likely imagine him in a Parisian cafe working through a pack of cigarettes and coffee, working on his latest play while waiting for his friend Pierre to arrive. His theories of freedom against the temptations of bad faith are thought to be theories of writers and activists, resisters of occupation. But while this is no doubt a central part of his thinking, it misses another context he was very much interested in: the clinic. While he was not an orthodox Freudian or trained analyst, he was deeply interested in many of the questions that psychoanalysts are also interested in, and this intersection proved to be very productive, generating thousands of pages of lesser known works. This is what Mary Edwards, philosophy lecturer at Cardiff University, has written about in her new book Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis: Knowing Others (Bloomsbury, 2022). Working through Sartre’s output from beginning to end, it first sets the stage with his early claims about the nature of the self and the possibility of knowing a person. From there, it works to his later works, in particular his voluminous yet unfinished biography of Gustave Flaubert, where Edwards finds Sartre developing and applying a very particular method of understanding a person while nonetheless maintaining a respect for their free nature. While Sartre never completed his intended project, Edwards finds his attempt suggestive for rethinking life both in and beyond the clinic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi’s recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation. On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books Discussed in this episode: The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick “The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!) A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first to chart the global diversity of colophons between 1400 and 1800. The volume presents a new approach to scribal cultures that expands traditional definitions. Moving from the paradigm of codicological information towards a thorough interpretation of the wider social worlds of colophons in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, this volume uncovers the fascinating cultural history of early modern scribes. Chapters examine how those engaging in the composition and distribution of colophons shaped scribal identities, group cultures and bookish communities in a world in which manuscripts mattered. Authors build on approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, codicology, history, and philology to offer a new conceptual framework that studies colophons as scribal practices embedded in their changing social and cultural worlds. As a new contribution to the history of the book, this volume’s global approach pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a colophon. Christopher Bahl is an Assistant Professor in South Asian History, Durham University, UK. He is interested in the social, cultural, and political histories of the early modern western Indian Ocean world and studies them through its surviving manuscript cultures. Stefan Hanß is a Professor in Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, UK, and winner of a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award and a Philip Leverhulme Prize. Hanß has published widely on material culture and global history. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment: Staging Natural Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford UP, 2016) explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. Not only did the representation of natural philosophy in eighteenth-century plays like Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso, Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon, Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table, and John Rich's Necromancer, or Harelequin Doctor Faustus, influence contemporary debates over the role that experimental science was to play public life, the theater shaped the very form that science itself was to take.  By disciplining, and ultimately helping to legitimate, experimental philosophy, the eighteenth-century stage helped to naturalize an epistemology based on self-evident, decontextualized facts that might speak for themselves. In this, the stage and the lab jointly fostered an Enlightenment culture of spectacle that transformed the conditions necessary for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Precisely because Enlightenment public science initiatives, taking their cue from the public stages, came to embrace the stagecraft and spectacle that Restoration natural philosophy sought to repress from the scene of experimental knowledge production, eighteenth-century science organized itself around not the sober, masculine "modest witness" of experiment but the sentimental, feminized, eager observer of scientific performance. Al Coppola is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Smollett's Britain (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), acclaimed British historian Jeremy Black examines the layers of craft and insight in Tobias Smollett, and discusses the particular nature of his genius and influence on British culture. Once again, Black acquaints the reader with the full range of a prolific writer's works and offers a backstage tour of the meaning and context of Britain's most beloved stories and story-tellers. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert T. Tally, Jr.'s book For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism (Zero Books, 2022) takes as its point of departure two profound and interrelated phenomena. The first is the pervasive sense of what Mark Fisher had called “capitalist realism", in which (to cite the famous expression variously attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) it is easier to imagine the end of the world than then end of capitalism. As Jameson in particular has noted, “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations,” and the attenuation of the imaginative function in cultural criticism has far-reaching implications for the organization and reformation of institutions more generally. This manifests itself as a waning of speculative or theoretical energy, which in turn leads to a general capitulation to the tyranny of “what is,” the actually existing state of affairs, and the preemptive disavowal of alternative possibilities. Connected to this is the second phenomenon: the prevalent tendency in literary and cultural criticism over the past 30 or more years to eschew critical theory and even critique itself, while championing approaches to cultural study that emphasize surface reading, thin description, ordinary language philosophy, object-oriented ontology, and post-critique.  Together these forms of anticritical and antitheoretical criticism have constituted a tendency that has in its various incarnations come to dominate the humanities and other areas of higher education in recent years. The latter has served to reinforce the former, and the result has been to align literary and cultural criticism with the broad-based forces of neoliberalism whose influence has so deleteriously transformed not only higher education but the whole of society at large. Robert T. Tally Jr. argues that, in order to counter these trends and empower the imagination, the time is ripe for “a ruthless critique of all that exists,” to borrow a phrase from the young Marx. This book is intended as a provocation, at once a polemic and a call to action for cultural critics Robert T. Tally Jr. is a professor of English at Texas State University Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hello everyone. This is Ti-han 張迪涵_, one of the hosts of our Taiwan On-Air podcast series, sponsored by the European Association of Taiwan Studies and today we are here for a Book Chat. Our guest today is a rising-star French scholar who specialised in Taiwanese and Chinese literary studies and translation,  Professor Gwennaël Gaffric from Université Lyon 3 Jean Moulin. Both Gwennael and I studied at the University of Lyon 3 as doctoral students back in early 2010s. First time we met was because I required some help from a native French speaker to help me revise my poorly written doctoral proposal and application in French at the time. Although Gwenn had never met me before, he was very kind to lend me a hand to review my application together. And since then, he had always been a great help and a true friend, and of course a wonderful colleague to work with throughout these years. Many of our Francophone colleagues who work on Taiwan studies also know Gwenn through his great works of fiction translation. As a doctoral student, he started with translating Wu Ming-yi’s 睡眠的航線 [Routes in a Dream], and subsequently translated also Wu’s 複眼人[The Man with the Compound Eyes] and 天穚上的魔術師 [The Magician on the Skywalk], as well as other Taiwanese novelists and poets such as Chi Ta-wei, Kao Yi-feng, Xia Yu and Walis Nokan. In recent years, his translation also goes beyond Taiwan, further including other Chinese best-selling eco sci-fi such as the Three-Body Problem from Liu Cixin and The Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan. Gaffric’s research today crosses between science fiction, ecocriticism,, and Sinohpone literary translation. And of course, he also plays a key role in the promotion of Taiwan literature and culture to the French-speaking world, as he is not only in charge as the director of Taiwan Fiction Collection Series in the Asiathèque, but he also collaborates with Ministry of Culture文化部 and Centre Culturel de Taïwan à Paris 巴文中心 to bring authors and poets to the Francophone readers. Today, however, we are not here to quiz Gwenn about his literary translation, but more about his scholarly research and his monograph, The Literature in the Age of Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Study of the Taiwanese writer Wu Ming-yi [La Littérature à l’ère de l’anthropocene: Une étude écocritique autour des oeuvres de l’écrivain taïwanaise Wu Ming-yi] which is recently translated into Chinese by his wife, Hsu Ya-wen, and published in Taiwan by Xinjindian Publishing. This is a book that based on Gwennaël’s doctoral thesis and with adapted revisions. In the book, readers are able to go more in depth on Gaffric’s own critical interpretation and analysis of Wu Ming-yi’s works across different periods as well as his theoretical understanding and worldview contextualised in the era of Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Credited with popularizing the label "ex-wife" in 1929, Ursula Parrott wrote provocatively about divorcées, career women, single mothers, work-life balance, and a host of new challenges facing modern women. Her best sellers, Hollywood film deals, marriages and divorces, and run-ins with the law made her a household name. Part biography, part cultural history, Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (U California Press, 2023) establishes Parrott's rightful place in twentieth-century American culture, uncovering her neglected work and keen insights into American women's lives during a period of immense social change. Although she was frequently dismissed as a "woman's writer," reading Parrott's writing today makes it clear that she was a trenchant philosopher of modernity--her work was prescient, anticipating issues not widely raised until decades after her decline into obscurity. With elegant wit and a deft command of the archive, Marsha Gordon tells a timely story about the life of a woman on the front lines of a culture war that is still raging today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From his debut as a novelist, Mordecai Richler challenged, provoked, enraged, entertained, and surprised readers. Criticizing him for his portrayals of Canada and accusing him of being anti-Jewish, many found his mix of progressive sympathies and illiberal satire confounding but hard to ignore. His novels were too engaging: their subjects crackled with contemporary relevance, and their humour was irresistible. Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) is an investigation into Richler's novels and the conflicting reactions they provoked.  Taking into consideration the most prevalent and voluble responses to his novels, Shana Mauer examines the texts themselves and assesses how they stand up to these reactions. She asks whether the backlash was justified, and whether these novels savaged Canada, maligned the Jewish community, disparaged women, mocked gays, and generally despaired of modern life and contemporary culture. As the first study of Richler's entire corpus, this book considers these issues in the context of a long career - one as consistent as it was varied - in which an ideological discourse often, but not always, evolved. Turning away from impressions, assumptions, and generalizations, many informed by Richler's non-fiction and on-record comments, Mauer focuses instead on the substance of the novels themselves, finding there a restless search for lasting moral value. Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values explores the construction of literary texts that have made Richler one of the most intriguing and successful modern writers, as well as an essential voice in Canadian and Jewish literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What does a map of Southeast Asia as a pegasus have to do with translation and Southeast Asia? How can we think of translation as anything other than a unidirectional practice of bringing meaning across languages? How can Southeast Asia challenge the way we think about translation?  Phrae Chittiphalangsri and Vicente L. Rafael, the editors of the first edited volume on translation and Southeast Asia Of Archipelagos and Peninsulas unpack these questions that are raised in the book, along with sharing their personal stories about translation, with Kukasina Kubaha, a NIAS SUPRA alumni. Phrae Chittiphalangsri is an Associate Professor of Translation Studies at Chulalongkorn University. She has written extensively on Orientalism, Translation, and Post-colonialism. She is also a literary translator working with Thai, English, and French. Vicente L. Rafael is a Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington. His latest book The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte is published with Duke University Press like his previous books which include Contracting Colonialism, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues. Books and articles mentioned: On the Virtuality of Translation in Orientalism The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualities like space, time, abundance, and community find expression in a good bookstore. Along the way, he also predicts--perhaps audaciously--a future in which the bookstore not only endures, but realizes its highest aspirations. In exploring why good bookstores matter, Deutsch draws on his lifelong experience as a bookseller, but also his upbringing as an Orthodox Jew. This spiritual and cultural heritage instilled in him a reverence for reading, not as a means to a living, but as an essential part of a meaningful life. Central among Deutsch's arguments for the necessity of bookstores is the incalculable value of browsing--since, when we are deep in the act of looking at the shelves, we move through space as though we are inside the mind itself, immersed in self-reflection. In the age of one-click shopping, this is no ordinary defense of bookstores, but rather an urgent account of why they are essential places of discovery, refuge, and fulfillment that enrich the communities that are lucky enough to have them. Jeff Deutsch is the director of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstores, which in 2019 he helped incorporate as the first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling. He lives in Chicago. Recommended Books: Lewis Hyde, The Gift Leon Forrest, Divine Days Toya Wolf, Last Summer on State Street Pierre Hadot, Don’t forget to Live W.B. Yates, “Words for Music, Perhaps” Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon.  Canon Fanfiction: Reading, Writing, and Teaching with Adaptations of Premodern and Early Modern Literature (Medieval Institute Publications, 2023) sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom. Christine Schott, MFA, PhD, is associate professor of English at Erskine College where she teaches medieval and world literatures and creative writing. Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga's discoveries decades before he made them. The title character of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges's widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband's personal library, and Borges's books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga's discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like "Funes." With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a native of Argentina, is Professor and Director of the Bioengineering Research Centre at the University of Leicester. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A fascinating exploration of George Orwell--and his body of work--by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century's greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor's stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell's last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life (Pegasus Books, 2023) achieves. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Analyzing Social Narratives (Routledge, 2015) is one of the concise and informative volumes in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods, whose titles we have been featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. Its author, Shaul Shenhav, organizes the book’s contents around four concepts: story, text, narration and multiplicity, each of which we discuss in this episode. Reflecting on his early experiences of learning about narrative through the love of literature, he explains why narrative analysis matters as much for political science as it does for the humanities, and talks us through some of the operations that he sets out in the book. He considers the relevance of narrative to other types of textual and discourse analysis, and discusses how interpretive political and social scientists can contribute to research and debates on large language models. Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He is also a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When Charles Darwin returned to Britain from the Beagle voyage in 1836, the most talked-about scientific books of the day were the Bridgewater Treatises. This series of eight works was funded by a bequest of the last Earl of Bridgewater and written by leading men of science appointed by the president of the Royal Society to explore “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” Securing public attention beyond all expectations, the series offered Darwin’s generation a range of approaches to one of the great questions of the age: how to incorporate the newly emerging disciplinary sciences into Britain’s overwhelmingly Christian culture. In Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age (U Chicago Press, 2022), Jonathan R. Topham examines how and to what extent the series contributed to a sense of congruence between Christianity and the sciences in the generation before the fabled Victorian conflict between science and religion. Building on the distinctive insights of book history and paying close attention to the production, circulation, and use of the books, Topham offers new perspectives on early Victorian science and the subject of science and religion as a whole. Jonathan R. Topham is professor of history of science at the University of Leeds, UK. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, Geraldo Cadava and Tasha Sandoval talk with Raquel Gutiérrez about their critically acclaimed book, Brown Neon: Essays, published by Coffee House Press in 2022. Brown Neon won the 2023 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography and the 2023 Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. It has received praise from the New Yorker, Vogue, Oprah Daily, SPIN, Ms. Magazine, and so many other publications. Gutiérrez, Cadava, and Sandoval discuss the legendary activist Jeanne Córdova, Leslie Marmon Silko, gentrification, belonging, performance, border walls, the Sonoran Desert, the drive on I-10 through Arizona and California, and Tucson. Really, it was a lot about Tucson, and you can thank Sandoval for editing that part down to a reasonable length. On the other hand, if you’re from the desert, or just a fan of the “Dirty T,” as Gutiérrez called it, then you’re welcome! A critic, essayist, poet, performer, and educator, Gutiérrez was born and raised in Los Angeles, and is today based in Tucson. They teach in the low-residency creative writing MFA programs at Oregon State University–Cascades and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Xiao Hong, Yom Sang-sop, Abe Kobo, and Zhong Lihe—these iconic literary figures from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all described Manchuria extensively in their literary works. Now China’s Northeast—but a contested frontier in the first half of the twentieth century—Manchuria has inspired writers from all over East Asia to claim it as their own, employing novel themes and forms for engaging nation and empire in modern literature. Many of these works have been canonized as quintessential examples of national or nationalist literature—even though they also problematize the imagined boundedness and homogeneity of nation and national literature at its core. Through the theoretical lens of literary territorialization, Miya Xie's Territorializing Manchuria: The Transnational Frontier and Literatures of East Asia (Harvard UP, 2023) reconceptualizes modern Manchuria as a critical site for making and unmaking national literatures in East Asia. Xie ventures into hitherto uncharted territory by comparing East Asian literatures in three different languages and analyzing their close connections in the transnational frontier. By revealing how writers of different nationalities constantly enlisted transnational elements within a nation-centered body of literature, Territorializing Manchuria uncovers a history of literary co-formation at the very site of division and may offer insights for future reconciliation in the region. Miya Qiong Xie is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative East Asian Literature at Dartmouth College. Her research involves modern Chinese, Korean and Japanese literatures. Broadly, she is interested in how people from the margins – geographical or metaphorical – gain power, find identity, and establish connections through transcultural negotiation and co-formation. Linshan Jiang is Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Brenda Beck discusses her lifelong work on a Tamil folk legend, resulting in a graphic novel, an English translation and Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures (U Toronto Press, 2022) which identifies important symbolic patterns connecting this tale to other epic stories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors. We discuss their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. We recently caught up with Héctor Tobar to discuss his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino" (MCD, 2023). Our conversation included mention of the pathbreaking historian Vicki L. Ruiz, to whom Tobar dedicated Our Migrant Souls, as well as discussions on the literary influence of James Baldwin, the need for a revolution in how we talk about immigrants and immigration, Latino racial identity, and Tobar’s own life and travels. Tobar is a writer based in Los Angeles and is a professor of literary journalism and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of many other books, including The Last Great Road Bum, Deep Down Dark, and The Tattooed Soldier. Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kathleen Lubey,'s book What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest Since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey's readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre's central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women's bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre's deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them. Kathleen Lubey is Professor of English at St. John's University. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660-1760 (2012). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose dedicated research provides the foundation for an analysis of the play’s broader contexts, also brings perspectives from the first fully staged modern production that tested the theatricality of the translation and provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities. In this discussion, Symes and Thomas discuss the significance of the play, surprising and fascinating things they learned while working on the book, and what the Play about the Antichrist tells us about what it means to be human. Carol Symes is associate professor of history and theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and author of an award-winning monograph on theater and public life in medieval Arras. Kyle A. Thomas is assistant professor of theatre at Missouri State University, specializing in medieval performance texts and strategies for their modern enactment. Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Alejandro Varela about his books The Town of Babylon and The People Who Report More Stress, both published by Astra House. The Town of Babylon was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The People Who Report More Stress is sure to earn similar accolades. We discussed stress as a silent killer in Latinx communities; the challenges of interethnic and interracial relationships; whether it’s possible to partner with someone who doesn’t share your politics; suburbs and cities; the meanings of Latinx literature as a genre; and so much more. Varela is a writer based in New York City. He has a background in public health, which is evident in his writing. His writing has appeared in the Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, The Offing, and other places. Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert Payne's Reimagining the Family: Lesbian Mothering in Contemporary French Literature (Peter Lang, 2021) is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centered around the notion of «reimagining», the book examines how literature interrogates the normative definition of the family as a heterosexual, biological unit. It discusses a range of themes, including the difficulty of reconciling lesbianism with mothering, the role of the father, the identity of the co-mother and issues of difference and equality. The corpus includes both well-known and previously unstudied authors, and covers a range of genres, from autobiography to popular fiction. Collectively, the texts offer privileged insights into the increasingly relevant experiences of lesbian mothers and illustrate the changing face of the family in twenty-first-century France. Salvador Lopez Rivera is a PhD candidate in French language and literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Toril Moi, whose book Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell (University of Chicago Press, 2017) returns to three twentieth-century figures in ordinary language philosophy to renew how we think about style and argumentation. Revolution of the Ordinary brings together a diverse archive of primary sources, from the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar to the 1970s TV show All in the Family. I am excited to welcome Toril to the podcast today. Toril is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy, and Theatre Studies at Duke University. Toril’s previous books include Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory and Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. She has served as Research Professor at Norway’s National Library for the last five years. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Translation is a mysterious process that combines the elements of writing – rhythm and voice, meaning, structure and nuance – with the challenge of problem-solving. The American writer Harry Mathews said, “translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing, since it demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech.” Anna Birkenhauer-Molad is an award-winning translator and teacher of literary translation, whose work has brought some of the best Hebrew prose and poetry to the German-reading public. Among the authors whose writings she has translated are: David Grossman, Aharon Applefeld, Haim Baer, Yoel Hoffman and Yehuda Amichai. In 2018, Anna was awarded the German Medal of Honor by the President of Germany for her contribution to cultural relations between Germany and Israel. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Volume 37 of Spenser Studies is a special issue on the theme of “Companionable Thinking: Spenser With.” As guest editors of this collection of essays, Namratha Rao (University of York), Joe Moshenska (University of Oxford), and David Hillman (King’s College, University of Cambridge) collect over two dozen essays which each “make a match” between Spenser’s work and a philosopher or theorist. For instance, Melissa Sanchez stages a conversation between Spenser and the trans theorist Julia Serrano; Patrick Aaron Harris reads Spenser’s Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s theorization of cute poetics; and Joe Moshenska and Ayesha Ramachandran look at Spenser through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “cannibal metaphysics.” Each essay, from Megan Bowman’s examination of “spectacular staring” in Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to Supriya Chaudhuri’s consideration of Donna Harraway, gestures toward new critical horizons for early modern studies to take up. Additionally, as the theorist’s work participates in “companionable thinking with” Spenser, the poetry of the Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and The Shepheardes Calender is shown to enrich contemporary discussions of literary theory. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Amir Artaban Sedaghat’s Translating Rumi into the West: A Linguistic Conundrum and Beyond (Routledge, 2023) engages Rumi, the 13th-century Muslim Persian mystic and a best-selling poet, and the paradoxes of English translations associated with him. Sedaghat explores generative questions from translation to audience reception using translation studies and theories of semiotics.  The book addresses linguistic and pragmatic questions of translations, such as how text, gender, language, and lexicon can or cannot be translated into languages like English and what's lost in the process. To highlight the latter example, Sedaghat masterfully maps various translators' works over the years, such as Orientalist scholars (Arberry and Nicholson) to contemporary Rumi enthusiasts (Coleman Barks), to show how these various translations have resulted in negotiations informed by translators own particularities (i.e., beliefs, linguistic abilities, and social locations etc). The book further considers how Rumi’s poetry is also defined by kinetic and musical dimensions, which cannot be translated. What then are the ethical challenges to these paradoxes of untranslatability and reception politics of Rumi into the global west? This book will be of interest to any Rumi enthusiast, scholars of translation, linguistics, and semiotics, and mysticism, Sufism, Persian/Iranian Studies and much more. Shobhana Xavier is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all. 500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer. Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The Great Mongol Shahnama” back at the center of a sprawling 14th-century Mongol empire. Robert Hillenbrand is an honorary professorial fellow in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In this interview, Robert and I talk about the Shahnama—and what makes the “Great Mongol Shahnama” unique—and how the Mongol empire gave this masterpiece’s illustrations recognizable Western and Chinese influences. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Mongol Shahnama. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When Tenzin Dickie was growing up in exile in India, she didn’t have access to works by Tibetan writers. Now, as an editor and translator, she is working to create and elevate the stories she wished she had had as a young writer. Her new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Vintage Books, 2023), offers a comprehensive introduction to modern Tibetan nonfiction, featuring essays from twenty-two Tibetan writers from around the world. Taken as a whole, the collection provides an intimate and powerful portrait of modern Tibetan life and what it means to live in exile. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Dickie to discuss the history of the Tibetan essay, why she views exile as a kind of bardo, and how modern Tibetan writers are continually recreating the Tibetan nation. Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity. Drawing on Deleuzian, Foucauldian, and new materialist theories, Miranda Corcoran charts a new feminist history from 1940s bobbysoxer to today, untangling strands of embodiments, agency, and violence. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation. Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery. Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin. There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recognize and affirm hybridity in ways that challenge binaristic conceptions of race and nationality. Halloran provides a common language and critical framework to discuss the achievements of members of the Caribbean diaspora and their considerable cultural and political capital as evident in their contributions to literature and popular culture. Vivian Nun Halloran is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, ethnic American literature, postmodernism, and popular culture. She previously wrote The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (University of Virginia Press, 2009). Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Wayne Deakin, whose new book, Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism, has just published by Palgrave Macmillan in summer 2023. Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism surveys the varied ways we have tried to make sense of literary texts, from the earliest Greek poetic theories of antiquity up to contemporary anti-critique polemics. Wayne Deakin is professor of English at Chiang Mai University, and is the author of the 2015 book, Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition, also from Palgrave/Macmillan. Wayne’s scholarship has explored commodity fetishism in Thailand, the writings of Coleridge, George Bataille, and Wordsworth, and postcolonialism. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What happens when you come of age in mid-life? Why is so challenging to figure out your own past? Can you find the permission to be weird? (And can you be happy if you don’t?) Memoirist and English professor Hannah Pittard joins us to explore: If the personal is ever too personal. What is a collective memory. The imperfect way we perceive our own experiences. Taking risks in writing and in life. The memoir We Are Too Many. Today’s book is: We Are Too Many, a memoir about a marriage-ending affair between award-winning author Hannah Pittard’s husband and her best friend. An innovative and genre-bending look at a marriage and friendship gone wrong, Professor Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of conversations that are fast-paced, intimate, and reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. She takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with—from the depths of female rage to the ways we outgrow certain people. We Are Too Many examines the unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the possibilities in starting life over after a catastrophe. Our guest is: Professor Hannah Pittard, who is the author Visible Empire, Reunion, Listen to Me, The Fates Will Find Their Way, and the memoir We Are Too Many. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a historian. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd Story Genius, by Lisa Cron Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg Revise, by Pamela Haag Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott Academic Life episode with Professor Morgan Talty about Night of the Living Rez Academic Life episode with novelist Erica Bauermeister, who left academia Academic Life episode with Nancy Thayer, an English professor who left academia to write full time Academic Life episode on writing memoir with Dr. Rebekah Tausig Academic Life episode on Shoutin in the Fire with Dante Stewart Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from today’s experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University Press in 2023. Eliot is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published a number of books: Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell University Press, 2023); Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2019); Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (Cornell University Press, 2000); and Overkill: Sex Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991 (Cornell University Press, 2008). Marvel Comics in the 1970s focuses on five writers, all born between 1945 and 1948, and their iconic takes on characters and titles: Steve Engelhart’s Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange; Doug Moench’s Master of Kung Fu; Marv Wolfman’s Tomb of Dracula; Don McGregor’s Black Panther and Luke Cage; and Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck. In particular, the book explores how subjectivity and the self are expressed through the unique medium and genre constraints of 1970s-era Marvel comics. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation. Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves. In an era of political polarization, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny (Redwood Press, 2021) demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way. Emily Katz Anhalt is Professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent book is Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement's Best Books of 2017. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Katherine Giuffre examines in depth six of the cultural "battles" that were key parts of this revolution: the novels of the Brontë sisters, the paintings of the Impressionists, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the Ballets Russes production of Le Sacre du printemps, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Using contemporaneous reviews in the press as well as other historical material, we can see that these now-canonical works provoked outrage at the time of their release because they addressed critical points of social upheaval and transformation in ways that engaged broad audiences with subversive messages. This framework allows us to understand and navigate the cultural debates that play such an important role in 21st century politics. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual dimension to these discussions in what amounts to the first large-scale comparative analysis of sodomitical themes in medieval literary and visual art, built around an impressive range of texts and artworks from high and late medieval England, France, and Italy.  As Mills shows, sodomy does enter the field of vision in certain contexts, despite being associated with a rhetoric of unmentionability. He shows why sodomy appears when it does and in which media and genres (e.g., commentaries on the Bible and Ovid s Metamorphoses, in manuscript illuminations and sculpture); how it shifts categories as a means of becoming visible (e.g., appearing in narratives involving age difference or gender transformation); and how, as readers/viewers, the process of translating the medieval category of sodomy into the languages of the present is at once a necessity and an impossibility. In a single stroke, Mills revises the way we think about well known medieval literary and visual materials in the light of twenty-first century thinking and the interaction between the visual and the textual, bringing both literary and art historical discourse on the subject to a new level of maturity." Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Kevin Killeen whose new monograph, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, has just been published by Stanford University Press. This monograph gathers together a range of early modern sources including the mystic Jacob Boehme, the poet and radical John Milton, the writer and royalist Margaret Cavendish, and the prophet Anna Trapnel. Taken together, these chapter offer a vibrant picture of literary culture’s engagements (sometimes critical, sometimes appreciative) of that which can’t quite be understood by the mind, language, or theology. Kevin Killeen is Professor of English at the University of York. His previous books are the monograph, The Political Bible in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and the Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700 (2015), co-edited with Helen Smith and Rachel Judith Willie. Kevin also is the editor of the journal Renaissance Studies. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it so perennially popular?  Why Horror Seduces (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses these questions through evolutionary social sciences.Explaining the functional seduction of horror entertainment, this book draws on cutting-edge findings in the evolutionary social sciences, showing how the horror genre is a product of human nature. Integrating the study of horror with the sciences of human nature, the book claims that horror entertainment works by targeting humans' adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe, allowing a high intensity experience within a safe context.  Through analyses of well-known and popular modern American works of horror--Rosemary's Baby; The Shining; I Am Legend; Jaws; and several others--author Mathias Clasen illustrates how these works target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms; we are attracted to horrifying entertainment because we have an adaptive tendency to find pleasure in make-believe that allows us to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. Organized into three parts identifying fictional works by evolutionary mode--the evolution of horror; evolutionary interpretations of horror; the future of horror--Why Horror Seduces succinctly explores the cognitive processes behind spectators' need to scream. Mathias Clasen Associate Professor of English at Aarhus University in Denmark. Clasen’s research integrates horror study with the natural and social sciences, in particular human behavioral biology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mateusz Świetlicki's book Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children's Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory (Routledge, 2023) is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children's historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of 41 books - novels, novellas, picturebooks, short stories, and a graphic novel. The first three chapters focus on texts about the complex process of becoming Ukrainian Canadian, showcasing the experiences of the first two waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, including encounters with Indigenous Peoples and the First World War Internment. The last two chapters are devoted to the significance of the cultural memory of the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the Second World War for Ukrainian Canadians. All the chapters demonstrate the entanglements of Ukrainian and Canadian history and point to the role Anglophone children's literature can play in preventing the symbolical seeds of memory from withering.  This volume argues that reading, imagining, and reimagining history can lead to the formation of beyond-textual next-generation memory. Such memory created through reading is multidimensional as it involves the interpretation of both the present and the past by an individual whose reality has been directly or indirectly shaped by the past over which they have no influence. Next-generation memory is of anticipatory character, which means that authors of historical fiction anticipate the readers - both present-day and future - not to have direct links to any witnesses of the events they discuss and to have little knowledge of the transcultural character of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as "invention," "singularity," "otherness," "alterity," "performance" and "form." He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a "responsible," creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2017) is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic. Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of York, UK. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Routledge, 2004), The Work of Literature (2015) and, with Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry (Routledge, 2015). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed over four hundred years old. And students will have to submit a piece of original writing that is well-organized, has a fresh argument, and cites early modern sources correctly. Rarely do these two tracks of the course inform each other. Adhaar Noor Desai’s new book, Blotted Lines: Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Discomposition (Cornell University Press, 2023) seeks to address this disjunction. As Desai shows, the early modern archive proposed strategies and ideas about writing that students and teachers might profitably learn—and sometimes unlearn. The innovative structure of Blotted Lines has an introduction, a coda, and five chapters that pair a topic from early modern poetics with a key writer: style (George Gascoigne), invention (Philip Sidney), revision (John Davies of Hereford), editing (Anne Southwell) and performance anxiety (William Shakespeare). After each chapter, Desai offers a brief conversational “reflection,” which offer a combination of practical teaching advice for the Shakespeare classroom and more expansive discussions about pedagogy in the twenty-first century university. Desai is Professor of English at Bard College and is one of the co-founders of the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network, an international project that brings together practitioners working at the intersection of technology, social justice, and creative practice. His scholarship has been published in English Literary Renaissance, Philological Quarterly, Configurations, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage, and Teaching Social Justice through Shakespeare. Blotted Lines is his first monograph. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford UP, 2023) is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age. Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published extensively on the cultural, political, and literary milieu of twentieth-century Britain, including (with William Abrahams) the Orwell biographies The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1980), both finalists for the National Book Award. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Lela Sebbar (U California Press, 2023) brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith community into which its author was born. The present translation makes this unique collection available to an English-speaking public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world. Translation by Lia Brozgal, Jane Kuntz, Rebekah Vince and Robert Watson. A free ebook version of this title is available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer striving in the fields, as immortalized in the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. But, as shown in Katie Kadue’s book Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago, 2021), the domestic practice of preservation offered a powerful metaphor for the often-menial, often-overlooked labor. These labors from pickling to correcting to tempering were largely imperceptible but were essential to ward off disorder. Domestic Georgic offers fresh close readings of Francois Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Montaigne’s Essays, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Through these readings, this study provides a compelling new framework for our understanding of early modern poetics, gender, and labor. Katie Kadue is an incoming professor at SUNY Binghamton and a former Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Modern Philology, Montaigne Studies, and Studies in Philology, and public-facing work can be found at The Philosopher and the Chronicle of Higher Education. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard--surveying land, running his family's pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond--and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have. Through Thoreau, readers will discover a philosophy of work in the office, factory, lumber mill, and grocery store, and reflect on the rhythms of the workday, the joys and risks of resigning oneself to work, the dubious promises of labor-saving technology, and that most vital and eternal of philosophical questions, "How much do I get paid?" In ten chapters, including "Manual Work," "Machine Work," and "Meaningless Work," this personal, urgent, practical, and compassionate book introduces readers to their new favorite coworker: Henry David Thoreau. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences take shape in the digital age. Webster describes the factors that create audiences, including the preferences and habits of media users, the role of social networks, the resources and strategies of media providers, and the growing impact of media measures—from ratings to user recommendations. He incorporates these factors into one comprehensive framework: the marketplace of attention. In doing so, he shows that the marketplace works in ways that belie our greatest hopes and fears about digital media. Some observers claim that digital media empower a new participatory culture; others fear that digital media encourage users to retreat to isolated enclaves. Webster shows that public attention is at once diverse and concentrated—that users move across a variety of outlets, producing high levels of audience overlap. So although audiences are fragmented in ways that would astonish midcentury broadcasting executives, Webster argues that this doesn't signal polarization. He questions whether our preferences are immune from media influence, and he describes how our encounters with media might change our tastes. In the digital era's marketplace of attention, Webster claims, we typically encounter ideas that cut across our predispositions. In the process, we will remake the marketplace of ideas and reshape the twenty-first century public sphere. James G. Webster is Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) invented Dada with a series of chaotic performances including multilingual (and nonlingual) shouting, music, drumming, and calisthenics. Within a few years, Dada (largely driven by Tzara) became an international artistic movement, a rallying point for young artists in Paris, New York, Barcelona, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. With TaTa Dada, Marius Hentea offers the first English-language biography of this influential artist. As the leader of Dada, Tzara created "the moment art changed forever." But, Hentea shows, Tzara and Dada were not coterminous. Tzara went on to publish more than fifty books; he wrote one of the great poems of surrealism; he became a recognized expert on primitive art; he was an active antifascist, a communist, and (after the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution) a former communist. Hentea offers a detailed exploration of Tzara's early life in Romania, neglected by other scholars; a scrupulous assessment of the Dada years; and an original examination of Tzara's life and works after Dada. The one thing that remained constant through all of Tzara's artistic and political metamorphoses, Hentea tells us, was a desire to unlock the secrets and mysteries of language. Marius Hentea, a Romanian-born literary scholar, teaches in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. He is the author of Henry Green at the Limits of Modernism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ada--a woman from Montreal living reluctantly in Michigan--vanishes from her bed one night while her husband Danny is asleep beside her, her young son, Gilles, in the next room. Desperate to locate Ada before Gilles understands what has happened, Danny begins a search. But the feds are already involved: across the country and around the world, mothers are vanishing from their homes. Where did Ada go? What has she gone through? And how does the mystery relate to the forest that she seemed magnetically drawn to? Confronting the role of motherhood and the meaning of home in the wreckage of capitalism and climate change, The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (Catapult, 2023) is that rare, dazzling debut that is both thrilling and profound. It is a mystery, a play on myths of metamorphosis, and above all, a story of love--between husband and wife, mother and child--deeply troubled by the future we face. Molly Lynch is a writer. She grew up on the West Coast of Canada and lived in Ireland as a teenager. She worked in Europe and traveled extensively through the Middle East, before studying Literature in Montreal. She did an MFA in Baltimore during the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and became involved in community activism against racist policing and apartheid. She now teaches creative writing as well as literature courses on social justice at the University of Michigan. Books Recommended: Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahara Anne Enright, The Gathering Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, often foreign, fiction and poetry, as well as original novels and poems, were “texts in motion.” They circulated throughout China together with their copiers and readers, youth sent-down during the Cultural Revolution, and often followed characters who were likewise moving, spies and scientists traveling within and beyond China.  Moreover, the text itself was just as unstable as its readers and characters were mobile: frequent copying resulted in the proliferation of multiple versions of any given narrative, thus troubling the clear-cut distinction between readers and authors. Henningsen’s careful survey of shouchaoben and related book forms, including “internal publications,” sketches out a lively and cosmopolitan reading culture. In the book, she shows that despite assumptions of cultural insularity and uniformity, paying attention to “reading acts” during the Cultural Revolution period shows that the “long 1970s” are not an abrupt, anomalous rupture in Chinese literary history, but a period that can be more fruitfully described in terms of continuities.  Please join me for a conversation with Lena Henningsen in exploring the rich archive of shouchaoben. Make sure to also visit ReadChina, to learn more about Henningsen's European Research Council grant funded research on Reading Acts in China and discover the resources her team has compiled here. Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century experiences of paranoia and literary apocalypse. It traces a twin fear of omniscience and oblivion back to the origins of writing in ancient Babylon and Egypt, then forwards to the age of Google. It uncovers bibliophobia from the first Chinese emperor to Nazi Germany, alongside parallel stories of bibliomania and bibliolatry in world religions and literatures. Books imply cognitive content embodied in physical form, in which the body cooperates with the brain. At its heart this relationship of body and mind, or letter and spirit, always retains a mystery. Religions are founded on holy books, which are also sites of transgression, so that writing is simultaneously sacred and profane. In secular societies these complex feelings are transferred to concepts of ideology and toleration. In the ambiguous future of the internet, digital immateriality threatens human equilibrium once again. Bibliophobia is a global history, covering six continents and seven religions, describing written examples from each of the last thirty centuries (and several earlier). It discusses topics such as the origins of different kinds of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and artificial intelligence; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution. It proposes a theory of writing, how it relates to speech, images, and information, or to concepts of mimesis, personhood, and politics. Originating as the Clarendon Lectures in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford, the methods of Bibliophobia range across book history; comparative religion; philosophy from Plato to Hegel and Freud; and a range of global literature from ancient to contemporary. Richly illustrated with textual forms, material objects, and art works, its inspiration is the power that books always (and continue to) have in the emotional, spiritual, bodily, and imaginative lives of readers. Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor at the University of York. Before arriving at York, he was Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and then Professor of English at the University of Sussex. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical work." (Evening Standard). Author Michael Gray is recognized as a world authority on the work and career of Bob Dylan; he was the first to consider Dylan’s writing as worthy of treatment as serious art. As author K G Miles said: “People forget that the road to the Nobel Prize was very long, took many years, and began with that book; it began with Michael Gray.” Song & Dance Man is unique in its scope, integrating biographical, literary and musical contexts into a powerful scrutiny of Dylan as songwriter and performer. This first volume contains the foundational and timeless analysis that made this book a classic - looking at how Dylan's writing and performance set in the folk and literary traditions and how it compared to other efforts to write rock and pop songs. It deeply inspects and discusses Dylan's use of language, both his early bursts of complexity and his later move towards simplicity. Included is a special review of the song 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune' which Gray finds particularly effective and impressive, and an over 100-page chapter detailed Dylan's fascination with and use of the pre-war blues. Michael Gray is a critic, writer, public speaker & broadcaster recognised as a world authority on the work of Bob Dylan, and as an expert on rock’n’roll history. He also has a special interest in pre-war blues, and in travel. Song & Dance Man on Twitter. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Northwestern UP, 2022) explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the common, cross‑cultural critique of lawyerly unscrupulousness and greed or as an expression of Russian hostility toward Western legalism, seen as antithetical to traditional Russian values. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict in terms of the two professions' competition for cultural authority. Anna Schur combines historical research and literary analysis to argue that the first generations of Russian trial lawyers shaped their professional identity with an eye to the celebrated figure of the writer and that they considered their own activities to be a form of verbal art. A fuller understanding of writers' antipathy to the law, Schur contends, must take into account this overlooked cultural backdrop. Laced with the better‑known critique of the lawyer's legalistic proclivities and lack of moral principle are the writer's reactions to a whole network of explicit and implicit claims of similarity between the two professions' goals, methods, and missions that were central to the lawyer's professional ideal. Viewed in this light, writers' critiques of the law and lawyers emerge as a concerted effort at protecting literature's exclusive cultural status in the context of modernization and the rapidly expanding public sphere. The study draws upon a mix of well-known and rarely studied nineteenth-century authors and texts—with particular attention paid to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin—and on a wide range of nonliterary sources, including courtroom speeches, guides to forensic oratory, legal treatises, and specialized press. Anna Schur is a professor of English at Keene State College in New Hampshire. She is the author of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Northwestern University Press). Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a historian of Russia and Eurasia and holds a PhD from Georgetown University. She is a faculty member at New York University. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary ecocriticism around a politics of degrowth instead of additive policies that serve to greenwash capitalist economies. Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. His research interests include early modern literature, contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the environmental humanities, and sexuality and film studies. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-author, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, under contract). He is currently working on two books: Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists and Destituent Ecology: Libidinal Politics for the Environmental Left. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this interview Mary M. McGlynn, Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, discusses her new book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2022). While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility. Colleen English is a scholar of Irish and Romantic literature based at Loyola University Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on experimental narrative and literary hypermedia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Despite initiatives to 'diversify' the publishing sector, there has been almost no transformation to the historic racial inequality that defines the field. White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that contemporary book culture is structured by practice that operates according to a White taste logic. By applying the notion of this logic to an analysis of both traditional and new media tastemaking practices, Alexandra Dane examines the influence of Whiteness on the cultural practice, and how the long-standing racial inequities that characterize Anglophone book publishing are supported by systems, institutions and platforms. These themes are explored through two distinct but interrelated case studies-women's literary prizes and anti-racist reading lists on Instagram-which demonstrate the dominance of Whiteness, and in particular White feminism, in the contemporary literary discourse. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe. Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art. Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, and Other Stories, and The Tusk That Did the Damage. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, and have been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk that Did the Damage was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tania lives in Washing D.C. where she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University. Recommended Books: Hua Hsu, Stay True Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea  *A video of a period expert playing Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is available here Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies. Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes. In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today. Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created. Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes). The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast. Discussed in this episode: Lapham’s Quarterly The Lover, Marguerite Duras “The Photograph,” Umberto Eco Various audiobooks, John Le Carré Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Robert Frost The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse “The Dead,” James Joyce Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes Aperture 223, “Vision and Justice,” ed. Sarah Lewis The Habitat  Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Mark Staff Brandl about his new book A Philosophy of Visual Metaphor in Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2023). Brandl is an artist and art historian with a PhD from the University of Zurich. He is an Associate Professor of Art History Emeritus at the Art Academy of Liechtenstein and Higher Professional College for Art in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His work has been shown in galleries and museums in America, Europe, Egypt and elsewhere. Brandl is by his own admission an iconoclast, and somebody who mixes philosophical discourse with more polemical “rants” in advocating for creativity. For instance, as addressed in this episode Brandl does not hesitate to find fault with contemporary artists who take the “cheap out” of relying (too much) on irony, instead of sparking hope; and likewise with collectors of art who often function merely as speculators. Brandl’s approach honors Lakoff and Johnson’s seminar book, Metaphors We Live By, while applying their approach to the visual arts. A notable example is that for Brandl the artist Van Gogh can be thought of in terms of a passionate flame (the metaphor being, passion is hot), with cypress trees that can appear like candles in the way they’ve been painted. To understand how form and content intertwine in art, this episode offers a good jumping off point. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton UP, 2023), Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one's sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both anti-trans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms "trans pragmatism"--the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens. With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture--poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving--even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, though she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. She also chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her. Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase. Books Mentioned: -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad -Kazuo Ishiguro -Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet” -Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head -Forna, Happiness -Forna, The Hired Man -Temne – largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), the poetics of incitement— found in texts originating in the West containing themes and representations of Islam hurtful to Muslims—became an accepted method of textual production in the West. Production of such texts intensified after the attacks of 9/11. Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and the Muslim Sacred (Lever Press, 2023) by Masood Ashraf Raja urges a new mode of reading, one that permits Western readers to transcend local reading practices in order to, as best as one can, read from the point of view of the Other. Raja argues that the lack of understanding of Muslim responses to the poetics of incitement in the West is the result of a lack of cross-cultural knowledge. He claims metropolitan universities often do not teach the proper social, historical, and religious context required for effectively reading these texts with any form of cultural knowledge.  To remedy this, Raja offers and theorizes “democratic reading practices” and new ways for students to engage with texts. A genealogy of the Muslim Sacred is included, thereby giving readers the history and specific knowledge that constitutes an average Muslim reader of these texts, a subject who should be imagined and empathized with when those in the West read works of the poetics of incitement. Democratic Criticism encourages Western readers to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning-making processes of the Islamic world while at the same time encouraging the Muslim readers to read representations of the Islamic world with a more expansive understanding. It will be a helpful tool in creating reading practices that allow both teachers and students of literature to transcend their mode of reading as universal and to read from the perspective of the Other, and allow readers to engage meaningfully with these texts. Students and scholars of world literature, history, and religious studies will find this book insightful and valuable. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, Anglophone literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow them on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (MIT Press, 2022), edited by Roy Christopher, is a moment. It is the deconstructed sample, the researched lyrical metaphors, the aha moment on the way to hip-hop enlightenment. Hip-hop permeates our world, and yet it is continually misunderstood. Hip-hop's intersections with Afrofuturism and science fiction provide fascinating touchpoints that enable us to see our todays and tomorrows. This book can be, for the curious, a window into a hip-hop-infused Alter Destiny--a journey whose spaceship you embarked on some time ago. Are you engaging this work from the gaze of the future? Are you the data thief sailing into the past to U-turn to the now? Or are you the unborn child prepping to build the next universe? No, you're the superhero. Enjoy the journey.--from the introduction by Ytasha L. Womack Through essays by some of hip-hop's most interesting thinkers, theorists, journalists, writers, emcees, and DJs, Boogie Down Predictions embarks on a quest to understand the connections between time, representation, and identity within hip-hop culture and what that means for the culture at large. Introduced by Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, this book explores these temporalities, possible pasts, and further futures from a diverse, multilayered, interdisciplinary perspective. Alex Kuchma is an MA student in history at York University. He has have researching hip-hop actively and collecting oral histories for more than a decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Life on Grub Street can be challenging, but it’s not without attendant attractions. One of those is the potential to have a platform to tell the unbidden truth. As the prolific D. J. Taylor writes in the introduction to his new collection of essays and reviews, “One of the heartening features of the literary landscape . . . is how tenaciously the freelance reviewer endures and how regularly, in an age where most people are terrified of saying in public what they really feel about anything, there rises from a newspaper arts section or magazine book column the sound of someone declining to follow the party line.” Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews, 2010-2022 (Shoestring Press, 2023) ranges widely, from contemporary novelists such as Salman Rushdie, to Victorians such as George Gissing, to oddities of the twentieth century such as Brian Sewell, collecting pieces from both British and American publications. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes.  In Ida Yoshinaga, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan's edited volume Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (MIT Press, 2022), more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers reflection and instruction informed by their own methods and processes. It’s a beautiful and vibrant book that invites writers, artists, and would-be creators into a feast of play and possibility. Kelcey Ervick is the author of the graphic memoir, The Keeper and other books. Her comics have been published widely, including in The Washington Post, The Believer, and Lit Hub, and two featured comics series of hers have appeared in The Rumpus. She is a professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches creative writing, comics, and literary collage. Tom Hart is the author/artist of The New York Times #1 bestselling graphic memoir Rosalie Lightning and of The Art of the Graphic Memoir. He is the executive director of The Sequential Artists Workshop, an organization and school for comics and graphic novels in Gainesville, Florida. Before founding SAW, Tom was a core instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 10 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Yoshiko Okuyama's book Tōjisha Manga: Japan’s Graphic Memoirs of Brain and Mental Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) defines tōjisha manga as Japan’s autobiographical comics in which the author recounts the experience of a mental or neurological condition in a unique medium of text and image. Yoshiko Okuyama argues that tōjisha manga illuminate otherwise “faceless” individuals and humanize their invisible tribulations because the first-person narrative makes their lived experience more authentic and relatable to the reader. Part I introduces the evolution of the term tōjisha, the tōjisha movements, and other relevant social phenomena and concepts. Part II analyzes five representative titles to demonstrate the humanizing power of tōjisha manga, drawing on interviews with the authors of these manga and examining how psychological or brain-related symptoms are artistically depicted in approximately 40 drawings. This book is highly recommended to not only scholars of disability studies and comic studies but also global fans of manga who are interested in the graphic memoirs of serious social issues. Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. On Twitter: @slissw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this conversation, we discuss Haleh Liza Gafori's masterful new translations of poetry by Rumi, the 13th-century Persian mystic and poet. Rumi's work is well-known in the West, but has often been encountered through the work of translators without direct knowledge of Persian language or culture. Haleh Liza Gafori's intimate knowledge of both, as well as her singer's knack for the sound of language, lends these translations both authoritativeness and beauty. The poems in Gold (New York Review of Books, 2022) are about ecstatic love, both of God and of our fellow human beings. Newcomers to Rumi will discover a new favorite poet, while longtime fans will encounter this major voice of world literature anew.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

George Orwell was born in India and served in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man. Douglas Kerr's book Orwell and Empire (Oxford UP, 2022) is a study of his writing about the East and the East in his writing. It argues that empire was central to his cultural identity and that his experience of colonial life was a crucial factor, in ways that have not been recognized, in shaping the writer he became. Orwell and Empire is about all his writings, fictional and non-fictional. It pays particular attention to work that derives directly from his Burmese years including the well-known narratives 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' and his first novel Burmese Days. It goes on to explore the theme of empire throughout his work, through to Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond, and charts the way his evolving views on class, race, gender, and authority were shaped by his experience in the East and the Anglo-Indian attitudes he had inherited. Orwell's socialism and his hatred of authoritarianism grew out of his anti-imperialism as The Road to Wigan Pier makes explicit. But this was not a straightforward repudiation or a painless process. He understood that, 'it is very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.' His whole career was a creative quarrel with himself and with his Anglo-Indian patrimony. In a way that anticipates current debates about the imperial legacy, he struggled to come to terms with his own history. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself. Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and the Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, winner of the American Choix Goncourt, and it has been a long-selling bestseller in France. Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a youtube channel that spotlights translators reading from their own work. She lives in the northeast of England. Books Recommended: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six million Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise Petra Rautiainen, Land of Ashes and Snow Julya Rabinowich, Me, In between  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Soviet Samizdat: Imagining a New Society (Cornell UP, 2022) traces the emergence and development of samizdat, a significant and distinctive phenomenon of the late Soviet era that provided an uncensored system for making and sharing texts. In bringing together research into the underground journals, bulletins, art folios, and other periodicals produced in the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Ann Komaromi reveals how samizdat helped to foster new forms of imagined community among Soviet citizens. Komaromi’s approach combines literary analysis, historical research, and sociological theory to show that samizdat was not simply a tool of opposition to a defunct regime, but a platform for developing informal communities of knowledge. In this way, samizdat foreshadowed the various ways in which alternative perspectives are expressed to challenge the authority of institutions around the world today. Ann Komaromi is a Professor within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Acting Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her interests include alternative publishing, underground networks and nonconformist literature and art, especially in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This conversation is with Brett Wilson, who has composed the first English translation of the classic and controversial novel from late Ottoman Turkey Nur Baba--a classic of modern Turkish literature written by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu--offers a unique window into Sufi lodges, social dilemmas, and intellectual life in early twentieth-century Istanbul. Wilson’s tranlsation is both lyrical and captivating, and will make for an excellent resource for courses on Sufism and Islam more broadly Inspired by Karaosmanoğlu's personal experiences with Islamic mystical orders, it is a story of illicit romance and spiritual inquiry, depicting a colourful lodge of Sufi dervishes led by a charismatic, yet morally suspect, spiritual master named Nur Baba. The plot follows his attempts to seduce an attractive married woman from an elite family and recounts her dramatic experiences in the life of a Sufi community. The setting shuttles between the grand mansions of Istanbul's elite families and a Sufi lodge where rich and poor intermingle. Exploring questions of gender, morality, and religious bias throughout, it captures the zeitgeist of early twentieth-century modernist thinkers who criticised Sufism for impeding social progress and debated the public roles of women in a rapidly modernising society. Alongside the editor's meticulous translation, Nur Baba: A Sufi Novel of Late Ottoman Istanbul (Routledge, 2023) includes a scholarly introduction, maps, and images, as well as explanatory footnotes that will aid both students and scholars alike. The novel will be of particular interest to those studying world literature, Sufi studies, and Ottoman-Turkish history. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

On today’s episode on New Books Network, we're joined by Dr. Felipe Valencia, Associate Professor of Spanish in the World Languages and Cultures Department at Utah State University to discuss his book, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2021. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Spanish lyric underwent a notable development. Several Spanish poets reinvented lyric as a melancholy and masculinist discourse that sang of and perpetrated symbolic violence against the female beloved. This shift emerged in response to the rising prestige and commercial success of the epic and was enabled by the rich discourse on the link between melancholy and creativity in men. In The Melancholy Void Professor Valencia examines this reconstruction of the lyric in key texts of Spanish poetry from 1580 to 1620. Dr. Julia M. Gossard hosts this episode. She is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. In Red Star over the Black Sea: Nâzım Hikmet and his Generation (Oxford University Press, 2022), James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers," individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War. Reuben Silverman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tisyera and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritual medium, Juan, who can commune with the dead and with the world of demons, and his son, Gaspar, as they go on a road trip to outrun a secretive occult society called The Order that hopes to use Juan and Gaspar in their unholy quest for immortality.  Publishers Weekly called it “A masterpiece of literary horror.” In a wide-ranging conversation, Mariana reflects on being a horror writer in Argentina, a country that obsesses over its traumatic past. Indeed, Mariana’s interest in writing fiction in the horror genre was prompted by hearing her first horror stories, the terrors of torture and disappearances under the Argentine Junta government. The three discuss Mariana’s use of violence, especially when it involves children; the various afterlives of the translations of Mariana’s award-winning fiction; and the arborescence of the novel form. Humor and dry wit cut through these weighty topics to make for a lively conversation with one of Latin America’s most important contemporary writers. Mentions:  Silvina Ocampo Mariana Enriquez,  La Hermana Menor -The Things We Lost in the Fire -The Dirty Kid Ray Bradbury, The October Country José Donoso Juan Carlos Onetti Ernesto Sabato Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Ingmar Bergman, The Hour of the Wolf A Nightmare on Elm Street (film) Titane (film) Pope John Paul II The Oulipo Movement Aleister Crowley Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham UP, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present. Dr. J. Daniel Elam is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods (Princeton UP, 2023) invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling bad. In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate "night vision" and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods--and ourselves--as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human. In this interview, we talk to Alessandri and the narrator of the audio book version of Night Vision, Gisela Chipe.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits. Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledges: Water and Afro-Diasporic Spirits in Latinx and Caribbean Worlds (U Texas Press, 2023) fathoms water’s depth and breadth in the work of Latinx and Caribbean creators such as Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana, Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, and the Border of Lights collective. Combining methodologies from literary studies, anthropology, history, and religious studies, Rebeca L. Hey-Colón’s interdisciplinary study traces how Latinx and Caribbean cultural production draws on systems of Afro-diasporic worship—Haitian Vodou, La 21 División (Dominican Vodou), and Santería/Regla de Ocha—to channel the power of water, both salty and sweet, in sustaining connections between past, present, and not-yet-imagined futures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this timely and witty combination of So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? a viral photo of a politician's wife's "feminine hygiene malfunction" catapults her to unwanted fame in a story that's both a satire of social media stardom and internet activism, and a tender mother-daughter tale. Kathleen Held's life is turned upside down when she arrives home to find her house on fire and her husband on the front lawn in his underwear. But the scandal that emerges is not that Bill, who's running for Senate, is having a painfully cliched affair with one of his young staffers: it's that the eyewitness photographing the scene accidentally captures a period stain on the back of Kathleen's pants. Overnight, Kathleen finds herself the unwitting figurehead for a social media-centered women's right movement, #YesWeBleed. Humiliated, Kathleen desperately seeks a way to hide from the spotlight. But when she stumbles upon the Society of Shame--led by the infamous author Danica Bellevue--Kathleen finds herself part of a group who are all working to change their lives after their own scandals. Using the teachings of the society, Kathleen channels her newfound fame as a means to reap the benefits of her humiliation and reclaim herself. But as she ascends to celebrity status, Kathleen's growing obsession with maintaining her popularity online threatens her most important relationship IRL: that with her budding activist daughter, Aggie. Hilarious and heartfelt, The Society of Shame (Anchor, 2023) is a pitch-perfect romp through politics and the perils of being "extremely online"--without losing your sanity or your true self. Jane Roper is the author of two previous books: a memoir, Double Time, and a novel, Eden Lake. Her short fiction, essays, and humor have appeared in publications including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Millions, The Rumpus, Salon, and Poets & Writers and on NPR. Jane is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in the Boston area with her husband and two children. Book Recommendations: Julia Argy, The One Ashley Audrain, The Push Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Born in central Tokyo in 1920, Rin Ishigaki was one of the most daring and gifted poets of Japan’s postwar cultural renaissance. She knew Japan before the war, during it, and afterwards, saw it move from hubris to disastrous defeat – which included the destruction of her family home during one of the worst fire bombings of Tokyo in 1945 – to restoration into the community of nations. Her poetry is witness to this history as seen from her own specific viewpoint, that of a single woman working in a bank as the only support for her six-member family, at first engaged in labor union activities, but later moving to a politically more independent position. Her down-to-earth understanding of the politics of family and the workplace, helped to create her reputation as a writer of ‘life poetry’ and as a poet of resistance, but this combines with a matter-of-fact, unsentimental, and often humorous intimacy with the ordinary creatures and things of the world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral, to shed an almost other-worldly light over some of the poems, even though they speak in tones and about subjects refreshingly earthy and earthly. Janine Beichman’s skilled and deeply sympathetic translations of Ishigaki's poems in This Overflowing Light (Isobar Press, 2022) capture Ishigaki's breadth and depths in English, from the early postwar political poems and cries for freedom from family ties all the way to the late poems in which she contemplates her own death. ‘How else,’ she asked, ‘could you write poetry except from your own life?’ Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, I was joined by Nicholas Scott Baker to discuss his book, In Fortune’s Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Professor Baker is an Associate Professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney Australia interested in the political and economic cultures of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Renaissance Italy. In this fascinating new book, Professor Baker reveals how Renaissance Italians developed a new concept of the future as unknown time-yet-to-come. As In Fortune’s Theater makes clear, nearly everyone in Renaissance Italy seemingly had the future on their minds. Authorities in important commercial hubs such as Genoa, Venice, Rome, and Florence legislated against overzealous betting on the future. Merchants filled their commercial correspondence with a lexicon of futurity. Famed painters such as Caravaggio, Giorgio Vasari, and Paolo Veronese manipulated the existing iconography of the figure of Fortuna into a moral allegory about unseized opportunity. And seemingly every important Renaissance Italian intellectual including Petrarch, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Poggio Bracciolini, Leon Battista Alberti, Laura Cereta, Giovanni Pontano, Niccolò Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Baldassare Castiglione cared deeply about time-yet-to-come. Baker’s book is a rich, multilayered examination of the problems of risk, fortune, and the future in the Renaissance, and it should have broad appeal to anyone interested in the economic and political culture of early modern Europeans. Michael Paul Martoccio is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in the economic and military historian of the early modern Mediterranean. I am especially interested in how early modern economic practices – consumerism, market culture, and the commercialization of war – shaped notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and political geography. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at martoccio@wisc.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controversial at the time: Hindu traditionalists, particularly in higher castes, prevented widows from remarrying to protect the family’s honor, and even teenage and child widows were expected to live lives of austerity. The following year, the Marathi author Baba Padmanji publishes Yamuna’s Journey: one of the first, if not the first, novel in an Indian language. The novel, recently translated by Deepra Dandekar and published by Speaking Tiger Books, follows the story of Yamuna, an educated Marathi woman (and secret Christian), and her husband Vinayak as they travel the region, encountering tragic tales of Hindu widows prevented from remarrying. Deepra Dandekar is a researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. She is the author of Baba Padmanji: Vernacular Christianity in Colonial India, the first critical biography of Baba Padmanji in English. We’re joined today by Mariyam Haider, researcher-writer and spoken word artist in Singapore. In this interview the three of us talk about Yamuna’s Journey, its Christian roots, and the debate about widow remarriage in nineteenth century India. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Yamuna’s Journey. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

U.S. foreign policy has long been built on a dichotomy of an irreplaceable "here" and an expendable "there." In his 2003 announcement of the military campaign in Iraq, George W. Bush declared that we would fight in the Middle East so we wouldn't have to fight "on the streets of our cities." But what do the millions of people who live over "there" have to say about U.S. interventions and the displacement they provoke? In Fighting Over There: U.S. War Making and Contemporary Refugee Literature (U Massachusetts Press, 2023), Alaina Kaus analyzes literature by and about refugees who fled Southeast Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East, in the wake of U.S. military occupation and economic intervention. Narratives by authors such as Lan Cao, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Demetria Martínez, Héctor Tobar, Dave Eggers, Mohsin Hamid, and Riverbend reveal contradictions in the human rights pledges that undergird U.S. foreign policy, which promote freedom while authorizing intervention and displacement, and favor market-based solutions over social justice and racial equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sheila Liming talks about the party, social gatherings that occasion joy and dread and various emotions in between. The party is both a pause and an acceleration in the life-work continuum, it can deaden political motivation and engender fresh politics. We discuss the horrible parties in The Office and the wonderful parties in Small Axe, among other things. Sheila Liming is Associate Professor at Champlain College in Burlington, VT, where she teaches classes in American literature, writing, and media. She is the author, most recently, of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time (Melville House, 2023), and also of the books Office (Bloomsbury, 2020) and What a Library Means to a Woman (Minnesota UP, 2020). Her writing has appeared in publications like the The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, LitHub, The Globe and Mail, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.  Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lauren Fournier, writer, independent curator, artist, and author of Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism discusses her forthcoming book with writer, educator and philosopher McKenzie Wark (A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Capital Is Dead, Reverse Cowgirl.) In the 2010s, the term “autotheory” began to trend in literary spheres, where it was used to describe books in which memoir and autobiography fused with theory and philosophy. In this book, Lauren Fournier extends the meaning of the term, applying it to other disciplines and practices. Fournier provides a long-awaited account of autotheory, situating it as a mode of contemporary, post-1960s artistic practice that is indebted to feminist writing, art, and activism. Investigating a series of works by writers and artists including Chris Kraus and Adrian Piper, she considers the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of autotheory. Fournier argues that the autotheoretical turn signals the tenuousness of illusory separations between art and life, theory and practice, work and the self—divisions long blurred by feminist artists and scholars. Autotheory challenges dominant approaches to philosophizing and theorizing while enabling new ways for artists and writers to reflect on their lives. She argues that Kraus's 1997 I Love Dick marked the emergence of a newly performative, post-memoir “I”; recasts Piper's 1971 performance work Food for the Spirit as autotheory; considers autotheory as critique; examines practices of citation in autotheoretical work, including Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts; and looks at the aesthetics and ethics of disclosure and exposure, exploring the nuanced feminist politics around autotheoretical practices and such movements as #MeToo. Fournier formulates autotheory as a reflexive movement, connecting thinking, making art, living, and theorizing. Hosted and produced by Sam Kelly; Mixed by Samantha Doyle; Soundtrack by Kristen Gallerneaux Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series. In this episode, our host Ignatius Suglo discusses the book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2022) by Thomas Chen. You’ll hear about: Author’s intellectual and professional trajectory that led him to the book; How to study Tiananmen Movement as a media event through a careful selection of literature and film materials; How to think of the productivity of silence and absence; The use of “positive energy” in mobilizing censorship; Human labor and the idea of “workshop” in the work of censorship; How iconic images such as “Tank Man” have been interpreted and appropriated; The role played by women in social movements and their representations in post-1989 China; The emergence of Internet in the 1990s and the paradoxical nature of “Internet sovereignty”; Author’s positionality and reflection on writing the book. About the book The violent suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations is thought to be contemporary China’s most taboo subject. Yet despite sweeping censorship, Chinese culture continues to engage with the history, meaning, and memory of the Tiananmen movement. Made in Censorship examines the surprisingly rich corpus of Tiananmen literature and film produced in mainland China since 1989, both officially sanctioned and unauthorized, contending that censorship does not simply forbid—it also shapes what is created. You can find more about the book here by Columbia University Press. Author: Thomas Chen graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and English from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. With a focus on modern Chinese literature and cinema, his research interests include world literature/cinema, translation studies, and historiography. His book Made in Censorship: The Tiananmen Movement in Chinese Literature and Film is available from Columbia University Press. Host: Ignatius Suglo is Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. He completed his Ph.D. in China Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He also has a secondary specialization in African Studies. His research interests Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cosmopolitan Cultures and Oceanic Thought (Routledge, 2023) imagines the ocean as central to understanding the world and its connections in history, literature, and the social sciences. Introducing the central conceptual category of the ocean as a method, it analyzes the histories of movement and traversing across connected spaces of water and land sedimented in literary texts, folklore, local histories, autobiographies, music, and performance. It explores the constant flow of people, materials, and ideologies across the waters and how they make their presence felt in cosmopolitan thinking of the connections of the world. Going beyond violent histories of slavery and indenture that generate global connections, it tracks the movements of sailors, boatmen, religious teachers, merchants, and adventurers. The essays in this volume summon up this miscegenated history in which land and water are ever linked. A significant rethinking of world history, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially connected history and maritime history, literature, and Global South studies. Dilip M. Menon is a historian and currently the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand. South Africa. Nishat Zaidi is a Professor and former Head of the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Celebrated, censored, canceled: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn cannot be avoided. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.” Toni Morrison explained that “the brilliance of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it is the argument it raises…. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim’s captivity on into each generation of readers.” Ernest Hemingway claimed “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Ralph Waldo Ellison added that “Hemingway missed completely the structural, symbolic and moral necessity for that part of the plot in which the boys rescue Jim. Yet it is precisely this part which gives the novel its significance.”  I spoke with Cleo McNelly Kearns, author of a seminal essay on Jim’s role in the book, about Huckleberry Finn as a challenge and an opportunity for 21st-century readers to understand ourselves, our country, and our moral obligations more accurately. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A husband and wife hear a mysterious bump in the night. A father mourns the closeness he has lost with his son. A friendship with a married couple turns into a dangerous codependency. With gorgeous sensitivity, assurance, and a propulsive sense of menace, these stories center on disappearances both literal and figurative--lives and loves that are cut short, the vanishing of one's youthful self. From San Antonio to Austin, from the clamor of a crowded restaurant to the cigarette at a lonely kitchen table, Andrew Porter captures each of these relationships mid-flight, every individual life punctuated by loss and beauty and need. The Disappeared (Knopf, 2023) reaffirms the undeniable artistry of a contemporary master of the form. ANDREW PORTER is the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Recommended Books: Sarah Majka, Cities I’ve Never Lived In Cara Blue Adams, You Never Get It Back Stuart Dybek, The Coast of Chicago  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton UP, 2023) examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the invention of modern American poetry. Through inspired readings of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters, George Moses Horton, Ann Plato, James Monroe Whitfield, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—as well as the poetry of neglected but once popular White poets William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Virginia Jackson demonstrates how Black poets inspired the direction that American poetics has taken for the past two centuries. As an idea of poetry based on genres of poems such as ballads, elegies, odes, hymns, drinking songs, and epistles gave way to an idea of poetry based on genres of people—Black, White, male, female, Indigenous—almost all poetry became lyric poetry. Jackson discusses the important role played by Frederick Douglass as an influential editor and publisher of Black poetry, and traces the twisted paths leading to our current understanding of lyric, along the way presenting not only a new history but a new theory of American poetry. A major reassessment of the origins and development of American poetics, Before Modernism argues against a literary critical narrative that links American modernism directly to British or European Romanticism, emphasizing instead the many ways in which early Black poets intervened by inventing what Wheatley called “the deep design” of American lyric. Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast. So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worlds” of Dickens and Mark Twain tempt David, but he goes another direction. He picks one book that shows humanity at its worst, heading towards world war. And another that shows how well we can behave towards one another (and even how happy we can be…) at “moments of super liquidity” when everything melts and can be rebuilt. He also guiltily admits a yen for Austen, Rowling, and Pullman–and gratuitously disses LOTR. John and David bond about their love for lonnnnnnng-form cultural history in the mold of Common Ground. Finally the brothers enthuse over their favorite book about Gettysburg, and reveal an embarrassing reenactment of the charge down Little Round Top. Mentioned in this episode: Charles Dickens, “David Copperfield“ J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Hobbit“ Mark Twain, “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) Barbara Tuchman, “The Guns of August” (1962, but about 1914) Emily St. John Mandel, “Station Eleven” (2014) Jon Moallem, “This is Chance” (March 2020; on the great Alaska earthquake) Isabel Wilkerson,. “The Warmth of Other Suns” (2010) (David delightedly discovers it on his bookshelf..) J Anthony Lukas, “Common Ground” (1986) (the mothership of the long-form cultural history that DP and JP both adore) Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter series Michael Shaara, “The Killer Angels” (1974) Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scenes from the past that reveal traumatic family secrets. Wurth speaks with critic Leif Sorensen and host Rebecca Evans about what abides at the intersection of politics and craft, and what’s at stake in particular for the Indigenous writers of genre fiction whose work takes shape at that intersection. Their conversation pokes serious fun at everything from the faltering literary truism that being good at plot is somehow less impressive than being good at characterization to debates over authenticity in Native literature. Horror, as Wurth describes it, offers real and meaningful pleasures, solves the craft problems of over exposition, and opens up powerful questions of identity, politics, and history. Tune in for recommendations for genre writers from the emerging Fifth Wave of Indigenous fiction, reflections on orality and linguistics, and Wurth’s cure for “writer’s depression” instead of writer’s block! Mentions Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio Tattered Cover Book Store Talking Scared Podcast Stanley Hotel Red Power movement and the American Indian Movement Tommy Orange’s There, There Water protectors Idle No More Black Lives Matter Astrophil Press The Writer’s Chronicle Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Save the Cat! Erika T. Wurth’s “The Fourth Wave” and “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction” David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual  Wurth also references and recommends a number of genre writers, from romance to speculative literature to crime fiction to horror and beyond. Check out her picks, including B. L. Blanchard, V. Castro, Kelli Jo Ford, Lev Grossman, Grady Hendrix, Brandon Hobson, Marlon James, Jessica Johns, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Danica Nava, Rebecca Roanhorse, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scenes from the past that reveal traumatic family secrets. Wurth speaks with critic Leif Sorensen and host Rebecca Evans about what abides at the intersection of politics and craft, and what’s at stake in particular for the Indigenous writers of genre fiction whose work takes shape at that intersection. Their conversation pokes serious fun at everything from the faltering literary truism that being good at plot is somehow less impressive than being good at characterization to debates over authenticity in Native literature. Horror, as Wurth describes it, offers real and meaningful pleasures, solves the craft problems of over exposition, and opens up powerful questions of identity, politics, and history. Tune in for recommendations for genre writers from the emerging Fifth Wave of Indigenous fiction, reflections on orality and linguistics, and Wurth’s cure for “writer’s depression” instead of writer’s block! Mentions Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio Tattered Cover Book Store Talking Scared Podcast Stanley Hotel Red Power movement and the American Indian Movement Tommy Orange’s There, There Water protectors Idle No More Black Lives Matter Astrophil Press The Writer’s Chronicle Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Save the Cat! Erika T. Wurth’s “The Fourth Wave” and “The Fourth Wave in Native American Fiction” David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual  Wurth also references and recommends a number of genre writers, from romance to speculative literature to crime fiction to horror and beyond. Check out her picks, including B. L. Blanchard, V. Castro, Kelli Jo Ford, Lev Grossman, Grady Hendrix, Brandon Hobson, Marlon James, Jessica Johns, Stephen Graham Jones, Stephen King, Victor LaValle, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Danica Nava, Rebecca Roanhorse, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Taiwan Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Reader (Springer, 2023) is an anthology of research co-edited by Dr. Chia-rong Wu (University of Canterbury) and Professor Ming-ju Fan (National Chengchi University). This collection of original essays integrates and expands research on Taiwan literature because it includes both established and young writers. It not only engages with the evolving trends of literary Taiwan, but also promotes the translocal consciousness and cultural diversity of the island state and beyond. Focusing on the new directions and trends of Taiwan literature, this edited book fits into Taiwan studies, Sinophone studies, and Asian studies. Chia-rong Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Global, Cultural and Language Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Dr. Wu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He specializes in Sinophone literature and film through the lens of postcolonial theories, indigenous studies, diaspora, and ecocriticism. Dr. Wu is the author of Supernatural Sinophone Taiwan and Beyond (Cambria Press, 2016) and Remapping the Contested Sinosphere: The Cross-cultural Landscape and Ethnoscape of Taiwan (Cambria Press, 2020) and has published in such academic journals as the British Journal of Chinese Studies, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Ming-ju Fan is a Distinguished Professor of Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan. She is the author of Spatial/Textual/Politics, Literary Geography: Spatial Reading of Taiwanese Fiction, Chronological Searches of Taiwanese Women’s Fiction and Critic Artisan, Like a Box of Chocolate: Criticism on Contemporary Literature and Culture; Co-Editor of The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Medieval books that survive today have been through a lot: singed by fire, mottled by mold, eaten by insects, annotated by readers, cut into fragments, or damaged through well-intentioned preservation efforts. In Holy Digital Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford UP, 2022), Michelle Warren tells the story of one such manuscript—an Arthurian romance with textual origins in twelfth-century England now diffused across the twenty-first century internet. This trajectory has been propelled by a succession of technologies—from paper manufacture to printing to computers. Together, they have made literary history itself a cultural technology indebted to colonial capitalism. Bringing to bear media theory, medieval literary studies, and book history, Warren shows how digital infrastructures change texts and books, even very old ones. In the process, she uncovers a practice of "tech medievalism" that weaves through the history of computing since the mid-twentieth century; metaphors indebted to King Arthur and the Holy Grail are integral to some of the technologies that now sustain medieval books on the internet. This infrastructural approach to book history illuminates how the meaning of literature is made by many people besides canonical authors: translators, scribes, patrons, readers, collectors, librarians, cataloguers, editors, photographers, software programmers, and many more. Situated at the intersections of the digital humanities, library sciences, literary history, and book history, Holy Digital Grail offers new ways to conceptualize authorship, canon formation, and the definition of a "book." Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Annabel Kim's second book*, Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) digs into fecal matter as a preoccupation of modern French literature. Inspired by the author's observations of a certain "fecal blindness" among student and other readers of French literature, Cacaphonies examines a series of canonical authors and texts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which shit plays a powerful role as the work and waste of bodies and a figure of radical equality. Throughout its five chapters, the book examines the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, Romain Gary, Anne Garréta, and Daniel Pennac. Reading the role that fecal matter plays in the works of these authors, Cacaphonies considers the materiality of shit in relationship to French identity, democracy, and universalism. It also explores the excrementalities of writing, literature, and literary studies more broadly. Provocative in the aesthetic and political projects it presents and interrogates, Cacaphonies is smart and engrossing, a wonderful and also really, really shitty book. *I last spoke with Annabel Kim in 2019 about her book Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminsit Fictions (The Ohio State University Press, 2018). You can listen to that interview here. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and empire. She is the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a channel launched in 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Black Queer Flesh: Rejecting Subjectivity in the African American Novel (U Minnesota Press, 2021) reinterprets key African American novels from the Harlem Renaissance to Black Modernism to contemporary literature, showing how authors have imagined a new model of Black queer selfhood. African American authors blame liberal humanism’s model of subjectivity for double consciousness and find that liberal humanism’s celebration of individual autonomy and agency is a way of disciplining Black queer lives. These authors thus reject subjectivity in search of a new mode of the self that Alvin J. Henry names “Black queer flesh”—a model of selfhood that is collective, plural, fluctuating, and deeply connected to the Black queer past. Henry begins with early twentieth-century authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and James Weldon Johnson. These authors adapted the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-formation, to show African Americans gaining freedom and agency by becoming a liberal, autonomous subjects. These authors, however, discovered that the promise of liberal autonomy held out by the Bildungsroman was yet another tool of antiblack racism. As a result, they tentatively experimented with repurposing the Bildungsroman to throw off subjectivity and its attendant double consciousness. In contrast, Nella Larsen, Henry shows, was the first author to fully reject subjectivity. In Quicksand and Passing, Larsen invented a new genre showing her queer characters—characters whose queerness already positioned them on the margins of subjectivity—escaping subjectivity altogether. Using Ralph Ellison’s archival drafts, Henry then powerfully rereads Invisible Man, revealing that the protagonist as a queer, disabled character taught by the novel’s many other queer, disabled characters to likewise seek a selfhood beyond subjectivity. Although Larsen and Ellison sketch glimpses of this selfhood beyond subjectivity, only Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments shows a protagonist fully inhabiting Black queer flesh—a new mode of selfhood that is collective, plural, always evolving, and no longer alienated from the black past. Black Queer Flesh is an original and necessary contribution to Black literary studies, offering new ways to understand and appreciate the canonical texts and far more. Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the Department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (U Toronto Press, 2022) argues that nineteenth-century Russian writers actively engaged with narrative models borrowed from European gothic fiction to articulate experiences such as fear, dread, and anxiety in realist literature. By examining a series of case studies focused on literary texts that address issue such as urban life, the women question, revolutionary terrorism, and the decline of the family, Katherine Bowers reveals the myriad ways in which political and cultural anxiety take shape via the gothic mode in the age of realism. Katherine Bowers is an Associate Professor within the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is an expert in Russian literature and culture, and her research interests include genre, narrative, environmental humanities, imagined geography, and digital humanities. She is also actively involved in the field of Dostoevsky studies and is a co-editor of A Dostoevskii Companion: Texts and Contexts (2018) and Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (2021). Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The heroic romance is one of the West's most enduring narratives, found everywhere, from religion and myth to blockbuster films and young adult literature. Within this story, adolescent girls are not, and cannot be, the heroes. They are, at best, the hero's bride, a prize he wins for slaying monsters. Crucially, although the girl's exclusion from heroic selfhood affects all girls, it does not do so equally- whiteness and able-bodiedness are taken as markers of heightened, fantasy femininity. Female Heroes in Young Adult Fantasy Fiction: Reframing Myths of Adolescent Girlhood (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Leah Phillips explores how the young female-heroes of mythopoeic YA, a Tolkienian-inspired genre drawing on myth's world-creating power and YA's liminal potential, disrupt the conventional heroic narrative. These heroes, such as Tamora Pierce's Alanna the Lioness, Daine the Wildmage, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder and Iko, offer a model of being-hero, an embodied way of living and being in this world that disrupts the typical hero's violent hierarchy, isolating individuality, and erasure of difference. In doing so, they push the boundaries of what it means to be a hero, a girl, and even human. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1943, three books appeared that changed American politics forever: Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Together, they laid the groundwork for what became the modern libertarian movement. Even more striking were the women behind these books: Paterson, a brilliant but misanthropic journalist whose weekly column made her one of the nation's most important literary critics; Lane, a restless writer who secretly coauthored the Little House on the Prairie novels with her mother; and Rand, a philosophically inclined Russian immigrant ferociously devoted to heroic individualism. Working against the backdrop of changes in literature and politics, they joined forces to rally the nation to the principles of freedom that had come under attack at home and abroad. Sometimes friends, at other times bitterly estranged, they became known as "the three furies of libertarianism."  In Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Freedom in an Age of Darkness (Cato Institute, 2022), author Timothy Sandefur examines their lives, ideas, and influences in the context of their times. Not a biography, but a story about personalities and ideas--about the literary, political, and cultural influences that shaped the destiny of freedom in America--Freedom's Furies tells the dramatic story of three writers who strove to keep liberty alive in an age of darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about?  Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit those distant places themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the 21st century. In this conversation we talk about how this volume goes about broadening both the geographical scope and methodological approaches to reading medieval sources. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How is science fiction from the Arab and Muslim world different than mainstream science fiction from the West? What distinctive and original contributions can it make? Why is it so often neglected in critical considerations of the genre? While other books have explored these questions, all have been from foreign academic voices.  Instead, Hosam A. Ibrahim Elzembely and Emad El-Din Aysha,'s book Arab and Muslim Science Fiction (McFarland, 2022) examines the nature, genesis, and history of Arabic and Muslim science fiction, as well as the challenges faced by its authors, in the authors’ own words. These authors share their stories and struggles with censors, recalcitrant publishers, critics, the book market, and the literary establishment. Their uphill efforts, with critical contributions from academics, translators, and literary activists, will enlighten the sci-fi enthusiast and fill a gap in the history of science fiction. Topics covered range from culture shock to conflicts between tradition and modernity, proactive roles for female heroines, blind imitation of storytelling techniques, and language games. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of media cultures, Anglophone literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their upcoming books: The Other #MeToos and ReFocus: The Films of Annemarie Jacir. Follow them on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich. Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life. In Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History (Norton, 2023), Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter. By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at reneeg@vanleer.org.il. She's on Twitter @embracingwisdom. She blogs here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the decade before and after independence, Nigerians not only adopted the novel but reinvented the genre. Nigerian novels imagined the new state, with its ideals of the rule of law, state sovereignty, and a centralized administration. Neil Ten Kortenaar's book Debt, Law, Realism: Nigerian Writers Imagine the State at Independence (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021) argues that Nigerian novels were not written for a Western audience, as often stated, but to teach fellow citizens how to envision the state. The first Nigerian novels were overwhelmingly realist because realism was a way to convey the understanding shared by all subject to the rule of law. Debt was an important theme used to illustrate the social trust needed to live with strangers. But the novelists felt an ambivalence towards the state, which had been imposed by colonial military might. Even as they embraced the ideal of the rule of law, they kept alive a memory of other ways of governing themselves. Many of the first novelists - including Chinua Achebe - were Igbos, a people who had been historically stateless, and for whom justice had been a matter of interpersonal relations, consensus, and reciprocity, rather than a citizen's subordination to a higher authority. Debt, Law, Realism reads African novels as political philosophy, offering important lessons about the foundations of social trust, the principle of succession, and the nature of sovereignty, authority, and law. Prof. Neil ten Kortenaar teaches at the University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination--its history, its meaning and its cultural significance--told through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution.  Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island (Hanover Square Press, 2022) is the definitive book on an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history. Kendall Dinniene is an English PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Iranian Literature After the Islamic Revolution: Production and Circulation in Iran and the World (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Dr. Laetitia Nanquette explores how Iranian literature has functioned and circulated from the 1979 revolution to the present. She looks at prose productions in particular, analyzing several genres and media. Taking Iran as a starting point, Nanquette explores the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society. She then turns to the diaspora – with a focus on North America, Western Europe and Australia – and the world beyond Iranians to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland. Laetitia Nanquette is Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Between 2015 and 2019, she was an Australia Research Council DECRA Fellow at UNSW and worked on the project "A Global Comparative Study of Contemporary Iranian Literature". Connor Christensen is a graduate student at the University of Chicago, pursuing both an MPP at the Harris School of Public Policy and an MA at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He welcomes collaboration, so feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or at his email, ctchristensen@uchicago.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Best known for its introduction of French theory to American readers, Semiotext(e) has been one of America's most influential independent presses since its inception more than three decades ago. Publishing works of theory, fiction, madness, economics, satire, sexuality, science fiction, activism and confession.  In this interview Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, who run Semitext(e) alongside Sylvère Lotringer, discuss the history of the press.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi was an Italian Jesuit who worked in South India from 1710 to 1747. A brilliant scholar of Tamil, his works include hymns, instructions for catechists, and a robust defense of the Catholic missionary approach. His most famous work is Tēmpāvaṇi (The Unfading Garland), an epic re-telling of the early life of Jesus, set in the context of the whole Biblical story, and surprisingly focused on St. Joseph, spouse of Mary and foster-father of Jesus. St. Joseph in South India argues that Beschi’s distinctively Catholic approach draws on methods already familiar in the Jesuit ethical and dramatic literature in post-Reformation Europe. Francis Xavier Clooney's Saint Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi's Tēmpāvaṇi (Brill, 2022) includes a fresh translation of about 300 verses from Tēmpāvaṇi. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graphic format, his decisions turn what has only been imagined into facts drawn on the page. In this conversation with critic, translator, and teacher of a creative course on the art of making comics, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Jennings explores how he makes those decisions that range from the design of endpapers to selecting a character’s skin tone with the ultimate aim of championing Black culture and Black comics. Given that Jennings has just entered the Marvel Universe with the debut of Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, the timing is right to reflect on the pressures and pleasures of adapting beloved stories for a contemporary audience. Jennings is both teacher and student of comics’ powerful lessons, and lucky for listeners, his course comes with an illustrated syllabus, aka illabus. In the podcast’s first ever episode about graphic novels, Jennings and Cloutier talk comic book history, the power of collaboration, and the importance of long showers. By John Jennings: Black Kirby: In Search of the MotherBoxx Connection, John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (2015) The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, Edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings (2016) Kindred, Octavia Butler, Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2018) Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler, Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2021) After the Rain, Nnedi Okorafor, Adapted by John Jennings and David Brame (2021) Box of Bones: Book One, Ayize Jama Everett and John Jennings (2021) Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, John Jennings and Valentine De Landro (2023) Also mentioned: Megascope, Curated by John Jennings Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, Roger Sabin (1996) Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, Hillary L. Chute (2014) Maus, Art Spiegelman (1980-1991; complete version 1996) Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture (2015-2016) Barry Lyndon, Dir. Stanley Kubrick (1975) The Silver Surfer: And Who Shall Mourn for Him? Stan Lee, Howard Purcell, et al. (1969) Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, Chris Claremont and Al Milgrom (1984-1985) The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2011) “Red Dirt Witch,” in How Long ‘til Black Future Month? N.K. Jemisen (2018) To learn more about the comic artists Jennings discusses, including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Frank Miller, and Charles Schulz, see Jeremy Dauber’s American Comics: A History (2021) and Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics (2014). Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, professor emerita in the School of Humanities and the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation at the University of Auckland, founder of WriteSPACE, an international virtual writing community, and author of Writing with Pleasure (Princeton UP, 2023). We talk about how pleasure is difficult-but-good. Helen Sword : "If you have a text that has not been written with pleasure — it's been like pulling teeth for the author — it's going to feel the same way for the reader. So I think an issue with a lot of academic writing is that we have to read a lot of things that we don't enjoy, and then we get this message that that's how we're supposed to write too. So, it just becomes this never-ending cycle. But what if we brought in here the potentialities of play and reversed this situation and thought, 'Okay, I'm going to write with pleasure, I'm going to be excited about this, I'm going to create a beautifully crafted sentence or paragraph so that my reader will read it and just go, "Oh, wow, they put that so well."' And I don't even mean fancy or anything — I mean just good communication of the science, for example. A clearly written sentence about a complex idea — that is beautiful, and it's a joyful experience to read." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Content note: This episode contains discussions of violence, including rape and mutilation Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 202) is a remarkable poetry collection, which won the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award (gold, poetry category), aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Testimony finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. The use of innovative literary techniques, along with the author's own experience around the Special Court for Sierra Leone, works to share the voices of survivors of this violence across the world. A heartbreaking and ambitious book, Testimony will be of great interest to human rights, legal, and literary scholars alike. Testimony also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and situating of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable, and for thinking about the intersections between poetry, human rights, and history. Dr. Stephanie Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. She holds an MFA from The New School and is completing a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. Prior to becoming a literary scholar, she was the psychologist for the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone (2005-2007) and a psychologist/trainer for CVT (an NGO that focuses on survivors of politically motivated torture), first in Guinea and later in Jordan. Dr. Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum Tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Listen to this interview of Jan Recker, Professor for Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg, Germany and author of Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (Springer, 2021). We talk about how your research is what you write. Jan Recker : "Very few of us scientists are gifted readers, and very few of us are gifted writers, but those who are, I do think that they have an advantage in science. It's not that they're the better scientists, but they just understand the literature better, or they can help a reader understand their own research better. And these are just really key and fundamental techniques of the research." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary readings without disciplinary boundaries. Louis Petrich and I talked about teaching and reading Classic Books as a means of deepening rather than resolving the mystery of who we are, what we do, and how best to engage the world around us. St. John’s offers the series Continuing the Conversation with professors where “questions are more important than answers,” which is a natural companion to Think About It. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

First performed in the Milagro Theater of Portland, Oregon in 2014, Olga Sanchez Saltveit’s ¡O Romeo! imagines William Shakespeare, late in his life, writing a play set in Mexico about a conquistador and his beloved, a woman from Tenochtitlán. Shakespeare tells Rifke, his Spanish housekeeper that his conquistador protagonist will “integrate” his beloved’s “life and faith with” his own. Rifke who has received letters from her missionary brother living in the Americas responds, “Los conquistadores no integran, imponen. ¿No has oído lo que escribe mi hermano?” (“The conquistadors do not integrate, they impose. Have you not heard what my brother writes?”) Saltveit’s play has been published in the first volume of a new anthology titled The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera (ACMRS, 2023), with its editors, Katherine “Kate” Gillen, Adrianna M. Santos, and Kathryn “Katie” Vomero Santos. Katherine Gillen is Professor of English at Texas A&M-San Antonio and is the author of the previous monograph Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity, and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare’s Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).  Kathryn Santos is Professor of English and co-director of the Humanities Collective at Trinity University and is author of the forthcoming 2024 monograph Shakespeare in Tongues from Routledge.  Their co-editor, who was not able to join us for the conversation, is Adrianna M. Santos, Professor of English at Texas A&M-San Antonio and the author of Cicatrix Poetics, Trauma and Healing in the Literary Borderlands: Beyond Survival (Palgrave, 2023).  Professors Gillen, Santos, and Santos are co-founders of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, which is a multi-institutional project designed to expand Shakespeare pedagogy and performance. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 2021, the world commemorates the 80th anniversary of the massacres of Jews at Babyn Yar. The present collection brings together for the first time the responses to the tragic events of September 1941 by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, presented here in the original and in English translation by Ostap Kin and John Hennessy. Written between 1942 and 2017 by over twenty poets, these poems belong to different literary canons, traditions, and time frames, while their authors come from several generations. Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI, 2022) create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust as well as other peoples murdered at the site. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clan... Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood but giving up far too much in the process; Sasha, a middle-class New England girl, has married into the Brooklyn Heights family, and finds herself cast as the arriviste outsider; and Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't have, and must decide what kind of person she wants to be. Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one-percenters, Pineapple Street (Pamela Dorman Books, 2023) is a smart, escapist novel that sparkles with wit. Full of recognizable, loveable--if fallible--characters, it's about the peculiar unknowability of someone else's family, the miles between the haves and have-nots, and the insanity of first love--all wrapped in a story that is a sheer delight. Jenny Jackson is a Vice President and Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf. A graduate of Williams College and the Columbia Publishing Course, she lives in Brooklyn Heights with her family. Pineapple Street is her first novel. Recommended Books: Katherine Heiny, Games and Rituals Meg Mason, Sorrow and Bliss  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In To Tell a Black Story of Miami (UP of Florida, 2022), Tatiana McInnis examines literary and cultural representations of Miami alongside the city's material realities to challenge the image of South Florida as a diverse cosmopolitan paradise. McInnis discusses how this favorable "melting pot" narrative depends on the obfuscation of racialized violence against people of African descent. Analyzing novels, short stories, and memoirs by Edwidge Danticat, M.J. Fievre, Carlos Moore, Carlos Eire, Patricia Stephens Due, and Tananarive Due, as well as films such as Dawg Fight and Moonlight, McInnis demonstrates how these creations push back against erasure by representing the experiences of Black Americans and immigrants from Caribbean nations. McInnis considers portrayals of state-sanctioned oppression, residential segregation, violent detention of emigres, and increasing wealth gaps and concludes that celebrations of Miami's diversity disguise the pervasive, adaptive nature of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. To Tell a Black Story of Miami offers a model of how to use literature as a primary archive in urban studies. It draws attention to the similarities and divergences between Miami's Black diasporic communities, a historically underrepresented demographic in popular and scholarly awareness of the city. Increasing understanding of Miami's political, social, and economic inequities, this book brings greater nuance to traditional narratives of exceptionalism in cities and regions. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A form at the origins of Western literature, the epic has always been theorized in contrast to other literary genres, those that would either perfect it (such as tragedy, according to Aristotle) or partially take its place, from the chivalric romance to the modern novel.  Corrado Confalonieri's Torquato Tasso and the Desire for Unity: Jerusalem Delivered and a New Theory of the Epic (Torquato Tasso e il desiderio di unità: “La Gerusalemme liberata” e una nuova teoria dell’epica) critically traces three different historical phases in the theorization of the epic: the classical poetics of Aristotle and Horace, the debates about poetics and poets in sixteenth-century Italy, and Hegelian philosophy and later twentieth-century theories of literary genres. The point of theoretical and interpretative reference throughout the volume is Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). The book’s final chapter undertakes a careful rereading of Tasso’s magnum opus that overcomes the traditional dichotomy between epic unity and novelistic variety by demonstrating how unity remains a desire rather than a result. Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Dr. Will Tosh offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant scenes. You’ll discover how a seemingly “wise” speech can actually be foolish and why Rosalind’s apparently foolish games contain a lot of wisdom, and see how the play opens up the question of who “Rosalind” actually is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy.  Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices. Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

New England's Puritans were devoted to self-scrutiny. Consumed by the pursuit of pure hearts, they latched on to sincerity as both an ideal and a social process. It fueled examinations of inner lives, governed behavior, and provided a standard against which both could be judged. In a remote, politically volatile frontier, settlers gambled that sincerity would reinforce social cohesion and shore up communal happiness. Sincere feelings and the discursive practices that manifested them promised a safe haven in a world of grinding uncertainty. But as Ana Schwartz demonstrates in Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America (Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2022), if sincerity promised much, it often delivered more: it bred shame and resentment among the English settlers and, all too often, extraordinary violence toward their Algonquian neighbors and the captured Africans who lived among them. Populating her "city on a hill" with the stock characters of Puritan studies as well as obscure actors, Schwartz breathes new life into our understanding of colonial New England. Ana Schwartz is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Unmoored: The Search for Sincerity in Colonial America and of several peer reviewed essays that have appeared in Early American Literature, New Literary History, J19, and, most recently, in American Literature, for which she is the 2022 winner of the Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year. She is currently at work on a second monograph, Ordinary Unhappiness: A Social History of the Soul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, our host Sim Gill discusses the book Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste (2021) by Jonathan Gray. You’ll hear about: A brief history of the book and its connection to global studies of media and communication; The role of media and cultural studies in amplifying the voices of dislikers, and how can scholars in these fields better understand and appreciate the register of dislike; The method of refractive audience analysis as a way to understand how adaptations of media texts affect people's perceptions of the original texts; How paratexts can shape audience perceptions and understanding of a media product; How the gendered norms may hinder women from expressing dislike, and how this relates to larger cultural systems of dislike, including political contexts; Some recent developments that have added to or changed the initial arguments/findings in the book. About the book Dislike-Minded draws from over two-hundred qualitative interviews to probe what the media’s failures, wounds, and sore spots tell us about media culture, taste, identity, representation, meaning, textuality, audiences, and citizenship. The book refuses the simplicity of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous dictum that dislike is (only) snobbery. Instead, Jonathan Gray pushes onward to uncover other explanations for what it ultimately means to dislike specific artifacts of television, film, and other media, and why this dislike matters. You can find the book here by NYU Press. Author: Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work examines how media entertainment and its audiences interact, and examines how and where value and meaning are created. He is now Chief Editor of The International Journal of Cultural Studies, co-editor, with Aswin Punathambekar and Adrienne Shaw, of NYU Press’ Critical Cultural Communication book series, and I was recently nominated as an International Communication Association Fellow. Host: Sim Gill is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests concern the social and subjective effects of discourse and institutional politics as well as the interrelationships between discourse, epistemology, and subjectivity. Her master's thesis evaluated the meaning-making behind the term BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), commonly used to describe minority ethnic communities in Britain. Editor & Producer: Jing Wang Keywords: Dislike, audience studies, media cultures, identity, representation, citizenship Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Western as a genre is alive and vibrant, argues University of Maine - Farmington professor of English literature Michael K. Johnson. In Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a Genre (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Johnson explains how authors, directors, and storytellers are pushing the classic genre into new directions by hybridizing Western tropes with science fiction, horror, and fantasy storytelling. These new speculative Westerns are revitalizing a genre, which has grown incredibly popular in recent years through television series like The Last of Us and Westworld, as well as many examples in film and literature. Speculative Westerns have also allowed space for Native and African American writers and storytellers to expand the genre into more inclusive spaces, telling stories about people often left out or stereotyped in more traditional Western stories. By including time travel, zombies, and vampires, Johnson argues that the Western has cemented itself with a new generation of Americans as one of the critical cultural narratives for understanding the United States. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfied, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer. Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches. Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration? Mentioned in the episode: Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here) Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“ Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris Brian Teare, Doomstead Days Derek Walcott, “Omeros“ W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs” Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“ Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides) Trixie Belden Shel Silverstein Lois Lowry, “The Giver“ Liz equates poetry and Tetris Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“ Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“ Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Swati Moitra explains how reading can be a subversive and even revolutionary act in certain socio-historical contexts. She draws especially from her own work in the history of women’s reading practices in nineteenth and early twentieth century India, in particular the region of Bengal. She talks about the dual indices of literacy and pleasure in her work, and its affiliations to fields like book history and print cultural studies. Swati Moitra (M.Phil., Ph.D.) is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at Gurudas College, University of Calcutta. Her areas of interest include book history and histories of readership. She is the recipient of the SHARP Research Development Grant for BIPOC Scholars 2022. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The collapse of the USSR was relatively bloodless. The Chechen Wars were not. A tiny nation on the edge of Russia, Chechnya brought one of the largest armies in the world to its knees. Elena Pedigo Clark, Trauma and Truth: Teaching Russian Literature on the Chechen Wars (Academic Studies Press, 2023) examines significant works about these wars by some of Russia’s leading contemporary war authors, including Anna Politkovskaya, Arkady Babchenko, and Zakhar Prilepin. Combining close reading of the texts with descriptions of the authors’ social and political activities and suggestions on how to teach these challenging authors and texts, Trauma and Truth traces the psychological effects of the wars on their participants, and concludes with a discussion of what this means for Russia today. Jeff Bachman is Senior Lecturer in Human Rights at American University’s School of International Service in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Soldier-Writer, the Expatriate, and Cold War Modernism in Taiwan: Freedom in the Trenches (Lexington Books, 2022) argues that what appeared to be a “genesis” of new literature engendered by the modernist movement in postwar Taiwan was made possible only through the “splendid isolation” within the Cold War world order sustaining the bubble in which “Free China” lived on borrowed time. The book explores the trenches of freedom in whose confines the soldier-poets’ were surrealistically acquiesced to roam free under the aegis of “pure literature” and the buffer zone created by the US presence in Taiwan—and the modernists’ expatriate writing from America—that aided their moderated deviance from the official line. It critically examines the anti-establishment character and gesture in the movement phase in terms of its entanglements with the state apparatus and the US-aided literary establishment. Taiwan’s modernists counterbalance their retrospectively perceived excess and nuanced forms of exit with a series of spiritual as well as actual returns, upon which earlier traditionalist undercurrents would surface. This modernism’s mixed legacies, with its aesthetic avant-gardism marrying politically moderate or conservative penchants, date back to its bifurcated mode of existence and operation of separating the realm of the aesthetic from everything else in life during the Cold War. Li-Chun Hsiao is professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, teaching at its School of International Liberal Studies, as well as its Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies. Hsiao is also the author of the monograph The Indivisible Globe, the Indissoluble Nation: Universality, Postcoloniality, and Nationalism in the Age of Globalization (ibidem Press, 2021). Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 addresses the play's central questions by examining its structure, literary context, and main characters. With Dr. Will Tosh, you’ll discover how Shakespeare blended different literary traditions to create the exploratory space of Arden, to investigate questions of identity, gender, and same-sex desire, and to afford his characters new kinds of freedom. You’ll explore the play’s performance history and the questions it has always raised around gender roles, and learn why Rosalind carries out her courtship in her male disguise.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

"In other words, like David Foster Wallace — who celebrates McCain for his display of “‘moral authority’” and commitment to “‘service’ and ‘sacrifice’ and ‘honor’” — Clinton responds to the extremes of free-market ideology by imagining that “American community” can be rebuilt through the practice of what he calls “old values,” or what Hillary Clinton calls, in a 1993 speech, the “politics of meaning.” In this sense, Clintonian rhetoric offers a particularly clear, particularly influential example of the kind of centrist “communitarianism” that would shape American writing and politics – including the politics of the party’s next president, Barack Obama, a self-described “New Democrat” – for at least a generation." – Ryan M. Brooks, Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era (2022) What happens when the right scholar expands his doctoral research to insightfully engage with the pressing issues of a fragmented American society by drawing together and contrasting visions of Reaganite and Clintonian neoliberalism and its implications for literature and politics moving forward? The answer is Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era (Cambridge UP, 2022) by Ryan M. Brooks, professor of English and podcast host for Humanities on the High Plains. Professor Brooks’ book is the latest in the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture which describes his efforts this way: Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era argues that a new, post-postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as a group of American writers – including Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others – grapples with the political triumph of free-market ideology. The book shows how these writers resist the anti-social qualities of this frantic right-wing shift while still performing its essential gesture, the personalization of otherwise irreducible social antagonisms. Thus, we see these writers reinvent political struggles as differences in values and emotions, in fictions that explore non-antagonistic social forms like families, communities and networks. Situating these formally innovative fictions in the context of the controversies that have defined this rightward shift – including debates over free trade, welfare reform, and family values – Brooks details how American writers and politicians have reinvented liberalism for the age of pro-capitalist consensus. Some of the other writers discussed in this interview: Bret Easton Ellis, Sesshu Foster, Sapphire, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead William Davies, Nancy Fraser, David Harvey, Georg Lukacs, Joe Klein, Robert Reich Ryan’s critical and literary studies recommendations: Walter Benn Michaels - The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History; Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent, ed. - Foucault and Neoliberalism; Melinda Cooper - Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism; Nancy Fraser - Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis; Janice Peck – Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era; Eve Bertram - The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from New Deal to New Democrats Nonsite.org - a peer-reviewed online journal of arts and humanities scholarship Ryan M. Brooks is an Assistant Professor of English at West Texas A&M University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work has been published in Twentieth-Century Literature, 49th Parallel, Mediations, The Account, and the critical anthology The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television. He hosts the podcast Humanities on the High Plains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) narrates the cultural and literary history of one of the world's most significant yet understudied lingua francas. From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature. Alexander Jabbari is an Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the literature, history, and philology of the Middle East and South Asia. Can be found on Twitter @yakabikaj. Iskandar Ding is a Ph.D. candidate in Iranian linguistics at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on the syntax of the Yaghnobi language. His other research interests include Tajik dialectology, Sino-Persian heritage, Persianate literature, and modern Persian literature in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. He blogs about the shared lexical heritage of the Persianate cultural sphere and beyond on his blog Vājabāz. Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Near Eastern Studies Department. His research focuses on the intersection of law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at almaazmi@princeton.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Christopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book The Italian Renaissance and the Origin of the Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano developed innovative ways to read texts closely, paying attention to historical context, developing methods to determine a text's authenticity, and taking the humanities seriously as a means of bettering human life. Alongside such novel reading practices, technology – the invention of printing with moveable type – fundamentally changed perceptions of truth. Celenza also reveals how luminaries like Descartes, Diderot, and D'Alembert – as well as many lesser-known scholars – challenged traditional ways of thinking. Celenza's authoritative narrative demonstrates above all how the work of the early modern humanist philosophers had a profound impact on the general quest for human wisdom. His magisterial volume will be essential reading for all those who value the humanities and their fascinating history. Professor Christopher S. Celenza is the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He is also a professor of history and classics. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value. The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For Henry David Thoreau, the woods are places beyond civilisation; for Ursula LeGuin and C S Lewis, they are loaded with otherworldly potential; and for those fleeing captivity, they can provide a welcome sanctuary. Woods can strike fear, they can inspire wonder, they can be lovely, dark and deep. With full-colour illustration throughout, this book branches out into the British Library to find both the haunting and the hopeful in an unparalleled collection of books, manuscripts and photography. It tells a global story of how we understand trees, and its beautifully illustrated pages present a moving argument for conservation and renewal. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production.  Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Dr. Will Tosh, research fellow and lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe in London. Dr. Tosh discusses the significance of the play in Shakespeare’s career and of the way that Shakespeare’s company first performed it. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Matthew Mewhinney's Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of lyric expression in literati culture and advanced the emergence of modern prose poetry in Japanese literature. Through rigorous close readings, this study changes our understanding of the relationship between lyric form and the representation of self, sense, and feeling in Japanese poetic writing from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The book aims to reach a broad audience, including specialists in East Asian Studies, Anglophone literary studies, and Comparative Literature. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to the translators of Marianna Kiyanovska's The Voices of Babyn Yar (HURI, 2022), Max Rosochinsky and Oksana Maksymchuk. With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a first-person perspective to an effect that is simultaneously immersive and estranging. While conceived as a tribute to the fallen, the book raises difficult questions about memory, responsibility, and commemoration of those who had witnessed an evil that verges on the unspeakable. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Feeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect called feelin. Through interviews, close readings, and archival research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black women. Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, scholar, and performer whose research focus is Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (Oxford UP, 2020) takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 1840 to the present, it treats cynic confrontationalism as a widely-employed credibility-check on the promotion of moral ideals--with roots in human psychology. Helen Small investigates how writers have engaged with Cynic traditions of thought, and later more gestural styles of cynicism, to re-calibrate dominant moral values, judgements of taste, and political agreements. The argument develops through a series of cynic challenges to accepted moral thinking: Friedrich Nietzsche on morality; Thomas Carlyle v. J. S. Mill on the permissible limits of moral provocation; Arnold on the freedom of criticism; George Eliot and Ford Madox Ford on cosmopolitanism; Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Laura Kipnis on the conditions of work in the university. The Function of Cynicism treats topics of present-day public concern: abrasive styles of public argument; debasing challenges to conventional morality; free speech, moral controversialism; the authority of reason and the limits of that authority; nationalism and resistance to nationalism; and liberty of expression as a core principle of the university. Helen Small is Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Value of the Humanities (OUP, 2013) and The Long Life (OUP, 2007) (winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism (2008) and the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (2008)), and editor of The Public Intellectual (Blackwell, 2002). She has written widely on literature and philosophy, nineteenth-century fiction and public moralism, and the relationship between the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1941, Dorothy Sayers, Christian apologist, author of The Mind of the Maker, and even more famous for her Peter Whimsey mystery novels, wrote a cycle of plays on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was produced by the BBC for the radio and was a great success, though Sayers got flak for it from all directions—from secular voices calling it religious propaganda, from conservative voices calling it blasphemy. She also broke an established prohibition against actors playing Jesus and made a number of editorial choices that were astonishing for the time and remain notable in the twenty-first century. In 2023, Kathryn Wehr annotated, edited, and published a new edition of these plays by Dorothy Sayers, including her commentary on the text and its context. Dr. Wehr is a Catholic apologist and writer, and is the managing editor of Logos: A journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. She also writes and performs devotional songs. She has a Doctorate of Divinity from St. Andrews University in Scotland. Kathryn Wehr’s website Kathryn Wehr’s YouTube Channel, which includes many of her songs A recording of the plays on YouTube, The Man Born to be King (but it is out of copyright and abridged, as Katy Wehr explains in our discussion). Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; he is also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hope Williard's book Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries (Arc Humanities Press, 2022) explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flattery for undeserving kings and aristocrats, his work remains unduly neglected. This book reframes Fortunatus as a writer uniquely suited to his times, a professional poet who addressed his contemporaries’ needs and wishes for the prestige and sophistication of Classical culture. His poems and letters enabled his aristocratic patrons to situate themselves in networks, which they made and maintained in order to navigate a post-imperial but not post-Roman world. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of friendship in the Middle Ages and offers a fresh look at the Frankish kingdoms of Merovingian Gaul. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

"For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone" says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem "Firestones" the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together. Firestones I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast, a testimony to centuries of silt left on the shore, of sediment pressed into stone: sandstone, shale, tufa, travertine, jasper, flint. There was the stone that knew the sadness of the sea, that saved its secrets. It was pock-marked with holes and lay half-buried in sand eager to save the ocean's spray, like tears, in its miniature pools. There was the stone that always rolled in place. It had rolled round and round with each wave, desperately trying to control the tide. The was the stone that shoe rings upon rings placed by the seas over the years, that kept time for the Pacific. There were stones that breathed sulfur, that sparked when they touched. Unremarkable in luster or shine, they were the lovers of the ocean, firestones whose sparks were not dampened by salty waves (but they only made sense in pairs). And there was this one, more white, more brilliant, more polished than any stone. But it was once upon a shell; it needed centuries to become stone. It was a counterfeit firestone: it did not breathe sulfur, it could not make sparks. I traced my steps back along the Cardiff coast and the stones I returned to the sands. The ocean's secrets would be well-kept by the stones: its tears would be stored in pools, its tides kept in check, its years measured in rungs. But love itself I could not leave on the beach. I kept the firestones. Discussing this poem with Sassan, we touched on Scholar's stones came up and also Gerard Manley Hopkins's journals full of words/names. From here we moved to other poems and poems and Sassan's work in different languages (Persian, English), poetic traditions (haiku, Sufi poetry, ghazal) and activities (writing, translation, teaching). His dissertation on Persian poet Rudaki is mentioned. His "messy" practice across these many boundaries expresses a kind of playful profusion, ultimately rooted in sound, word, and the music of the lines. *Qazal* As a boy, I waited for the smile to appear in you. Listened for echoes of the sigh I could hear in you. You are the mirror where I have sought the beloved: Her hyacinth curls, a nod, a wink. a tear, in you. In the marketplace you can learn your future for a price. They are merchants of fate; I see the seer in you. What had been buried under the scriupture's weight, Its truth, without words or incense, becomes clear in you. They who bind you on the altar of sacrifice Hide behind masks; don’t let them smell the fear in you. As I approach the house lit by dawn's blue light, Step by step, I lose myself, I disappear in you. We closed out our talk with a reading of Sassan's translation of David Ferry's "Resemblance" (also featured in episode 55), with the Persian and English stanzas alternating. Sassan's book Ferry to Malta will be out in April, and you can hear him read and discuss his work April 27th at Brookline Booksmith. Read the transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Season 5 of Novel Dialogue opens with an impassioned refresher course in literary theory brought to you by Ocean Vuong, poet and author of the bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Ocean talks with critic Amy E. Elkins and host Emily Hyde about browsing bookstore shelves and building his personal reading list of “life-giving weirdos.” They discuss genre and gender, antiquing and thrifting, fish sauce and photography, all the while integrating the insights of queer theory and the full range of literary history. What does looking at the world as a junkyard have to do with making art? What does it feel like to run smack dab into a memory? How can we be mindful of the fact that words (like “this”) are tiny objects with infinite possibilities? If autofiction annoys you, listen for how the form reinvents the self against dominant class and gender structures. And if your boots have ever touched down in Hot Springs, Arkansas, stay tuned for our signature question and don’t miss this episode! Mentions: Judith Butler Anne Carson Autobiography of Red Bhanu Kapil Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Djuna Barnes Nightwood Freytag’s triangle Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji Amy E. Elkins, “The Weaver’s Handshake” William Carlos Williams Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Susan Sontag Walt Whitman Langston Hughes Lucille Clifton Hot Springs High School The Sugarhill Gang, “Rappers Delight” Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick Bixby's book Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (Manchester UP, 2022) demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, newspaper debates, public lectures, and private correspondence.  These materials reveal a response to Nietzsche that created abiding tensions between Irish cultural production and reigning religious and nationalist orthodoxies, during an anxious period of Home Rule agitation, world war, revolution, civil war, and state building. With its wealth of detail, the book greatly enriches our understanding of modernist culture as a site of convergence between art and politics, indigenous concerns and foreign perspectives. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Emma Smith offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant monologues. You’ll discover the unique kind of speech that Shakespeare develops in this play to reflect his characters’ sense of conscience and guilt, and learn to see how Shakespeare reflects the largest themes of his plays in the smallest units of language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity (Liverpool UP, 2022) by Dr. Ross Clare introduces and analyses the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary science fiction. By using up-to-date methods from classical reception theory, science-fiction analysis and fictional-world studies, the book will help furnish the reader's understanding of the ways in which the literature, culture, history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome are appropriated and represented across multiple media platforms in the science-fiction genre today. The book will therefore serve as an entry point into several areas of study: the reception of classics in popular culture, antiquity in modern media, the uses of the ancient world in science-fiction, and broader science-fiction criticism. The chapters, structured by medium, principally offer a roughly chronological overview of that medium and its treatment of ancient history, mythology, literature, and culture. An abundance of case studies from literature, film, television, and videogames—including Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Bill and  Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Fallout: New Vegas—show how classical antiquity is reused, encountered, and re-encountered by creators and consumers of the present. Clare shows how we bounce off images of this history, and it bounces off us, a reciprocation that creates new visions of Greece and of Rome. In addition to this book, Ross Clare is the author of Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames, with Bloomsbury Academic Press, as well as having written some short stories, and video game scripts. He used to teach at the University of Liverpool. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Two perceptions about wolves are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. In Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), Elizabeth Marshall traces the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England. Marshall provides new, animal-centric readings of Old English texts, including Beowulf, and positions these texts within a lupine literary network that transcends time and place. By exploring the intricate, contradictory, and even sympathetic depictions of the wolves and wolf-like entities found within these texts, Marshall banishes all notions of the medieval wolf as the one-dimensional, man-eating creature that it is so often understood to be. Elizabeth Marshall earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews and has received awards for both her thesis and research on the cultural and sociological issues related to the extraordinary predator’s reintroduction to Britain. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind. Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after 1900 drugs were increasingly viewed as a social problem, and the long tradition of self-experimentation began to disappear. From Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine to William James's epiphany on nitrous oxide, Mike Jay brilliantly recovers a lost intellectual tradition of drug-taking that fed the birth of psychology, the discovery of the unconscious, and the emergence of modernism. Today, as we embrace novel cognitive enhancers and psychedelics, the experiments of the original psychonauts reveal the deep influence of mind-altering drugs on Western science, philosophy, and culture. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon's edited volume After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022) demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles. The featured speakers in this podcast include: Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon: Marxist Literary Study and the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Nikhil Pal Singh: Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism Mark Steven: Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution Joshua Clover: The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature Juliana Spahr: Literature and the State Jasper Bernes: Poetry and Revolution Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dindshenchas as a branch of aetiological literature; and an analysis of the literary connections between the Dindshenchas and medieval Irish literature generally. Dindshenchas Érenn was published as a part of the series, Cork Studies in Celtic Literatures, in 2023. Dr. Marie-Luise Theuerkauf is a Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral fellow on the 'Mapping the Medieval Mind' project, with Prof. Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Dr David McCay, in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. Her academic interests include Celtic languages and literatures, with a specialisation in medieval Irish; dindshenchas (placename history), Irish metrics; Medieval Welsh literature; and Arthurian literature and folklore. She is also the editor of the forthcoming volume, Dublaídi Dindshenchais: Proceedings of a Conference on the Medieval Irish Place-name Tradition, which is being published by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who is currently the Coordinator for Digital Engagement for the International Center of Medieval Art and an assistant editor for the journal, Church Archaeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer. Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet we rarely stop and consider its history and material culture. This volume introduces student readers to the development of writing across time and societies. The book incorporates autoethnography and asks readers to consider writing histories, influences, processes, and tools in their own lives. Designed for composition courses with a Writing about Writing focus or courses in writing studies, A Writing Studies Primer is a unique introduction to writing through its material culture. Dr. Julia M. Gossard is Associate Dean for Research in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 addresses some of the central questions the play raises, especially questions of evil and guilt. With Professor Emma Smith, you’ll explore the Macbeths’ marriage and the different ways it can be interpreted, issues about joint agency and responsibility, and the question of how Shakespeare can dramatize such evil in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and still make these figures sympathetic.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring the role of Roth's absent father in his imaginings, his attitude to his Jewishness and his restless search for home, Keiron Pim's gripping account of Roth's chaotic life speaks powerfully to us in our era of uncertainty, refugee crises and rising ethno-nationalism. Published as Roth's works rapidly gain new readers and recognition, Endless Flight delivers a visceral yet sensitive portrait of his quest for belonging, and a riveting understanding of the brilliance and beauty of his work. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), Jill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode of High Theory is based upon a conference paper Saronik and Kim wrote for the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in 2023. It departs from our usual conversational style, in that we take turns reading sections of the paper aloud. But we could all do with a dose of formality, right? The paper we read is titled, “How Will Critique Save the World?: Popular Theory and Public Humanities” and it talks about the method wars on Twitter, the cameo appearance of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in The Matrix, alt-right conspiracy theory, and the academic job market. For a full transcript of the episode, with references, see our website: hightheory.net/2023/03/19/acla2023/ The image accompanying this episode was made by Saronik Bosu. Don’t use it without asking him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936 (American Philosophical Society, 2022) is an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and others wishing to study transatlantic slavery using African Voices. Aaron Spencer Fogleman is professor of history at Northern Illinois University. Robert Hanserd teaches African, Afro-Atlantic, and African-American history at Columbia College Chicago. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Based on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world, Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (U Toronto Press, 2020) offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin – a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. By analyzing the illustrations in fairy tales, classic "adult" literature reformatted for children, and war-time picture books, Megan Swift elucidates the vital and multifaceted function of illustrated children’s literature in repurposing the past. Picturing the Page demonstrates that while the texts of the past remained fixed, illustrations could slip between the pages to mediate and annotate that past, as well as connect with anti-religious, patriotic, and other campaigns that were central to Soviet children’s culture after the 1917 Revolution. Megan Swift is an associate professor of Russian Studies at the University of Victoria and author of Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (University of Toronto Press, 2020). Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford. Professor Smith outlines the imagery and structure of the play and its relationship to historical events of Shakespeare’s time. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Brantley is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Professor Brantley's new book is Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. After giving a comprehensive survey of writing surfaces, writing instruments, and other aspects of material culture, Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms takes a fresh look at some of the most widely studied texts of the medieval period—the Beowulf manuscript, the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, and the Book of Margery Kempe—alongside less canonical manuscripts. In addition to rich analyses of these books as textual artifacts, the book contains 200 high-quality illustrations that will pique the interest of readers looking to deepen their familiarity with medieval manuscript culture. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Arya Aryan's book The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (Cambridge Scholars, 2022) explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It argues that postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, but hetero-referential, consciously revealing the paradoxes of self-referentiality while simultaneously creating a heterocosmic world where the text is capable of referring to an external reality. The book highlights Chatterton’s narrative strategies and techniques which result in revealing the text’s meaning-granting process. The novel acknowledges the existence of reality and the text’s possibility of representation, but contends that reality is a human construct. In addition, the book demonstrates that representation is possible through fictive referents, and thus hetero-referential. Arya Aryan is assistant professor in English Literature. He received his PhD in postmodern and contemporary literature and the medical humanities from Durham University (UK). He also carried out a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Tübingen. His research interests are postmodernism, contemporary literature and the medical humanities. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a liberatory force in an age dominated by markets. By exploring the nuances of artistic production, Autonomy is a feast of delicious and insightful appraisals of artwork—with surprising turns and twists—within a larger context of the dialectics between art and market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Between 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the United States. Zaborowska demonstrates how Baldwin’s Turkish sojourns enabled him to re-imagine himself as a black queer writer and to revise his views of American identity and U.S. race relations as the 1960s drew to a close. Following Baldwin’s footsteps through Istanbul, Ankara, and Bodrum, Zaborowska presents many never published photographs, new information from Turkish archives, and original interviews with Turkish artists and intellectuals who knew Baldwin and collaborated with him on a play that he directed in 1969. She analyzes the effect of his experiences on his novel Another Country (1962) and on two volumes of his essays, The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), and she explains how Baldwin’s time in Turkey informed his ambivalent relationship to New York, his responses to the American South, and his decision to settle in southern France.  James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke UP, 2009) expands the knowledge of Baldwin’s role as a transnational African American intellectual, casts new light on his later works, and suggests ways of reassessing his earlier writing in relation to ideas of exile and migration. Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Professor of Afroamerican and American Studies and the John Rich Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Superman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In the following decades, Superman's mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Jewish motifs for their stories, basing Krypton's past on Genesis and Exodus, its society on Jewish culture, the trial of Lex Luthor on Adolf Eichmann's, and a future holiday celebrating Superman on Passover.  A fascinating journey through comic book lore, American history, and Jewish tradition, Roy Schwartz's Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero (McFarland, 2021) examines the entirety of Superman's career from 1938 to date, and is sure to give readers a newfound appreciation for the Mensch of Steel! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Humility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible responses to such states. Tracing the relation between negative affect, ethics, and aesthetics, Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation (Edinburgh UP, 2021) demonstrates how these two major modernists recuperate the affinity between humility and humiliation – concepts whose definitions have largely been determined by philosophy and theology. Rick de Villiers is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He holds a PhD from Durham University in the UK, and he is the author of articles on modernism, South African literature, alternative assessment practices and more. His first book, Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to Einstein's mania for African art and Benjamin's obsession with old Russian toys, she shows how these authors' literary techniques of compiling, gleaning, and reassembling constitute a modernist style of collecting which that reimagines the relationship between author and text, source and medium. Placing Benjamin and Einstein in surprising conversation with James sharpens the contours of collecting as aesthetic and political praxis underpinned by dangerous passions. An apt figure for modernity, the collector is caught between preservation and transformation, order and chaos, the past and the future. Positing a shadow history of modernism rooted in collection, citation, and paraphrase, To the Collector Belong the Spoils traces the movement's artistic innovation to its preoccupation with appropriating and rewriting the past. By despoiling and decontextualizing the work of others, these three authors engaged in a form of creative plunder that evokes collecting's long history in the spoils of war and conquest. As Pfeifer demonstrates, more than an archive or taxonomy, modernist collecting practices became a radical, creative endeavor—the artist as collector, the collector as artist. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination with the notion of "borders", including borders between humans and machines, men and women, normality and abnormality..., and how these borders can be translated into themes for her fictional creation. Finally, Lin also tells us how literary and philosophical theories such as posthumanism, queer theory, cultural constructivism, inspired and influenced her creative writings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Gripping tales that abound with fantastic characters and astonishing twists and turns, Greek myths confront what it means to be mortal in a world of powerful forces beyond human control. Little wonder that they continue to fascinate readers thousands of years after they were first told. Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (Princeton UP, 2023) is a major new telling of ancient Greek myths by one of the world's preeminent experts. In a fresh, vibrant, and compelling style that draws readers into the lives of the characters, Sarah Iles Johnston offers new narrations of all the best-known tales as well as others that are seldom told, taking readers on an enthralling journey from the origin of the cosmos to the aftermath of the Trojan War. Some of the mortals in these stories are cursed by the gods, while luckier ones are blessed with resourcefulness and resilience. Gods transform themselves into animals, humans, and shimmering gold to visit the earth in disguise--where they sometimes transform offending mortals into new forms, too: a wolf, a spider, a craggy rock. Other mortals--both women and men--use their wits and strength to conquer the monsters created by the gods--gorgons, dragons, harpies, fire-breathing bulls. Featuring captivating original illustrations by Tristan Johnston, Gods and Mortals highlights the rich connections between the different characters and stories, draws attention to the often-overlooked perspectives of female characters, and stays true both to the tales and to the world in which ancient people lived. The result is an engaging and entertaining new take on the Greek myths. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute “equipment for living”: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction. Laura Kolb is an Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, the City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In light of J.D. Salinger's recent passing and on reflection of his literary contributions, The New England Quarterly took a trip back to its December 1997 issue (70:4) and one of the journal's most popular articles. Pulitzer Prize-winner and NEQ editorial board member, Louis Menand interviews author Stephen J. Whitfield on his article "Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye." They discuss the impact of Salinger, the political and social climate during the time of Catcher, and contemplate how Cold War is viewed today. The conversation was recorded on February 24, 2010. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dive into the question of why audiences love Shakespeare’s plays and Game of Thrones so much, despite their depictions of prejudice and violence, and discuss the unique power of tragic art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom they are significant, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What role do imaginary games have in story-telling? Why do fiction authors outline the rules of a game that the reader will never watch or play?  Combining perspectives from philosophy, literature and game studies, Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides the first in-depth investigation into the significance of games in fictional worlds. With examples from contemporary cinema and literature, from The Hunger Games to the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone introduce four key functions that different types of imaginary games have in worldbuilding. First, fictional games can emphasize the dominant values and ideologies of the fictional society they belong to. Second, some games function as critical, utopian tools, inspiring shifts in the thinking and political orientation of the fictional characters. Third, imaginary games, especially those with a magical component, are conducive to the transcendence of a particular form of being, such as the overcoming of human corporeality. And fourth, fictional games can deceptively blur the boundaries between the contingency of play and the irrevocable seriousness of "real life", either camouflaging life as a game or disguising a game as something with more permanent consequences.  With illustrations in every chapter, bringing the imaginary games to life, Gualeni and Fassone creatively inspire us to consider fictional games anew: not as moments of playful reprieve in a storyline, but as significant and multi-layered rhetorical devices. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an understanding of both the prescriptions for womanhood espoused in print culture and how those prescriptions were interpreted in everyday life. While much has been written about the cultural marker of true womanhood as a gender ideology of white middle-class women, Stanfield reveals how it served an even more significant purpose by defining racial difference and attaching civic purpose to the daily practices of women. Black and white women were actively engaged in redefining citizenship in ways that did not necessarily call for suffrage rights but did claim a relationship to the state. The prominence of true womanhood relied upon a female-focused print culture. The act of publication gave power to the ideology and allowed for a shared identity among white middle-class women and those who sought to emulate them. Stanfield argues that this domestic literature created a national code for womanhood that was racially constructed and infused with civic purpose. By defining women’s household practices as an obligation not only to their husbands but also to the state, women could reimagine themselves as citizens. Through print sources, women publicized their performance of these defined obligations and laid claim to citizenship on their own behalf. Katrina Anderson is a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi reviews this work which was published in the 90s and provides his reflection on how to re-read the novel in the context of the Anthropocene. We also chat about the influence of Japanese manga and anime on his Sci-fi world-creating and his view on contemporary speculative fiction. Chi further shares with us his thoughts on the next generation of Taiwanese sci-fi novelists.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades.  John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400 (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information. Emily Steiner is the Rose Family Endowed Chair Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work on medieval literature and middle English literature and culture. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Historically and geographically expansive, Truschke takes her readers through a delightful tour of Sanskrit texts from a variety of genres to show their incongruity with modern conceptions of religious difference and antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Through her close readings of Sanskrit historical texts often saturated with poetry and a keen poetic sensibility, Truschke achieves no less than a fundamental reorientation of how we imagine and approach the discipline of history. This meticulously researched and lyrically written book will be of tremendous interest to scholars of South Asia, Religion, and the wider Humanities. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at sherali.tareen@fandm.edu. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH: English Literary History. Botanical Poetics, a wide-ranging study of print culture around poetry between the years 1568 and 1583, investigates the intersection of literary history and horticultural practice. The book includes new interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Romeo and Juliet, as well as George Gascoigne’s A Hundred Sundry Flowers and Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosegay. Botanical Poetics offers a variety of fresh concepts for the study of early modern poetry such as “the ecology of small forms” and “slippery poetics.” Not least of all, this book explores what it meant to “read like a pig” in the 1570s. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women--from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers. Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English and Chinese audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode, Martin Erwig show us how we can find computational concepts inside some of our favorite stories. Picture a computer scientist, staring at a screen and clicking away frantically on a keyboard, hacking into a system, or perhaps developing an app. Now delete that picture. In Once Upon an Algorithm, Martin Erwig explains computation as something that takes place beyond electronic computers, and computer science as the study of systematic problem solving. Erwig points out that many daily activities involve problem solving. Getting up in the morning, for example: You get up, take a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast. This simple daily routine solves a recurring problem through a series of well-defined steps. In computer science, such a routine is called an algorithm. Erwig illustrates a series of concepts in computing with examples from daily life and familiar stories. Hansel and Gretel, for example, execute an algorithm to get home from the forest. The movie Groundhog Day illustrates the problem of unsolvability; Sherlock Holmes manipulates data structures when solving a crime; the magic in Harry Potter's world is understood through types and abstraction; and Indiana Jones demonstrates the complexity of searching. Along the way, Erwig also discusses representations and different ways to organize data; "intractable" problems; language, syntax, and ambiguity; control structures, loops, and the halting problem; different forms of recursion; and rules for finding errors in algorithms. This engaging book explains computation accessibly and shows its relevance to daily life. Something to think about next time we execute the algorithm of getting up in the morning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Explore the moral tensions and dilemmas that Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin force their audiences to confront, especially in the storylines of their most notable political leaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Michelle Chihara, Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Annie Berke, the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. We talked about book reviewing in the age of the Internet and LA literary culture. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Chaim Grade’s novel, Tsemakh Atlas: Der Yeshivah, was originally published in Yiddish in the late 1960s. Considered a landmark of modern Yiddish literature, the novel now known as The Yeshiva, captures the inner life of the pre-Holocaust Lithuanian yeshiva tradition, with protagonists who are steeped in the pietistic Musar movement and tormented by religious doubt. Yehudah DovBer Zirkind is a research fellow at the Herzog Institute for the Study of Hasidism and a graduate student of Yiddish literature at Tel Aviv University. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Drawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no historical account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels about plague, apocalypse, and racial violence, but also readers whose taste for older novels, and for re-reading novels they knew earlier in their lives, has grown. Alternating between chapters that analyze single texts that were popular (Albert Camus's The Plague, Ali Smith's Summer, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre) and others that describe clusters of, for example, dystopian fiction and nature writing, this work brings out the diverse quality of the Covid-19 bookshelf. Time is of central importance to this study, both in terms of the time of lockdown and the temporality of reading itself within this wider disrupted sense of time. By exploring these varied experiences, this book investigates the larger question of how the consumption of novels depends on and shapes people's experience of non-work time, providing a specific lens through which to examine the phenomenology of reading more generally. This timely work also negotiates debates in the study of reading that distinguish theoretically between critical reading and reading for pleasure, between professional and lay reading. All sides of the sociological and literary debate must be brought to bear in understanding what readers tell us about what novels have meant to them in this complex historical moment. Ben Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Sex, Time, and Space in Contemporary Fiction (2016); editor of John Burnside: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2020); and co-editor of Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture (2011). He has also published articles in journals such as Textual Practice and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Christina Lupton is a professor at the University of Warwick and the University of Copenhagen. She is author of three monographs: Knowing Books (2012), Reading and the Making of Time (2018), and Love and the Novel: Life After Reading (2022), and numerous articles on the topics of reading, time use, and the materiality of books. Johanne Gormsen Schmidt holds a PhD in literature from University of Southern Denmark and is currently a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of several pieces in the fields of literary sociology, comparative and Scandinavian literature, and uses of literature. She is editor of the literary journal Passage. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Ohio State UP, 2022), Charlie Samuelson casts queerness in medieval French texts about courtly love in a new light by bringing together for the first time two exemplary genres: high medieval verse romance, associated with the towering figure of Chrétien de Troyes, and late medieval dits, primarily associated with Guillaume de Machaut. In close readings informed by deconstruction and queer theory, Samuelson argues that the genres’ juxtaposition opens up radical new perspectives on the deviant poetics and gender and sexual politics of both. Contrary to a critical tradition that locates the queer Middle Ages at the margins of these courtly genres, Courtly and Queer emphasizes an unflagging queerness that is inseparable from poetic indeterminacy and that inhabits the core of a literary tradition usually assumed to be conservative and patriarchal. Ultimately, Courtly and Queer contends that one facet of texts commonly referred to as their “courtliness”—namely, their literary sophistication—powerfully overlaps with modern conceptions of queerness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Helen Solterer and Vincent Joos edited volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present: Multilingual Literatures, Arts, and Cultures (Manchester UP, 2022) examines the sustained contribution of migrants to Europe’s literatures, social cultures, and arts over centuries. Europe has never been a continent bounded by the seas that surround it. In premodern times, migrants imprinted the languages, arts, and literatures of the places where they settled. They contributed to these cultures and economies. Some were on the move in search of a better life; others were displaced by war, dispossessed, expelled; while still others were brought in servitude to European cities to work, enslaved. Today’s immigration flows in Europe are not exceptional but anchored in this longue durée process. Iberia/Maghreb, Sicily/Lampedusa, Calais are the three hotspots considered in this volume. These regions have been shaped and continue to be shaped by migrants; by their cultures; their Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Somali; their French, English and Mandarin languages. They are also shaped by migrants’ struggles. The scholars and artists who wrote Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present compose a new significant chapter in the cultural history of European migration by reflecting on the forces that have put people into motion since the premodern period and by examining the visual arts, literature, and multilingual social worlds fostered by migration. This historically expansive and multilingual approach to mobility and expressiveness makes a crucial contribution: migrants as a lifeblood of European cultures. Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations--about her parents' hollow marriage, her father's double life and tortured sexual identity--fundamentally changed Priscilla's perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him. A wrenching story about what it means to be the daughter of a demanding parent, a revelatory window into the impact of divorce, and a searching reflection on the nature of art and criticism, The Critic's Daughter is an unflinching account of loss and grief--and a radiant testament of forgiveness and love. Priscilla Gilman is the author of the previous memoir The Anti-Romantic Child and a former professor at Yale and Vassar. Her other writings have appeared in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. -Guest Hosted with Professor Corey McEleney, Fordham University Recommended Books: Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You Paul Harding, This Other Eden Anne Beattie, Onlookers De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Decent People Claire Dederer, Monsters  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the late twentieth century, the Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco has been viewed as a triumphant proto-feminist icon: a woman who celebrated her sexuality, an outspoken champion of women and their worth, and an important intellectual and cultural presence in sixteenth-century Venice. In Veronica Franco in Dialogue (U Toronto Press, 2022), Marilyn Migiel provides a nuanced account of Franco’s rhetorical strategies through a close analysis of her literary work. Focusing on the first fourteen poems in the Terze rime, a collection of Franco’s poems published in 1575, Migiel looks specifically at back-and-forth exchanges between Franco and an unknown male author. Migiel argues that in order to better understand what Franco is doing in the poetic collection, it is essential to understand how she constructs her identity as author, lover, and sex worker in relation to this unknown male author. Veronica Franco in Dialogue accounts for the moments of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indirectness in Franco’s poetry, as well as the polemicism and assertions of triumph. In doing so, it asks readers to consider their ideological investments in the stories we tell about early modern female authors and their cultural production. Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the histories of diplomacy and sociality. Her publications have appeared in The Italianist and the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Renaissance World, with forthcoming research on the intersections across affect, masculinity, early modern poetics, and Baroque opera. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Discover the real-life history that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeare’s history plays, and learn the distinctive ways in which Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin each transform history into art Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a new account of the medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe. Kempe, who had fourteen children, traveled all over Europe and recorded a series of unusual events and religious visions in her work The Book of Margery Kempe, which is often called the first autobiography in the English language. Anthony Bale charts Kempe’s life and tells her story through the places, relationships, objects, and experiences that influenced her. Extensive quotations from Kempe’s Book accompany generous illustrations, giving a fascinating insight into the life of a medieval woman. Margery Kempe is situated within the religious controversies of her time, and her religious visions and later years put in context. And lastly, Bale tells the extraordinary story of the rediscovery, in the 1930s, of the unique manuscript of her autobiography. Anthony Bale is professor of medieval studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has published many articles and books on medieval literature and culture, including The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–1500 and a translation of The Book of Margery Kempe. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Let’s talk about zombies! Scholars Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have produced an engaging and important analysis of the idea of zombies, and how and why these particular monsters are omnipresent in American popular culture, especially these days. Zombies both represent and present ideas about the world in which we live, and Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines these connections, helping us consider our relationship to this vision of the “undead” and why these monsters are indigenous to the Americas. Zombies reflect the colonial experience in the Americas, not only those who settled in both North and South America, but also in the approach taken to labor and those who labored. Saldarriaga and Manini examine the zombie as a representation of chattel slavery, which used the human body as a commodity like the other exploited resources in “the new world.” Those who were enslaved were essentially dead labor, according to Marxian conceptions, and the continued exploitation and disposability of workers continues this idea of the use of the undead in the modern world. Zombies as a concept can be seen within neoliberalism as corpses made into commodities, just as other commodities are valued or devalued based on supply and demand. Another avenue of exploration is how zombies live in an ablest world where they have very limited abilities—thus making us consider our own toggling between ableism and disability. In a sense, zombies push on the idea that disability itself is the norm. They represent the way that bodies should not look, with all the insides missing, or on the outside. They also reproduce in rather unique ways—not in the biologically expected way, but in the consumption of others to create more zombies. Thus, in a world with zombies, the patriarchal form of reproduction is replaced, erasing binary sex roles along the way. While we usually consider zombies as horror staples, they are, in fact, science fiction entities, since they are really a kind of futurity. Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies explores these myriad ways that zombies are symbolic of so much of what surrounds us in our everyday lives, but also what scares us. Zombies, if we think of them as a future, cause us a great deal of anxiety, since they demonstrate a post-human existence. Zombies regularly show us how we are literally eating ourselves. With the existential threat of global climate change, and the antagonism between humans and the nature world, zombies as metaphor and popular culture trope highlight our fears about the future as well as the long shadow of a colonial and enslaving past. Saldarriaga and Manini systematically explore the many dimensions of why zombies are so entrenched in our imaginaries and what these monsters are teaching us about ourselves and our fears and anxieties. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Owing to Taiwan’s multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers’ creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the “post-truth” era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, Taiwanese Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2022) focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers’ experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors’ co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination. Pei-yin Lin is Associate Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She is author or editor of multiple books, most recently Gender and Ethnicity in Taiwanese Literature: Japanese Colonial Era to Present Day (2021) and Positioning Taiwan in a Global Context: Being and Becoming (2019, co-edited with Bi-yu Chang). Wen-chi Li is Susan Manning Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK. He and Colin Bramwell won first prize in the 2018 John Dryden Translation Competition. In Taiwan, Li has published three poetry collections as well as co-edited the book Under the Same Roof: A Poetry Anthology for LGBT. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is the nature of language? This is the question that Nathan Vedal’s book, The Culture of Language in Ming China: Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge (Columbia University Press; 2022), explores. And ‘explore’ is indeed the best word to describe what this beautifully rich book does, for it looks at how language was conceived, discussed, and debated in a wide range of little-known texts from the Ming and Qing, including works of philosophy, philology, literature, and music. Through this exploration, The Culture of Language in Ming China looks at how a community interested in philology formed in the sixteenth century. More importantly, this book examines Ming philology on its own terms, making the point that constrained disciplinary boundaries around philology and around what constitutes the study of language simply didn’t apply in this period; such restrictions would come later. As such, this book should be of interest to anyone curious in learning more about Chinese intellectual history, the history of the Ming and Qing, and the study of language in East Asia — but also anyone interested in thinking critically about the formation and history of disciplinary boundaries. Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Kewes and Professor Palfrey offer detailed close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, including Hamlet’s famous soliloquies. You’ll watch critical interpretation in action as our featured scholars offer contrasting readings of a single speech; you’ll uncover the images and metaphors behind Hamlet’s words that reveal the unique bent of his imagination; and you’ll learn the precise linguistic techniques Shakespeare uses to convey a living mind in the act of thinking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as “the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time . . . insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all.” An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain. After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring.  Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy (Syracuse UP, 2021), with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure. Marci Mazzarotto is an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of Digital Communication at Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Her research interests center on the interdisciplinary intersection of academic theory and artistic practice with a focus on mass media, popular culture and avant-garde art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Daisy Alpert Florin about her new novel My Last Innocent Year (Henry Holt, 2023). Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family. Recommended Books: Kevin Wilson, Now is Not the Time to Panic Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves Elena Ferrante, The Lying Lives of Adults Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as "The Cutting," and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Duke UP, 2019).  Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's novel is one of the few works that details the massacre's scale and scope. Conveying the horror of witnessing such inhumane violence firsthand, it is both an attempt to come to terms with personal and collective guilt and a search to understand how people can be driven to indiscriminately kill their neighbors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books (Oxford UP, 2017) presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism. Philip Nel is University Distinguished Professor of English at Kansas State University. His many books include Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children's Literature (UP Mississippi, 2012), Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2008, co-edited with Julia Mickenberg), The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (Random House, 2007), and Dr. Seuss: American Icon (Continuum, 2004). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade.  In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Practicing shame investigates how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to safeguard their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against the possibility of sexual shame. A combination of inward reflection and outward comportment, this practice of 'shamefastness' was believed to reinforce women's chastity of mind and body, and to communicate that chastity to others by means of conventional gestures.  Practicing Shame: Female Honour in Later Medieval England (Manchester UP, 2019) uncovers the paradoxes and complications that emerged from these emotional practices, as well as the ways in which they were satirised and reappropriated by male authors. Working at the intersection of literary studies, gender studies and the history of emotions, it transforms our understanding of the ethical construction of femininity in the past and provides a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come. Mary C. Flannery is a Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Professorial Fellow at the University of Bern Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The story of water in the United States is one of ecosystemic disruption and social injustice. From the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and Flint, Michigan, to the Appalachian coal and gas fields and the Gulf Coast, low-income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color face the disproportionate effects of floods, droughts, sea level rise, and water contamination.  In Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and a Just Transition (U Nebraska Press, 2023) Matthew S. Henry examines cultural representations that imagine a just transition, a concept rooted in the U.S. labor and environmental justice movements to describe an alternative economic paradigm predicated on sustainability, economic and social equity, and climate resilience. Focused on regions of water insecurity, from central Arizona to central Appalachia, Henry explores how writers, artists, and activists have creatively responded to intensifying water crises in the United States and argues that narrative and storytelling are critical to environmental and social justice advocacy. By drawing on a wide and comprehensive range of narrative texts, historical documentation, policy papers, and literary and cultural scholarship, Henry presents a timely project that examines the social movement, just transition, and the logic of the Green New Deal, in addition to contemporary visions of environmental justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

While the stock image of the anarchist as a masked bomber or brick thrower prevails in the public eye, a more representative figure should be a printer at a printing press. In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture (Duke UP, 2023), Kathy E. Ferguson explores the importance of printers, whose materials galvanized anarchist movements across the United States and Great Britain from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s. Ferguson shows how printers—whether working at presses in homes, offices, or community centers—arranged text, ink, images, graphic markers, and blank space within the architecture of the page. Printers' extensive correspondence with fellow anarchists and the radical ideas they published created dynamic and entangled networks that brought the decentralized anarchist movements together. Printers and presses did more than report on the movement; they were constitutive of it, and their vitality in anarchist communities helps explain anarchism’s remarkable persistence in the face of continuous harassment, arrest, assault, deportation, and exile. By inquiring into the political, material, and aesthetic practices of anarchist print culture, Ferguson points to possible methods for cultivating contemporary political resistance. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When Maya Phillips first saw the opening of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, she knew her life would change forever. She then spent her formative years loving not just the Star Wars saga but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who. In Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022), Phillips, a critic at large for the New York Times, presents an incisive essay collection that explores race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender through the lens of pop culture fandoms. Maya Phillips received her BFA in writing, literature, and publishing with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College and her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in humanities. Her research and writing interests include reading in popular culture, the public history of fiction writing, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Saga Bougdaeva is the translator of the first English version of Jangar (University of California Press, 2023), the heroic epic of the Kalmyk nomads. The Kalmyks are the Western Mongols of Genghis Khan’s medieval empire in Europe. Today, Kalmykia is situated in the territory that was once the Golden Horde, founded by Genghis Khan son’s Juchi. Although their famed khanates and cities have long since disappeared under the sands of the Great Eurasian Steppe, the Kalmyks have witnessed, memorized, and orally transmitted some of the most transformative developments, both victorious and tragic, in the history of civilizations. A tribute to the protectors of the mythical country Bumba, Jangar reflects the hopes and aspirations of the Kalmyk people as well as their centuries-long struggle for cultural survival. Dr. Bougdaeva’s translation is more than a tribute to the artistic creativity and imagination of the Kalmyk people—it is also an important step in their struggle for cultural survival. It was only after centuries of oral transmission that the songs and stories surrounding Jangar were written down. When the first translation, into Russian, finally appeared, Stalin had the entire Kalmyk population deported to Siberia and ordered that their national literature be eliminated from the published world. This Soviet repression has had enormous consequences for world literature, silencing nomadic voices and keeping hidden their distinctive contributions. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 turns from the political to the philosophical and psychological, as Simon Palfrey, professor of English at the University of Oxford, analyzes Hamlet’s character, language, and thought. You’ll learn what makes Hamlet one of the most complex and lifelike characters in literature and what strategies Shakespeare used to create this character. You’ll also explore the play’s deep questions about action, freedom, existence, and death--and learn how questions like these keep Shakespeare’s work open and alive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers.  Sara Petrosillo's Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 14 original essays, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) reveals the history of books in all their various forms, from the ancient world to the digital present. Leading international scholars offer an original and richly illustrated narrative that is global in scope. The history of the book is the history of millions of written, printed, and illustrated texts, their manufacture, distribution, and reception. Here are different types of production, from clay tablets to scrolls, from inscribed codices to printed books, pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers, from written parchment to digital texts. The history of the book is a history of different methods of circulation and dissemination, all dependent on innovations in transport, from coastal and transoceanic shipping to roads, trains, planes and the internet. It is a history of different modes of reading and reception, from learned debate and individual study to public instruction and entertainment. It is a history of manufacture, craftsmanship, dissemination, reading and debate. Yet the history of books is not simply a question of material form, nor indeed of the history of reading and reception. The larger question is of the effect of textual production, distribution and reception - of how books themselves made history. To this end, each chapter of this volume, succinctly bounded by period and geography, offers incisive and stimulating insights into the relationship between books and the story of their times. James Raven is Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex and a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Formerly he was Reader in Social and Cultural History, University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. He is the author, editor and co-editor of numerous books in early modern and modern British, European and colonial history, including Judging New Wealth (1992); The Practice and Representation of Reading (1996); The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000); Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing (2000); London Booksellers and American Customers (2002); Lost Libraries (2004); The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade (2007); Books between Europe and the Americas (2011); Publishing Business (2014) and Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 (2014). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One of the foremost Black writers and intellectuals of his era, Claude McKay (1889–1948) was a central figure in Caribbean literature, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black radical tradition. McKay’s life and writing were defined by his class consciousness and anticolonialism, shaped by his experiences growing up in colonial Jamaica as well as his early career as a writer in Harlem and then London. Dedicated to confronting both racism and capitalist exploitation, he was a critical observer of the Black condition throughout the African diaspora and became a committed Bolshevik. In Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik (Columbia UP, 2022), Winston James offers a revelatory account of McKay’s political and intellectual trajectory from his upbringing in Jamaica through the early years of his literary career and radical activism. In 1912, McKay left Jamaica to study in the United States, never to return. James follows McKay’s time at the Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State University, as he discovered the harshness of American racism, and his move to Harlem, where he encountered the ferment of Black cultural and political movements and figures such as Hubert Harrison and Marcus Garvey. McKay left New York for London, where his commitment to revolutionary socialism deepened, culminating in his transformation from Fabian socialist to Bolshevik. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, James offers a rich and detailed chronicle of McKay’s life, political evolution, and the historical, political, and intellectual contexts that shaped him. Articles referenced in the show: Winston James, “Letters from London in Black and Red: Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey and the Negro World,” History Workshop Journal, Issue 85 (Spring 2018), pp. 281-293. Winston James, "To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924," The American Historical Review, Volume 126, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 1001–1045. @amandajoycehall is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in the Department of African American Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Material Rhetorics (Ohio State UP, 2022) brings together emerging and established voices at the nexus of new materialist and decolonial rhetorics to advance a new direction for rhetorical scholarship on materiality. In part a response to those seeking answers about the relevance of new material and posthuman thought to cultural rhetorics, this collection initiates bold conversations at the pressure points between nature and culture, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, knowing and being, and across culturally different ontologies. It thus relies on a tapestry of both accepted and marginalized discourses in order to respond to frustrations of erasure and otherness prevalent in the fields of rhetoric, writing, and communication—and offers solutions to move these fields forward. With diverse contributions, including compelling pieces from leading Indigenous scholars, these essays draw from political, cultural, and natural life to present innovative projects that consider material rhetorics, our planet, and human beings as necessarily interwoven and multiple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency?  Jane Hwang Degenhardt's book Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented around discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortune's unpredictable turns. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions. Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theater--like that of English seaborne expansion--was also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popular understandings of fortune's role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of acting in the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon. John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It seems undeniable that language has limits in what it can express – among other philosophers, Wittgenstein famously drew a line of this sort in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But what is the unsayable or inexpressible? What is interesting, philosophically, about the unsayable? And if if something is unsayable, how can fictional works be related to (if not say something about) it?  In Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable (Lexington Books, 2022)), Timothy Cleveland argues that philosophical interest is not limited to the in-principle unsayable, as many philosophers claim: there is great value in what may be unsayable at a given time, due to epistemic limitations. Cleveland, who is professor of philosophy at New Mexico State University, defends a view in which words rendered in a certain way in fiction – such as in T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" – can acquaint us with, or exhibit to us, experiences that emerge from but are not semantically encoded in the sentences the works contain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Note: Sadly, Dr. Marie-Christine Leps passed away before the book came out. Via this conversation, we pay homage to her work that went into the making of this book and to her memories. After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps's book Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Academic Studies Press, 2022) focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Check out their latest book: The Other #MeToos. Follow them on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains some of the most famous words, images, and characters in all of literature. In this course, you’ll learn Hamlet’s story, explore its lead character’s mind, and hear its key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Paulina Kewes, professor of English at the University of Oxford. Professor Kewes lays out the wide-ranging moral and political questions that Hamlet raises and reveals how the play engages with some of the most important historical events of Shakespeare’s time. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Dennis Duncan tells us about the history of the index. At it’s simplest, an index is a table with columns that allow you to match sets of terms, most often topics and page numbers. Google is an index, as was the first bible concordance, completed in 1230 under the direction of a French Dominican scholar named Hugo de Saint-Cher. In the episode, Dennis quotes a line from Alexander Pope’s Dunciad: How index-learning turns no student pale.  Yet holds the eel of science by the tail (book 1, lines 279-80) He also references Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic, July/Aug 2008), and the book based upon it, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2011), both of which make an argument against shallow reading that Dennis argues goes all the way back to medieval critiques of the index. In the longer version of our conversation, we talked about Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler. Dennis Duncan is a scholar of book history, translation, and avant-garde literature at the University College London. His book about the history of the index, Index: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age was published in the US by Norton in 2022. The book includes two indices, once made by indexing software, and the other by Paula Clarke Bain. This week’s image is a portrait of Hugo de Saint-Cher, made by Tommaso da Modena. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Full citation: Hugues de Saint-Cher († 1263), bibliste et théologien, Paris, Centre d’études du Saulchoir, Actes du colloque 13-15 mars 2000, Brepols, coll. « Bibliothèque d’histoire culturelle du Moyen Âge », n°1, Turnhout, 2004, 524 p., ISBN : 2-503-51721-8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for reading guided him throughout his years. A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books (Yale UP, 2022) explores all aspects of Stalin’s tumultuous life and politics. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Based on his wide-ranging research in Russian archives, Roberts tells the story of the creation, fragmentation, and resurrection of Stalin’s personal library. As a true believer in communist ideology, Stalin was a fanatical idealist who hated his enemies—the bourgeoisie, kulaks, capitalists, imperialists, reactionaries, counter-revolutionaries, traitors—but detested their ideas even more. Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College Cork and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. A leading Soviet history expert, his many books include an award-winning biography of Zhukov, Stalin’s General, and the acclaimed Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Tim Harte's Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) looks at sport as artistic subject matter, in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. In sport, artists found inspiration that could be applied both to improvement of the self and to social progress as artists defined it. In the long run, the constraints of the Socialist Realist aesthetic came to constrain the creative freedom of artists, but until the late 1920's, sport served as a focus of genuine artistic interest, for its own sake and for its ability to provide a reservoir of metaphors that artists could use to make broader, more ideological commentary. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms. Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (U Chicago Press, 2020) ultimately asks what can resist ruination--and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure. John Yargo holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His specializations are early modern literature, the environmental humanities, and critical race studies. His dissertation explores early modern representations of environmental catastrophe, including The Tempest, Oroonoko, and the poetry of Milton. He has published in Studies in Philology, The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Curtis Runstedler's book Alchemy and Exemplary Poetry in Middle English Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) explores the different functions and metaphorical concepts of alchemy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and bridges them together with the exempla tradition in late medieval English literature. Such poetic narratives function as exemplary models which directly address the ambiguity of medieval English alchemical practice. This book examines the foundation of this relationship between alchemical narrative and exemplum in the poetry of Gower and Chaucer in the fourteenth century before exploring its diffusion in lesser-known anonymous poems and recipes in the fifteenth century, namely alchemical dialogues between Morienus and Merlin, Albertus Magnus and the Queen of Elves, and an alchemical version of John Lydgate’s poem The Churl and the Bird. It investigates how this exemplarity can be read as inherent to understanding poetic narratives containing alchemy, as well as enabling the reader to reassess the understanding and expectations of science and narrative within medieval English poetry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A century after being expelled from Portugal, cryptoJews in Mexico, false converts to Christianity, could not speak of their beliefs for fear of becoming embroiled in the imprisonment, torture, and death in flames that characterized the Inquisition. Without written texts, the Jewish liturgy lost, clans of cryptoJews created a unique body of religious poetry, connecting them to the Laws of Moses, seeking redemption from sin, or hoping for an escape from their embittered lives. The Carvajal clan was led by Luis el Mozo, an alumbrado, a mystic, and his Judaizing sisters. Once discovered to be secretly practicing Judaism, years of suffering at the hands of the Inquisitors were meticulously recorded in the transcripts of their long demeaning trials. The Carvajal's friends, spouses, children and grandchildren were implicated as Judaizers, with many being reconciled by the Church to secular authorities to be burned alive at massive public ceremonies. The burning of Luis and his sisters was the main attraction for cheering crowds at the auto de f of 1596 in Mexico City. The cruelty of the Inquisitors was matched by their attention to legal detail and testimonies made at trial. Buried within thousands of pages of transcripts, hiding in library special collections of rare books around the world are the only remnants of the religious poetry that sustained cryptoJews hiding in Mexico. Mark A. Schneegurt's Anthology of Religious Poetry from the Mexican Inquisition Trials of 16th-Century CryptoJews uncovers these hidden treasures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Virginia Woolf’s 1938 provocative and polemical essay Three Guineas presents the iconic writer’s views on war, women, and the way the patriarchy at home oppresses women in ways that resemble those of fascism abroad. Two great Woolf experts, Professor Anne Fernald, editor of two editions of Mrs. Dalloway which she movingly discusses on another Think About It episode, and Rajgopal Saikumar, who is completing a dissertation on Woolf, Hurston, Baldwin and Gandhi and the “duty to disobey” at NYU, explain Woolf’s arguments, the reasons for the shocked response by most of her peers, and why Three Guineas remains so relevant for our time. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audiences around the globe. Why is that? In this course, you’ll learn who Shakespeare was, what kinds of plays he wrote, and what makes his body of work perhaps the greatest work of art ever created. In Episode Five, Professor Smith shares student-tested strategies for approaching Shakespeare’s plays as a first-time reader or audience member. You’ll learn how to engage with the structure, imagery, and poetic verse of Shakespeare’s language and with the particular way that Shakespeare constructs his characters and plots. You’ll also learn why performance is key to discovering the meanings of Shakespeare’s plays--and why there are always new meanings to be discovered. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production (Duke UP, 2020), Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958–1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially.  Soundwork is Reed’s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes’s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka’s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez’s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes. Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For generations, the composition and recitation of poetry has been a key mode of expression among Bedouin populations in the Middle East, reflecting social norms, religious practices, relationships with the natural environment, and tribal histories and politics. In Words Like Daggers: The Political Poetry of the Negev Bedouin (Brill, 2022), Kobi Peled, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, analyzes a corpus of poetry collected among the Bedouin of the Negev Desert over the past 100 years for themes of political resistance, dissidence, and reactions to the political changes facing the Negev Bedouin. The poems reveal how the Negev Bedouin responded to and perceived changes in state authority and rule from the late Ottoman period to the contemporary state of Israel. Peled argues that in addition to being a creative and artistic mode of expression, poetry and a close reading of Bedouin poetry can serve as a lens onto Bedouin worldviews, sentiments, and reactions to and participation in processes political formations and state-building undergone in the Negev region during the 20th century. Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

These are troubling days for the humanities. In response, a recent proliferation of works defending the humanities has emerged. But, taken together, what are these works really saying, and how persuasive do they prove? The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today (Oxford UP, 2020) demonstrates the crucial downsides of contemporary apologetics for the humanities and presents in its place a historically informed case for a different approach to rescuing the humanistic disciplines in higher education. It reopens the passionate debates about the classics that took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America as a springboard for crafting a novel foundation for the humanistic tradition. Eric Adler demonstrates that current defenses of the humanities rely on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of certain poorly defined skills such as "critical thinking." It criticizes this conventional approach, contending that humanists cannot hope to save their disciplines without arguing in favor of particular humanities content. As the uninspired defenses of the classical humanities in the late nineteenth century prove, instrumental apologetics are bound to fail. All the same, the book shows that proponents of the Great Books favor a curriculum that is too intellectually narrow for the twenty-first century. The Battle of the Classics thus lays out a substance-based approach to undergraduate education that will revive the humanities, even as it steers clear of overreliance on the Western canon. The book envisions a global humanities based on the examination of masterworks from manifold cultures as the heart of an intellectually and morally sound education. Eric Adler is a Professor of Classics at the University of Maryland. Adler's scholarly interests include Roman historiography, Latin prose, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of the humanities. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering what is left unsaid—whether concealed or silenced, presupposed or excluded. Drawing on a variety of real-world examples, narrative criminologist Lois Presser outlines how to determine what or who is excluded from textual materials. With strategies that can be added to the tool kits of social researchers and activists alike, Unsaid provides a richly layered approach to analyzing and dismantling the power structures that both create and arise from what goes without saying. “…there’s always been a latent importance to absences and silences, and people have been saying that for a long time, but I think this is a time of just trying to get our act together with how we’re going to make strong claims about exclusions and silences and disappearances.” – Lois Presser, author of Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In “Fame is Not Just for the Fellas”: Female Renown and the Childhood of Famous Americans Series (University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), Gregory Pfitzer examines the editorial and production choices surrounding the biographies of women in the popular children’s book series Childhood of Famous Americans, published between 1932 and 1958. Using conversations and disagreements among authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and sales agents at Bobbs-Merrill publishers, the book tells the story of how female subjects were chosen and what went into writing these histories for young readers of the time. Tensions between “feminism” and “femininity” reflected changing Cold War gender norms, and sources reveal ongoing negotiation of the virtues that the biographies should instill. Pfitzer illustrates how these books shaped children's thinking and historical imaginations around girlhood using tales from the past and considers the influence of the series on readers and American culture more broadly. "Fame Is Not Just for the Fellas" places the series in the context of national debates around fame, gender, historical memory, and portrayals of children and childhood for a young reading public--charged debates that continue to this day. Rebecca Turkington is a PhD Candidate in History at Cambridge University studying transnational women’s networks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many histories of science have been written, but A New History of the Humanities (Oxford UP, 2014) offers the first overarching history of the humanities from Antiquity to the present. There are already historical studies of musicology, logic, art history, linguistics, and historiography, but this volume gathers these, and many other humanities disciplines, into a single coherent account. Its central theme is the way in which scholars throughout the ages and in virtually all civilizations have sought to identify patterns in texts, art, music, languages, literature, and the past. What rules can we apply if we wish to determine whether a tale about the past is trustworthy? By what criteria are we to distinguish consonant from dissonant musical intervals? What rules jointly describe all possible grammatical sentences in a language? How can modern digital methods enhance pattern-seeking in the humanities? Rens Bod contends that the hallowed opposition between the sciences (mathematical, experimental, dominated by universal laws) and the humanities (allegedly concerned with unique events and hermeneutic methods) is a mistake born of a myopic failure to appreciate the pattern-seeking that lies at the heart of this inquiry. A New History of the Humanities amounts to a persuasive plea to give Panini, Valla, Bopp, and countless other often overlooked intellectual giants their rightful place next to the likes of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Rens Bod is a professor of humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode we talk with New York Times Opinion Section Editor Peter Catapano, who has edited and published more than 1,000 pieces in The Times and worked with thinkers and writers such as Arthur Danto and E.O. Wilson. Our conversation explores the relationship between writer and editor and the important work Catapano did editing Oliver Sacks’ chronicling his illness and death. Catapano’s The Stone, established in 2010, is the longest-running online series in Opinion, and draws millions of readers each year. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audiences around the globe. Why is that? In this course, you’ll learn who Shakespeare was, what kinds of plays he wrote, and what makes his body of work perhaps the greatest work of art ever created. Episode Four introduces you to the plays--the kinds of stories that Shakespeare wrote, the way he developed as a dramatist over his two-decade career, and the path his works took over four centuries to find their way into your hands. The next part picks up just at this point: now that you have the plays, what do you do with them?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen fundamentally altered the perception of American comic books and remains one of the medium’s greatest hits. Launched in 1986—“the year that changed comics” for most scholars in comics studies—Watchmen quickly assisted in cementing the legacy that comics were a serious form of literature no longer defined by the Comics Code era of funny animal and innocuous superhero books that appealed mainly to children. After Midnight: Watchmen After Watchmen (U Mississippi Press, 2022) looks specifically at the three adaptations of Moore’s and Gibbons’s Watchmen—Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film (2009), Geoff Johns’s comic book sequel Doomsday Clock (2017), and Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen series on HBO (2019). Divided into three parts, the anthology considers how the sequels, especially the limited series, have prompted a reevaluation of the original text and successfully harnessed the politics of the contemporary moment into a potent relevancy. The first part considers the various texts through conceptions of adaptation, remediation, and transmedia storytelling. Part two considers the HBO series through its thematic focus on the relationship between American history and African American trauma by analyzing how the show critiques the alt-right, represents intergenerational trauma, illustrates alternative possibilities for Black representation, and complicates our understanding of how the mechanics of the show’s production can complicate its politics. Finally, the book’s last section considers the themes of nostalgia and trauma, both firmly rooted in the original Moore and Gibbons series, and how the sequel texts reflect and refract upon those often-intertwined phenomena. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University and an Associate Faculty member at University of Arizona Global Campus. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it.  In Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023), Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels. Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s book is: The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, which is the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award Winner. The Diné Reader showcases the breadth, depth, and diversity of Diné creative artists and their poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose, in a wide-ranging anthology. The collected works display a rich variety of and creativity in themes: home and history; contemporary concerns about identity, historical trauma, and loss of language; and economic and environmental inequalities. The Diné Reader developed as a way to demonstrate both the power of Diné literary artistry and the persistence of the Navajo people. The volume opens with a foreword by poet Sherwin Bitsui, who offers insight into the importance of writing to the Navajo people. The editors then introduce the volume by detailing the literary history of the Diné people, establishing the context for the tremendous diversity of the works that follow, which includes free verse, sestinas, limericks, haiku, prose poems, creative nonfiction, mixed genres, and oral traditions reshaped into the written word. This volume combines an array of literature with illuminating interviews, biographies, and photographs of the featured Diné writers and artists. A valuable resource to educators, literature enthusiasts, and beyond, this anthology is a much-needed showcase of Diné writers and their compelling work. The volume also includes a chronology of important dates in Diné history by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, as well as resources for teachers, students, and general readers by Michael Thompson. The Diné Reader is an exciting convergence of Navajo writers and artists with scholars and educators. Our guest is: Esther G. Belin, who is a Diné multimedia artist and writer, and a faculty mentor in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute for American Indian Arts. She graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry collection From the Belly of My Beauty won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her latest collection is Of Cartography: Poems. Our co-guest is: Jeff Berglund, who is the director of the Liberal Studies Program and a professor of English at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked since 1999. Dr. Berglund’s research and teaching focuses on Native American literature, comparative Indigenous film, and U.S. multi-ethnic literature. His books include Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (co-editor), and Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendancy of Social Media Activism (co-editor). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Institute of American Indian Arts Esther Belin’s poems on the Poetry Foundation website, including Bringing Hannah Home and When Roots Are Exposed and Blues-ing on the Brown Vibe Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush This podcast with Morgan Talty discussing Night of the Living Rez This podcast with Michelle Cyca about Misrepresentation on Campus This podcast with the editor of Tribal Colleges Journal of American Indian Higher Education Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison). Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a startling flanking maneuver to finish with contemporary Polish poetry. John puffs to keep up… Discussed in this episode: Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, American abroad, in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady) Pliny the Younger, Letters (“the very model of the good civil servant”) Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty Ovid, Tristia Zbigniew Herbert, e.g. Mr. Cogito Wislawa Szymborska View with a Grain of Sand D. H. Lawrence, “Snake” (and other animal poems) Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds (“This [octopus encounter] is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”) George Herbert, “The Rose“ Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971) Listen and Read: 41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional story alongside the lives of real medieval women--from a maid who travelled around Europe, abandoned her employer, and forged a new career in Rome to a duchess who married her fourth husband, a teenager, when she was sixty-five. Turner also tells the incredible story of Alison's post-medieval life, from seventeenth-century ballads and Polish communist pop art to her reclamation by postcolonial Black British women writers. Entertaining and enlightening, funny and provocative, The Wife of Bath is a one-of-a-kind history of a literary and feminist icon who continues to capture the imagination of readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Medieval manuscripts are our shared inheritance, and today they are more accessible than ever—thanks to digital copies online. Yet for all that widespread digitization has fundamentally transformed how we connect with the medieval past, we understand very little about what these digital objects really are. We rarely consider how they are made or who makes them. Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor (Stanford UP, 2022) demystifies digitization, revealing what it's like to remake medieval books online and connecting modern digital manuscripts to their much longer media history, from print, to photography, to the rise of the internet. Examining classic late-1990s projects like Digital Scriptorium 1.0 alongside late-2010s initiatives like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, and world-famous projects created by the British Library, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Stanford University, and the Walters Art Museum against in-house digitizations performed in lesser-studied libraries, Bridget Whearty tells never-before-published narratives about globally important digital manuscript archives. Drawing together medieval literature, manuscript studies, digital humanities, and imaging sciences, Whearty shines a spotlight on the hidden expert labor responsible for today's revolutionary digital access to medieval culture. Ultimately, this book argues that centering the modern labor and laborers at the heart of digital cultural heritage fosters a more just and more rigorous future for medieval, manuscript, and media studies. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology and a volunteer at Interference Archive. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021), Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization. Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We shouldn’t be dismissive of the popularity of children’s literature among adults, as it is often in these works of fiction that powerful themes such as death, love, and virtue are most deeply and imaginatively explored. Guests Christina Phillips Mattson, Scholar of Children’s Literature Casper ter Kuile, Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School and co-host of Harry Potter and the Sacred Text MG Prezioso, Contributing writer for Harvard Political Review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode is a recording of a short paper presented by Kim and Saronik in the panel “Literary Criticism: New Platforms” organized by Anna Kornbluh at the 2023 Convention of the Modern Language Association. In the paper, they reflect on the nature of the voice in the humanities and the role of the humanities podcast inside and outside institutions. Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions revolutionized the way philosophers and historians of science thought about science, scientific progress, and the nature of scientific knowledge. But Kuhn himself also considered later on how his framework might apply to art. In After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions (De Gruyter, 2022), Oana Serban elaborates on the suggestions and proposals of Kuhn and others to develop a new view of aesthetic and artistic progress and change based in Kuhn’s work. Serban, who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bucharest, adds the key concept of aesthetic validity to the Kuhnian analysis as central to the concept of an aesthetic revolution. The dominance of a particular aesthetic paradigm depends on broadly political factors and are responses to particular ideological questions, such as “What is the relation between humans and God?” Artistic revolutions, in contrast, are stylistic expressions of these ideological frames, such that the norms, values, and styles in art can be transgressive without being Kuhnian revolutions. Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Wout J. van Bekkum's The Religious Poetry of El'azar Ben Ya'aqov Ha-Bavli (Baghdad, 13th C.) (Brill, 2022) is a comprehensive edition of Hebrew hymns composed by Eleazar the Babylonian, a prolific composer and scholar who lived in 13th-century Baghdad. His poetic language and style show much affinity with contemporary Sufism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Historian and author Dexter Gabriel talks about his relationship to truth and memory in his fiction and non-fiction writing. Come for his thoughts on what truth we can find in history and stay for his thoughts about George Washington’s teeth and his affection for astrolabes. Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website. Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dan Kois is the author of three nonfiction books: How to Be A Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Foward, an oral history of Tony Kushner's Angels in America (with Isaac Butler); and Facing Future, part of the 33 1/3 series of music criticism. He's a longtime writer, editor, and Podcaster at Slate. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his family. Book Recommendations: Luke Healy, Con Artists Peter and Maria Hoey, The Bend of Luck Linnea Sterte, A Frog in Fall  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Despite being set in the distant future on a remote desert planet, the story of resource extraction, power, politics, ecology, and religion told in Frank Herbert's sci-fi series Dune bears distinct parallels to real-world history and events. One example of Herbert's real-life inspirations comes in the characters of the Fremen, who Herbert based on both the Bedouin in the Middle East and Native American peoples. How are nomadic Indigenous peoples incorporated into and represented in Herbert's fictional universe, and what can we learn about real people and their history from these fictionalized representations? In this episode, I'm joined by Dune expert Dr. Kara Kennedy to discuss the Fremen of Dune , the inspirations and intentions behind the novels, Orientalism and literary representations of Islam and the Middle East, and what science fiction can teach us about both history and the future. Dr. Kennedy's book Women’s Agency in the Dune Universe: Tracing Women’s Liberation through Science Fiction is available here. Dr. Kennedy writes articles about Dune aimed at a general audience on her blog here. Follow Dr. Kennedy on Twitter @drkarakennedy and @dunescholar Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Roma figures have been an essential part of European folklore, myths, and literary traditions for centuries, with writers from Cervantes to Shakespeare to Victor Hugo drawing on the stereotype of the free-spirited, bohemian "Gypsy." Post-World War II, Roma characters began to appear in a new literary medium: American comic books. Roma heroes and villains alike fill the pages of DC and Marvel comics, with iconic characters like Dr. Doom, Magneto, Scarlet Witch, and Nightcrawler depicted as Roma. Almost exclusively written and drawn by non-Romani, however, these characters are often flawed or stereotypical, or, in recent years, they've been stripped of their Roma identity. Despite this, Roma comic book characters have become an important source of inspiration and empowerment for Roma youth around the globe. In this episode, Roma human rights activist and pop culture expert Vicente Rodriguez Fernandez joins me to talk about depictions of Romani characters in comic books, film and TV, the use of Roma identity as a literary trope, and comics as a tool of empowerment for minority groups. Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robin Vose (St. Thomas University) talks about his new monograph, The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God (Reaktion, 2022), censorship, and the Reformation.The first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church’s notorious Index, with resonance for ongoing debates over banned books, censorship, and free speech. For more than four hundred years, the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum struck terror into the hearts of authors, publishers, and booksellers around the world, while arousing ridicule and contempt from many others, especially those in Protestant and non-Christian circles. Biased, inconsistent, and frequently absurd in its attempt to ban objectionable texts of every conceivable description—with sometimes fatal consequences—the Index also reflected the deep learning and careful consideration of many hundreds of intellectual contributors over the long span of its storied evolution. This book constitutes the first full study of the Index of Prohibited Books to be published in English. It examines the reasons behind the Church’s attempts to censor religious, scientific, and artistic works, and considers not only why this most sustained of campaigns failed, but what lessons can be learned for today’s debates over freedom of expression and cancel culture. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1982, the Institute held a multi day discussion of censorship. In this session from the Vault, sociologist Richard Sennett talks about Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ideas about censorship in the arts. The discussion is moderated by Aryeh Neier, and includes Sidney Morgenbesser, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodskey, Richard Gillman, Frances Fitzgerald, Karen Kennerly, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Michael Scammell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned about the welfare of their race. Indeed, despite the tremendous injustice and discrimination that they faced, African Americans now had confidence to write to the president and to seek redress of their grievances. Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances. Jonathan W. White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln (UNC Press, 2021) presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' and civilians' experiences in wartime. As readers continue to think critically about Lincoln's image as the "Great Emancipator," this book centers African Americans' own voices to explore how they felt about the president and how they understood the possibilities and limits of the power vested in the federal government. ​​Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022), Urvashi Chakravarty excavates the ideologies of slavery that took root in early modern England in the period that preceded the development of an organized trade in enslaved persons. Despite the persistent fiction that England was innocent of racialized slavery, Chakravarty argues that we must hold early modern England—and its narratives of exceptional and essential freedom—to account for the frameworks of slavery that it paradoxically but strategically engendered. Slavery was not a foreign or faraway phenomenon, she demonstrates; rather, the ideologies of slavery were seeded in the quotidian spaces of English life and in the everyday contexts of England's service society, from the family to the household, in the theater and, especially, the grammar school classroom, where the legacies of classical slavery and race were inherited and negotiated. The English conscripted the Roman freedman's figurative "stain of slavery" to register an immutable sign of bondage and to secure slavery to epidermal difference, even as early modern frameworks of "volitional service" provided the strategies for later fictions of "happy slavery" in the Atlantic world. Early modern texts presage the heritability of slavery in early America, reveal the embeddedness of slavery within the family, and illuminate the ways in which bloodlines of descent underwrite the racialized futures of enslavement. Fictions of Consent intervenes in a number of areas including early modern literary and cultural studies, premodern critical race studies, the reception of classical antiquity, and the histories of law, education, and labor to uncover the conceptual genealogies of slavery and servitude and to reveal the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid. Although early modern England claimed to have "too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in," Chakravarty reveals slavery was a quintessentially English phenomenon. Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and the history of slavery, Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought (Ohio State UP, 2021), Professor Roger Sneed illuminates the interplay of Black religious thought with science fiction narratives to present a bold case for Afrofuturism as an important channel for Black spirituality. In the process, he challenges the assumed primacy of the Black church as the arbiter of Black religious life. Incorporating analyses of Octavia Butler’s Parable books, Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturistic saga, Star Trek’s Captain Benjamin Sisko, Marvel’s Black Panther, and the philosophies of Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam, Sneed demonstrates how Afrofuturism has contributed to Black visions of the future. He also investigates how Afrofuturism has influenced religious scholarship that looks to Black cultural production as a means of reimagining Blackness in the light of the sacred. The result is an expansive new look at the power of science fiction and Afrofuturism to center the diversity of Black spirituality. Roger A. Sneed is Professor and Chair of Religion at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. His work involves the intersections of African American religious thought and culture, Christian thought and gay male sexualities, and religious ethics. He is a contributor for Huffington Post and has previously published the book Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps' book Heterotopic World Fiction: Thinking Beyond Biopolitics with Woolf, Foucault, Ondaatje (Academic Studies Press, 2023) focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University. A specialist in Antebellum American literature and culture and in American citizenship, he focuses mainly on the history, meaning, and future of liberal education. This question motivates his book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton University Press, 2021). “Great Books” dominate “the Core” at Columbia University, where undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental humanities courses. Montás teaches in the Core and was for ten years the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum. From this vantage point, he considers the function of “great books” today, particularly for members of historically marginalized communities like himself. In Rescuing Socrates, he recounts how a liberal education transformed his life as a Dominican-born American immigrant. As many academics deem the Western canon to be inherently chauvinistic and the general public increasingly questions the very value of the humanities, Montás takes a different approach. He argues: “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.” The New York Times praised the book for its compelling argument “for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer.” I spoke with Montás about the complicated value of “great books,” the potential of a humanities education, and his conviction that a teacher in the humanities can trigger for students the beginning of a lifelong investigation of the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1983, ten years after W. H. Auden’s death, the New York Institute for the Humanities organized a series of readings and discussions of his work. In this episode from the Vault, Edward Mendelson, Auden's literary executor, moderates a discussion between Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Who gets to define generational cohorts and do they obscure more than illuminate? Guests Neil Howe, author of Generations Tony Tulathimutte, author of Why There’s No ‘Millennial’ Novel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In April 2006, The Institute held a two day symposium about copyright and intellectual property, titled Comedies of Fair Use. In this session, Lewis Hyde talks about owning art and ideas. Hyde is a cultural critic and scholar, whose work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property. He is best known for his books, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, and Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear the1982 Gallatin Lecture, in which Sir Edmund Leach discussed the work of Roman Jakobson, who he met in 1960, at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Jakobson was one of the pioneers of structural linguistics, and a major influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. He taught at Harvard from 1940 until his retirement in 1967. Leach was a British social anthropologist, and the provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Mani Rao about her translation Saundarya Lahari: Wave of Beauty" (HarperCollins, 2022) Saundarya Lahari is a popular Sanskrit hymn celebrating the power and beauty of Sakti, the primordial goddess. In one hundred verses, it underlines the centrality of the feminine principle in Indian thought. Attributed to Adi Sankaracarya, Saundarya Lahari is a valuable source for understanding tantric ideas. Every verse is associated with yantras and encoded mantras for tantric rituals, and specific verses in the hymn are considered potent for acquiring good health, lovers, and even poetic skills. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford UP, 2020), Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied. Julia Elsky is Assistant Professor of French at Loyola University Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a before and after. It was a poem that unequivocally declared that the ancient art of poetry had become modern." In What the Thunder Said: How 'The Waste Land' Made Poetry Modern (Princeton UP, 2022), Rasula tells the story of how The Waste Land changed poetry forever and how this cultural bombshell served as a harbinger of modernist revolution in all the arts, from abstraction in visual art to atonality in music. From its famous opening, "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land," to its closing Sanskrit mantra, "Shantih shantih shantih," The Waste Land combined singular imagery, experimental technique, and dense allusions, boldly fulfilling Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new." What the Thunder Said traces the origins, reception, and enduring influence of the poem, from its roots in Wagnerism and French Symbolism to the way its strangely beguiling music continues to inspire readers. Along the way, we learn about Eliot's storied circle, including Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell, and about poets like Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, whose innovations have proven as consequential as those of the "men of 1914." Filled with fresh insights and unfamiliar anecdotes, What the Thunder Said recovers the explosive force of the twentieth century's most influential poem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, Molly Haskell talks about her 2009 book, Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited, published by Yale University Press. Haskell grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the Sorbonne. She came to New York in the sixties to work for the French Film office, where she wrote a newsletter about French films. She wrote about movies for the Village Voice, Vogue, and New York magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lisa Swayze is the General Manager and Buyer at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca’s cooperatively owned independent bookstore. You’ve heard me mention Buffalo Street Books on all episodes—and it is Lisa who has really transformed the store into a community space for all of our community, where anyone can find themselves represented in the books, events, and atmosphere of the bookstore. Hillary Smith is Southern Pomo and Coastal Miwok and originally from Northern California. She has been a bookseller on and off since 2009. In December 2021 she left her job as an indie bookstore manager in California and moved to Glens Falls, New York. She started Black Walnut Books as a queer and Native pop-up and online bookstore focusing on Indigenous, BIPOC and queer authors. In January Black Walnut Books will become a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the Shirt Factory in Glens Falls. Hannah Oliver Depp is the owner of Loyalty Bookstores in Petworth, DC and Silver Spring, MD. Loyalty serves all readers as a diverse, intersectional feminist bookstore and programming space. Oliver Depp is a founding member of the American Bookselling Association Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and serves on the boards of Bookshop.org and as The President of the New Atlantic Independent Bookseller’s Association (NAIBA). Books Recommended: All the recommended books from our three booksellers can be found at the website, burnedbybooks.com Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this week’s episode from the Institute’s Vault, we hear a lecture on the revival of narrative in history by Laurence Stone. Professor Stone taught at Princeton from 1963 to 1990. He died in 1991. He is best known for his books The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, and Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this interview, she discusses her book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford UP, 2023), which inserts successive Irish-American identities--forcibly transported Irish, Scots-Irish, and post-Famine Irish--into American histories and representations of race. Figures from the Scots-Irish Andrew Jackson to the Caribbean-Irish Rihanna, as well as literature, film, caricature, and beauty discourse, convey how the Irish racially transformed multiple times: in the slave-holding Caribbean, on America's frontiers and antebellum plantations, and along its eastern seaboard. This cultural history of race and centuries of Irishness in the Americas examines the forcibly transported Irish, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian Ulster-Scots, and post-1845 Famine immigrants. Their racial transformations are indicated by the designations they acquired in the Americas: 'Redlegs,' 'Scots-Irish,' and 'black Irish.' In literature by Fitzgerald, O'Neill, Mitchell, Glasgow, and Yerby (an African-American author of Scots-Irish heritage), the Irish are both colluders and victims within America's racial structure. Depictions range from Irish encounters with Native and African Americans to competition within America's immigrant hierarchy between 'Saxon' Scots-Irish and 'Celtic' Irish Catholic. Irish-connected presidents feature, but attention to queer and multiracial authors, public women, beauty professionals, and performers complicates the 'Irish whitening' narrative. Thus, 'Irish Princess' Grace Kelly's globally-broadcast ascent to royalty paves the way for 'America's royals,' the Kennedys. The presidencies of the Scots-Irish Jackson and Catholic-Irish Kennedy signalled their respective cohorts' assimilation. Since Gothic literature particularly expresses the complicity that attaining power ('whiteness') entails, subgenres named 'Scots-Irish Gothic' and 'Kennedy Gothic' are identified: in Gothic by Brown, Poe, James, Faulkner, and Welty, the violence of the colonial Irish motherland is visited upon marginalized Americans, including, sometimes, other Irish groupings. History is Gothic in Irish-American narrative because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race. Aidan Beatty is a historian at the Frederick Honors College of the University of Pittsburgh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the fall of 1942, only the city of Stalingrad stood between Soviet survival and defeat as Hitler’s army ran rampant. With the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent their finest writers into the heat of battle. After six months of terrifying work, these men succeeded in creating an enduring epic of Stalingrad. Their harrowing tales of valour and heroism offered hope for millions of readers. “Stalingrad lives!” went the rallying cry: the city had to live if the nation was to stave off defeat.  In Stalingrad Lives!: Stories of Combat and Survival (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022) Ian Garner brings together a selection of short stories written at and after the battle. They reveal, for the first time in English, the real Russian narrative of Stalingrad - an epic story of death, martyrdom, resurrection, and utopian beginnings. Following the authors into the hellish world of Stalingrad, Garner traces how tragedy was written as triumph. He uncovers how, dealing with loss and destruction on an unimaginable scale, Soviet readers and writers embraced the story of martyred Stalingrad, embedding it into the Russian psyche for decades to come. Featuring lost work by Vasily Grossman alongside texts by luminaries such as Konstantin Simonov, Viktor Nekrasov, and Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalingrad Lives offers a literary perspective on the Soviet Union at war. Ian Garner is a cultural historian and translator in Kingston, Ontario. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in 2017 after studying at the University of Bristol and the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. Follow Ian on Twitter. Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a historian of Russia and Eurasia and holds a PhD from Georgetown University. She is a faculty member at New York University. To learn more, visit her website or follow her on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (U Minnesota Press, 2023) is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the surprisingly short history of idioms in English. Widely known for his studies of word origins, Anatoly Liberman explains more than one thousand idioms, both popular and obscure, occurring in both American and British standard English and including many regional expressions. The origins, and even the precise meaning, of most idioms are often obscure and lost in history. Based on a critical analysis of countless conjectures, with exact, in-depth references (rare in the literature on the subject), Take My Word for It provides not only a large corpus of idiomatic phrases but also a vast bibliography. Detailed indexes and a thesaurus make the content accessible at a glance, and Liberman’s introduction and conclusion add historical dimensions. The result of decades of research by a leading authority, this book is both instructive and absorbing for scholars and general readers, who won’t find another resource as comparable in scope or based on data even remotely as exhaustive. Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has written more than twenty books, including A Bibliography of English Etymology and An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (both from Minnesota). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“The Little Mermaid” has become popular around the world since the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen published it almost two centuries ago. Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of “The Little Mermaid” (Wayne State University Press, 2017) uses Japanese and American transformations of “The Little Mermaid” to think through the pleasures that the text provides for consumers. Building on Mayako Murai’s From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West, Fraser tracks transformations from the nineteenth century through 2008, with particular attention to literary and filmic media. The binary languages of the title are matched by a series of binaries that Fraser identifies within The Little Mermaid and its transformations. Fraser shows how Andersen’s story presents readers with strict binaries – like human-merfolk, sea-land, and soul-soulless – only for the protagonist to transgress them. The Pleasures of Metamorphosis then presents readers with more binaries – between transformations that emphasize the (male, human) prince and those that emphasize the (female, non-human) mermaid, for example – to show the diverse pleasures inherent to the text. In so doing, The Pleasures of Metamorphosis traverses Disney’s classic animated film and Studio Ghibli’s more recent Ponyo (2008) as well as literature by a host of skilled writers, including Yumiko Kurahashi, Banana Yoshimoto, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Oscar Wilde, Kōbō Abe, Yōko Ogawa, Shūji Terayama, and Hiromi Kawakami. The book concludes by showing the promise of theories surrounding Japan’s shōjo, or girls’, culture for non-Japanese works. Lucy Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at The University of Queensland, Australia, where she teaches Japanese language and literature. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University who researches Japanese culture and contemporary media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Regarded as the “9th Art”, French bande desinée have a much longer history of serious socio-political engagement than American comics. Since the Algerian War (1954–62), postcolonialism, migration, anti-racism are major themes in francophone comics. Mark McKinney’s newest book studies the genre from the formal dismantling of the French colonial empire in 1962 up to the present. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (Leuven UP, 2021) analyses comics representing a gamut of perspectives on immigration and postcolonial ethnic minorities, ranging from staunch defense to violent rejection. Individual chapters are dedicated to specific artists, artistic collectives, comics, or themes, including avant-gardism, undocumented migrants in comics, and racism in far-right comics. Dr. Mark McKinney is Professor of French at Miami University, Ohio. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics(Leuven University Press, 2020) is the final installment of a trilogy of sorts that includes The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Dr. McKinney co-edited with Alec G. Hargreaves, Post-Colonial Cultures in France (Routledge, 1997) and edited History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (University Press of Mississippi, 2008). From 2008-2015, along with Laurence Grove and Ann Miller, he edited the academic journal European Comic Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

John Milton is unrivalled--for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals--freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves--that are still relevant and necessary in our times. Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be English poetry's masterpiece. Samuel Johnson, not one for effusive praise, claimed that from Milton's books alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned. But Milton's renown rests on more than his artistic achievements. In a time of convulsive political turmoil, he justified the killing of a king, pioneered free speech, and publicly defended divorce. He was, in short, an iconoclast, an independent, even revolutionary, thinker. He was also an imperfect man--acrimonious, sometimes mean. Above all, he understood adversity. Afflicted by blindness, illness, and political imprisonment, Milton always sought to bear up and steer right onward through life's hardships. In Reading John Milton: How to Persist in Troubled Times (Stanford UP, 2022), Dobranski looks beyond Milton's academic standing, beyond his reputation as a dour and devout purist, to reveal the ongoing power of his works and the dauntless courage that he both wrote about and exemplified. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Haruki Murakami, a global literary phenomenon, has said that he started writing fiction as a means of self-therapy. What he has not discussed as much is what he needed self-therapy for. This book argues that by understanding more about why Murakami writes, and by linking this with the question of how he writes, readers can better understand what he writes. Murakami's fiction, in other words, can be read as a search for self-therapy.  In five chapters which explore Murakami's fourteen novels to date, Haruki Murakami and the Search for Self-Therapy: Stories from the Second Basement (Bloomsbury, 2022) argues that there are four prominent therapeutic threads woven through Murakami's fiction that can be traced back to his personal traumas - most notably Murakami's falling out with his late father and the death of a former girlfriend – and which have also transcended them in significant ways as they have been transformed into literary fiction. The first thread looks at the way melancholia must be worked through for mourning to occur and healing to happen; the second thread looks at how symbolic acts of sacrifice can help to heal intergenerational trauma; the third thread looks at the way people with avoidant attachment styles can begin to open themselves up to love again; the fourth thread looks at how individuation can manifest as a response to nihilism. Meticulously researched and written with sensitivity, the result is a sophisticated exploration of Murakami's published novels as an evolving therapeutic project that will be of great value to all scholars of Japanese literature and culture. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Arya Aryan's The Post-War Novel and the Death of the Author (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) not only discloses and examines different functions and concepts of authorship in fiction and theory from the 1950s and 1960s to the present but it also reveals, at least implicitly, a trajectory of some of the modes and functions of the novel as a genre in the last few decades. It argues that the explicit terms of much of the theoretical and philosophical debate surrounding the concept of authorship in the moment of High Theory in the 1980s had already been engaged, albeit often more implicitly, in literary fictions by writers themselves. This book examines the fortunes of the authorship debate and the conceptualisations and functions of authorship before, during, and after the Death of the Author came to prominence as one of the key foci for the moment of High Theory in the 1980s. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this conversation (one of my favorite interviews ever), I talk with Noah Askin of the University of California at Irvine about why some popular children's books, songs, and movies seem to last forever. Is it because the successful ones are similar but different? Is it a fluke? Is it the marketing? Or is it the story that the song/book/movie/anything tells, or is, or is it perhaps the story we make of it.  Noah Askin is Assistant Professor of Teaching Organization and Management at UC-Irvine in the Paul Merage School of Business. Prior to his arrival in Southern California, he was an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, where he directed and taught multiple Executive Education programs in addition to teaching the organizational design and leadership core course in the MBA program. He has a popular TEDx talk on what makes popular songs succeed. Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is co-founder of Ourboox, a web platform with some 240,000 ebooks that allows anyone to create and share flipbooks comprising text, pictures and videos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Writing With Scripture: Scripturalized Narrative in the Gospel of Mark (T&T Clark, 2022), Nathanael Vette proposes that the Gospel of Mark, like other narrative works in the Second Temple period, uses the Jewish scriptures as a model to compose episodes and tell a new story. Vette compares Mark's use of scripture with roughly contemporary works like Pseudo-Philo, the Genesis Apocryphon, 1 Maccabees, Judith, and the Testament of Abraham; diverse texts which, combined, support the existence of shared compositional techniques. This volume identifies five scripturalized narratives in the Gospel: Jesus' forty-day sojourn in the wilderness and call of the disciples; the feeding of the multitudes; the execution of John the Baptist; and the Crucifixion of Jesus. This fresh understanding of how the Jewish scriptures were used to compose new narratives across diverse genres in the Second Temple period holds important lessons for how scholars read the Gospel of Mark. Instead of treating scriptural allusions and echoes as keys which unlock the hidden meaning of the Gospel, Vette argues that Mark often uses the Jewish scriptures simply for their ability to tell a story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From governesses with supernatural powers to motor-car obsessed amphibians, the iconic images of English children's literature helped shape the view of the nation around the world. But, as Translating England into Russian: The Politics of Children's Literature in the Soviet Union and Modern Russia (Bloomsbury, 2021) reveals, Russian translators did not always present the same picture of Englishness that had been painted by authors. In this book, Elena Goodwin explores Russian translations of classic English children's literature, considering how representations of Englishness depended on state ideology and reflected the shifting nature of Russia's political and cultural climate. As Soviet censorship policy imposed restrictions on what and how to translate, this book examines how translation dealt with and built bridges between cultures in a restricted environment in order to represent images of England.  Through analyzing the Soviet and post-Soviet translations of Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, J. M. Barrie, A. A. Milne and P. L. Travers, this book connects the concepts of society, ideology and translation to trace the role of translation through a time of transformation in Russian society. Making use of previously unpublished archival material, Goodwin provides the first analysis of the role of translated English children's literature in modern Russian history and offers fresh insight into Anglo-Russian relations from the Russian Revolution to the present day. This ground-breaking book is therefore a vital resource for scholars of Russian history and literary translation. Polina Popova is a Ph.D. student at the history department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses (Oxford UP, 2022), with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides. The annotations reflect the latest scholarship and have been thoroughly reviewed by an international team of experts. They are designed to be accessible to first-time readers and college students and will also serve as a resource for Joycean specialists. The volume includes contemporaneous maps of Dublin to illustrate the cityscape's relevance to Joyce's novel. Unlike previous volumes of annotations, almost every note includes documentation about sources. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques--black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)--in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects. Daniela Gutiérrez Flores is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Literature and Cultureat the Univeristy of California, Davis. She is interested in Food Studies, early modern history and literature, Latin American studies, and the history of material culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Anna Hogeland about her new novel The Long Answer (Riverhead Books, 2022). Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont. Books Recommended: Lisa Marchiano, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Paris in 1953, one of the strangest and most popular plays of the 20th century premiered, Waiting for Godot, written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Since the premier, people have been trying to figure out what this play means. It’s been interpreted in countless ways, with no definitive confirmation from Beckett one way or another. Waiting for Godot is famous as a play about nothing, but it has endured because it is in fact a play about life. For what is life but a sequential collection of waitings? Waiting for school to end. Waiting to find someone to love. Waiting to know what to do. Waiting to feel better. Waiting for money or recognition. And ultimately, the last waiting, waiting for death. And yet, between all these waitings, we find meaning to continue on. Peter Connor is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U.P., 2000). See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ariana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creative process. The methodological process called the 'scientific method' tells us how to test ideas when we have had them, but not how to arrive at hypotheses in the first place. Hearing the stories that scientists and artists tell about their projects reveals commonalities: the desire for a goal, the experience of frustration and failure, the incubation of the problem, moments of sudden insight, and the experience of the beautiful or sublime. Selected themes weave the practice of science and art together: visual thinking and metaphor, the transcendence of music and mathematics, the contemporary rise of the English novel and experimental science, and the role of aesthetics and desire in the creative process. Artists and scientists make salient comparisons: Defoe and Boyle; Emmerson and Humboldt, Monet and Einstein, Schumann and Hadamard. The book draws on medieval philosophy at many points as the product of the last age that spent time in inner contemplation of the mystery of how something is mentally brought out from nothing. Taking the phenomenon of the rainbow as an example, the principles of creativity within constraint point to the scientific imagination as a parallel of poetry. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in history, and Hamlet is his greatest work. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gave us one of the first modern characters in literature. We are invited into the mind of Hamlet, to see how he thinks and acts in the face of love, grief, and revenge. It is a work of deep psychological complexity, and has inspired many writers to explore and reveal the inner lives of their characters. Part of what keeps Hamlet alive is its delicate balance of textured specificity and capacious vagueness. It is specific enough for Hamlet to feel real while also inviting endless interpretations. Michael Dobson is the director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. He is the author of “Cutting, interruption, and the end of Hamlet” See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs. But Cory and Rebecca have solutions to break the stranglehold, and in this episode of Darts and Letters Cory helps Jay explore various chokepoints, from concert tickets to audiobooks, and how we can open up the industries and get workers paid. SUPPORT THE SHOW You can support the show for free by following or subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whichever app you use. This is the best way to help us out and it costs nothing so we’d really appreciate you clicking that button. If you want to do a little more we would love it if you chip in. You can find us on patreon.com/dartsandletters. Patrons get content early, and occasionally there’s bonus material on there too. ABOUT THE SHOW For a full list of credits, contact information, and more, visit our about page. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Don Quixote was written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote it in two parts. Part one was published in 1605, and part two ten years later, in 1615. The story is centered around a middle aged guy named Alonso Quijano who is obsessed with stories of brave medieval knights—so obsessed that he decides to create a new persona for himself and live in a fictitious world of his own creation as Don Quixote. Don Quixote goes on all sorts of misguided adventures; fighting a windmill, jousting with a flock of sheep, and usually losing these battles in humiliating fashion. Timothy Hampton is a professor of comparative literature and French at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses. Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation project titled, “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writing” has been awarded an Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from her graduate school for outstanding research and scholarly excellence. Her work on the Indian Ocean archipelagos also takes the shape of a collaborative public-facing, community project Delta Lives, which platforms communities in Sundarbans telling their stories. As part of her commitment to rethinking environmental humanities pedagogy, she has edited a cluster on “Water Pedagogies: From the Academy and Beyond” published by NICHE Canada which brings together a set of eleven articles from scholars and activists reflecting on water pedagogy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time. This project consumed him until he died in 1922. By the end, his novel came out at more than 1.2 million words—that’s 3,000-4,000 pages depending on the edition. Much of the work was inspired directly from his life, sometimes memories of the past, and sometimes experiences that were unfolding in the present. In English, the novel goes by the title In Search of Lost Time. Although it does have a plot of sorts, this book is more about ideas, and less about a storyline. Elisabeth Ladenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and General Editor of Romanic Review at Columbia University. She is the author of Proust’s Lesbianism. Michael Lucey is Professor in the French department at University of California Berkeley. He is the author of What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long March (Overlook Press, 2022), about one couple who faced a similar decision–whether to leave their child behind–and that decision’s repercussions decades later. In this interview, Michael and I talk about the Long March, what makes it a great setting for a novel, and how its story aligns with many other family stories from modern China. Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi province. His short story collection, Further News of Defeat (Autumn House Press: 2020), won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and was a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Michael’s work has appeared in the New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Russellville, Arkansas. He can be followed on Twitter at @MichaelXWang3. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lost in the Long March. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change. In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon into the pandemic moment of late March, 2020. Then they discuss Stan’s sense that SF is the realism of the day and his take on “cognitive estrangement.” Finally, they happen upon a shared admiration for the great epic SF poet, Frederick Turner. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick. Mentioned in the Episode George Stewart, “Earth Abides“ Mary Shelley, “The Last Man“ M. P. Shiel, “The Purple Cloud“ John Clute, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (on “fantastika”) Frederick Turner, “Genesis” and “Apocalypse“ Ursula Le Guin, “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974; KSR praises such works as this for “power of poetry alone”) Darko Suvin, “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre ” (1979; on cognitive estrangement) “The door dilated” a quote from Robert A. Heinlein in “Beyond This Horizon” Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Philip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative poet and musician from St. Vincent. Keane was an influential figure in the 1960s London jazz scene, worked briefly for the government on his home island, and moved to New York where he built lasting relationships, all the while creating an extensive discography and numerous publications. Nanton's considerations of Keane's contributions to freeform jazz as well as his innovative approach to poetry will inspire readers to seek out the sounds and words he left behind. Alejandra Bronfman is Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic of the Catholic Church. In 1759 Voltaire published one of his best known works, Candide. In this satirical fable, Voltaire used current events of the day—like the 7 Years War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—to explore larger philosophical questions, such as how there could be evil in a world created by a benevolent god. In Candide, Voltaire frees us from the naive optimism that there is a perfect order to things. Carla Hesse is the Peder Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that book, he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a story about life, death, endings, and beginnings. It is a novel that invites its readers to think about their own past, and accept the complex and mysterious forces that have shaped them. It calls into question our relationship to nostalgia, and the role memory plays in shaping our futures. Héctor Hoyos is an Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He is the author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Becoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the parts of your writing process that need developing. The book is ideal for dissertation writing seminars, graduate students struggling with the transition from coursework to dissertation work, scholars who are supporting or participating in writing groups, and marginalized scholars whose writing struggles have prompted them to internalize the bias that others have about their ability to do exemplary research. Michelle R. Boyd is the founder of the InkWell Academic Writing Retreats. Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Perhaps more than any other book, Ulysses has the reputation of being difficult—it is dense, allusive, and often hard to follow. But Joyce wasn’t trying to be challenging for its own sake, or because he sadistically wanted to punish future students assigned his book. Quite the contrary. With Ulysses, Joyce wanted to explore and convey what it is to be alive. And just like his book, life is difficult and confusing, but also thrilling and joyful. Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor, Affiliate of the Program in Critical Theory, Director of Berkeley Connect in English, and Director of Irish Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism. Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication. Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism: The Early Modern Origins of the Intellectual Ideal (Bloomsbury, 2020) challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concept, but rather a range of concepts-sacred and secular, inclusive and exclusive-all described with the cosmopolitan vocabulary. While most scholarly attention in the history of cosmopolitanism has focussed on Greek and Roman antiquity or the Enlightenments of the 18th century, this book shows that the crucial period in the evolution of modern cosmopolitanism was early modernity. Between 1500 and 1800 philosophers, theologians, cartographers, jurists, politicians, alchemists and heretics all used this vocabulary, shedding ancient associations, and adding new ones at will. The chaos of discourses prompted thinkers to reflect on the nature of the cosmopolitan ideal, and to conceive of an abstract 'cosmopolitanism' for the first time. This meticulously researched book provides the first intellectual history of an overlooked period in the evolution of a core ideal. As such, The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism is an essential work for anyone seeking a contextualised understanding of cosmopolitanism today. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital (Ohio State UP, 2020), Marco Codebò assesses the state of fiction in our time, an age defined by the combined hegemony of global capital and software. Codebò argues that present-day displacement originates in the dualism of power that pervades our polarized society and in the sweeping deterritorialization that is affecting people, objects, and signs. As the ties between subjectivity and territory break, being in the world means being displaced. Rather than narrating how subjectivity can mark a place, novels of displacement convey the crisis of subjectivity’s connection to place. Using four works as case studies—Bernardo Carvalho’s Nove noites, Daniel Sada’s Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Mathias Énard’s Zone—Codebò investigates how globalization, displacement, and technology inform our understanding of subjectivity and one’s place in the world. Coming from different literary traditions—Brazilian-Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French— Novels of Displacement traces the development of displacement caused by organized crime, migration, and war. Ultimately what emerges from this study is evidence of how cultures of untruth damage but do not destroy human agency. Iqra Shagufta Cheema writes and teaches in the areas of digital cultures, postcolonial literatures, transnational digital feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and global south film studies. Follow them on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Crimes are meant to be solved. But what happens when they’re not? For the individuals involved—from the victims and their families to police investigators—this is the most frustrating part of all. For them there’s no resolution, no justice, no tidy boxes in which to pack away all the bits and pieces of a puzzle that finally links together. Instead, they are only left with questions that may never get answered. In The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries (Mango Publishing, 2022), the sixth volume in her true crime franchise, Mitzi Szereto brings together all-new and original accounts of unsolved crimes and mysterious stories from around the world penned by writers from across the literary spectrum, from true crime and crime fiction to journalism. Readers will uncover a fascinating collection of crimes that are dark, scary, mysterious, and still waiting to be solved. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons.  Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail (UP of Kansas, 2021) is Daldorph’s record of teaching at the jail for the two decades between 2001 and 2020, showing how the lives of everyone involved in the class—but especially the inmates who came to class week after week—benefited from what happened every Thursday afternoon in that jail classroom, where for two hours inmates and instructor became a circle of ink and blood, writing together, reciting their poems, telling stories, and having a few good laughs. Words Is a Powerful Thing brings into the light the works of fifty talented inmate writers whose work deserves attention. Their poetry speaks of “what really matters” to all of us and gives the reader sustained insight into the role that creativity plays in aiding survival and bringing positive change for inmates, and, in turn, for all of us. Daldorph’s account of his teaching experience not only takes the reader inside the daily life at a county jail but also sets the work done in the writing class within the larger context of inmate education in the US corrections system, where education is often one of the few lifelines available to inmates. Words Is a Powerful Thing provides a teaching guide for instructors working with incarcerated writers, offering an extensive examination of both the challenges and benefits. When Brian Daldorph decided the story of his classroom experiences and the great writing produced by the inmates deserved to be told to wider audiences, he struggled with how to bring it all together. Not long after, an inmate wrote a poem titled “Words Is a Powerful Thing,” offering Daldorph a title, concept, and purpose: to show that the poetry of inmates speaks not just to other inmates but to all of us. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Centro de Educación Superior de Enseñanza e Investigación Educativa (CEIE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she teaches and publishes widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Dr. Parvulescu joins us from St. Louis where she teaches at the Washington University’s English Department. A prolific author, she has worked in the fields of literary theory and criticism, visual culture, female labor and migration, and the East-West relations in contemporary European history. The result of their sustained collaboration, Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative, multidisciplinary method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories. Transylvania, one such historical region at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, has offered Boatca and Parvulescu a platform for a multi-level reading of topics that include the region's capitalist integration into global commercial circuits, antisemitism and slavery, multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Using Liviu Rebreanu’s 1920 modernist novel Ion as an analytical point of departure and a chronicle of Transylvania’s modernities, the co-authors provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Vladislav Lilic is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Visions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. In No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World (Cambridge UP, 2021), Mathias Thaler examines expressions of the utopian imagination, with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian tendencies in contemporary debates around the Anthropocene; as well as to develop a political theory of radical transformation that avoids not only debilitating fatalism but also wishful thinking. This book juxtaposes theoretical interventions, from Bruno Latour to the members of the Dark Mountain collective, with fantasy and science fiction texts by N. K. Jemisin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood, debating viable futures for a world that will look and feel very different from the one we live in right now. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Chrysta Bilton is an American writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Her first book, the memoir Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, was published in July 2022 by Little, Brown in the US and Octopus in the UK. Chrysta's work has appeared in The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Newsweek. Normal Family was listed among Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and named a 'best' or 'must-read' book of Summer 2022 by Amazon, The Los Angeles Times,Vanity Fair, People, USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, Cup of Jo, Parade, Today, Apple, and elsewhere. Book Recommendations: David Sheff, Beautiful Boy Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the early 20th century, Europe and North America were undergoing a radical transformation. Scientific, technological, and political changes disrupted many traditional forms of life. The growth of cities opened up new freedoms and opportunities and scientists like Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach were developing new theories about how we perceive the world and construct reality. These cultural changes gave birth to a form of art that reflected the new sensibilities of this era—modernism. The modernist literary movement was characterized in particular by its interest in revealing the inner psychology of its characters. And few texts were as successful in this goal as Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway. Dora Zhang is Associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Autumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in science justice. The premise of the book is that America was living through two collective experiments as it suffered the aftermath of the failed Reconstruction following the US Civil War. The first was the experiment of Black freedom and the second was the experiment of new technologies to document (Black) life at a time when standards for how to use and to read their outputs were excitingly wide-open. In the hands of Black cultural producers, the yield of these technologies was “undisciplined data,” which pointed to the possibility of true freedom not mere social reform as defined by White progressives. Readers follow writer Zora Neale Hurston working with anthropological film, WEB Dubois working with the social survey as a foundation for his urban sociology as well as for his literary novels, and other historical actors who were using documentary technologies to demonstrate the impossibility of capturing the fullness of Black sociality with those very technologies. Producing “undisciplined data,” Womack suggests, is not only a practice of the past, but the hope for greater justice in the present day. This interview was a collaborative effort among Professor Laura Stark and graduate students at Vanderbilt University in the seminar “Science & Technology Studies.” Please email Laura with any feedback on the interview or questions about how to design collaborative interview projects for the classroom. Email: laura.stark@vanderbilt.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton UP, 2022) is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury”—a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems—this collection features 177 jewel-like entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers have variously referred to as emotions, passions, sentiments, moods, affects, and dispositions. These entries serve as beautiful literary and philosophical vignettes that convey the delightful texture of Indian thought and the sheer multiplicity of conversations about emotions in Indian texts. An indispensable reference, Words for the Heart reveals how Indian ways of interpreting human experience can challenge our assumptions about emotions and enrich our lives. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an Indie National Bestseller. If I Survive You was long-listed for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and elsewhere, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, The Work Room, The Porch, and at GrubStreet in Boston, where, as former staff, he founded the Boston Writers of Color Group, which currently has more than 2,000 members. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA Program (Fiction) and attends the University of Southern California’s Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature Program as a Provost Fellow. He is a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Books Recommendations: Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different Laura Warrell, Sweet Soft Plenty Rhythm  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Humans love stories. And no collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The original collection only contained about 40 stories. It was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine Galland who got a hold of this original manuscript in the 1690s. Galland began translating and publishing these stories in French. They were an instant hit. But some of the most popular stories, such as Aladdin and Ali Baba didn’t appear in that original manuscript. Paulo Lemos Horta is an associate professor of literature at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complete opposites: Levi level-headed and self-aware, Ka-Tzetnik caught up in repeating the traumatic past. In this book I show how fundamentally mistaken this approach is, and how the similarity between them is, in fact, far greater than it may seem. While Levi draws the map, Ka-Tzetnik reveals the territory itself, and, taken together, they offer a better understanding of the human experience of the camps. This book explores their writing and their lives up to their deaths—Ka-Tzetnik of old age and Levi by his own hand—offering new explanations of Levi’s suicide, little understood to this day. Yochai Ataria is an associate professor at Tel-Hai College, Israel. He is the author of Body Disownership in Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (2018) and The Structural Trauma of Western Culture (2017). He has also co-edited the Body Schema and Body Image (2021), Jean Améry: Beyond the Mind’s Limits (2019), and Interdisciplinary Handbook of Culture and Trauma (2016). This book was published also in Hebrew by Pardes Publication House 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American lives as different and particular. But in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin showed that his life as a Black man in America was universally human. Josef Sorett is the Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is also chair of the Department of Religion and directs the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. He is the author of Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-De-Siècle Spain (Vanderbilt UP, 2021) argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession. Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism's subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self-realization. Jennifer Smith is an associate professor of Spanish and chair of the Department of Languages, Cultures, and International Trade at Southern Illinois University. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Centro de Educación Superior de Enseñanza e Investigación Educativa (CEIE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered character who pushes against cultural norms and fully embraces her complexity. She’s crabby, difficult, and gets depressed. But she’s also smart and passionate. And she claims the right to love and be loved because she is all these things—fully human. Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London and Between Women: Marriage, Desire, and Friendship in Victorian England. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union. The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Russian, comprise a groundbreaking survey of women's writing in the Central Asian country over its thirty years of independence, paying homage to the rich but largely unrecorded oral storytelling tradition of the region. Contemplating nostalgia, politics, and intergenerational history in a time altered by modernity, Amanat acutely traces the uncertainties, struggles, joys, and losses of a corner of the post-Soviet world often unseen and overlooked. Utterly absorbing, Amanat is an invitation to listen-the women of Kazakhstan have stories to tell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Meg Howrey is the author of the novels They're Going to Love You, The Cranes Dance, and Blind Sight. She is also the coauthor, writing under the pen-name Magnus Flyte, of the New York Times Bestseller City of Dark Magic and  City of Lost Dreams. Her non-fiction has appeared in Vogue and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Meg was a professional dancer who performed with the Joffrey Ballet and City Ballet of Los Angeles, among others. She made her theatrical debut in James Lapine's "Twelve Dreams" at Lincoln Center, and received the 2001 Ovation Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Musical for her role in the Broadway National Tour of "Contact." Book Recommendations: Bojan Lewis, Sinking Bell Leni Zumas, Red Clocks  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“Soft sci-fi, gothic body horror” is how Hiron Ennes describes their debut novel, Leech (Tordotcom, 2022). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Set in an isolated winter chateau, the novel weaves a surreal and atmospheric tale of a doctor who is part of a hivemind parasite, a twisted baron’s family, and a newcomer that threatens to destroy any perceived sense of order. Leech is an exploration of bodily autonomy, trauma, and a desperation to dig up the oppressive structures of the past. It is a multi-layered, multi-threaded slow burn that pays off for the persistent reader as the characters reveal their own monstrous, intertwined attempts at survival in the least hospitable of places. Hiron Ennes is a writer, musician, and medical student based in the Pacific Northwest. Their areas of interest include infectious disease, pathology, and petting your dog. Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bringing together 100 essential critical articles across 4 volumes, Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a comprehensive collection of the most important academic writings on ecocriticism and literature's engagement with environmental crisis. With texts by key scholars, creative writers and activists, the articles in these four volumes follow the development and history of environmental criticism, as well as interdisciplinary conversations with contemporary philosophy and media studies. Literature and the Environment includes work by such writers as: Stacy Alaimo, Jonathan Bate, Winona LaDuke, Laura Pulido, Kyle Powis Whyte, Jacques Derrida, Ursula K. Heise, Bruno Latour, Rob Nixon, Ken Saro-Wiwa, William Shakespeare, Leslie Marmon Silko, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Wong. E.O. Wilson, Cary Wolfe and William Wordsworth. Stephanie LeMenager is Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, USA. She is co-founder (with Stephanie Foote) of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities and her previous books include Living Oil: Petroleum and Culture in the American Century (2014). Teresa Shewry is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She is the author of Hope At Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (2015). Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s greatest literary works, the Divine Comedy. In the story, Dante, the main character, must pass through the nine circles of Hell, climb Mount Purgatory, and ascend to Heaven to reach salvation. Along the way he meets all sorts of characters including the Roman poet Virgil, various politicians of his time, teachers from his school, and his one true love. Nassime Chida is a Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Local Power in Dante’s Inferno. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (forthcoming with Celadon Books). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square, Story, Bennington Review, Wigleaf Top 50, and Gulf Coast. She contributed to Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, a flash anthology by writers of color, and in 2012, she won the CutBank Big Fish Flash Fiction/Prose Poetry Contest. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015. Recommended Books: Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom Patricia Highsmith, Deep Water Billy Ray-Belcourt, A Minor Chorus Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It was a tense time, full of uncertainty and the spectre of Soviet communism loomed. In 1984, Orwell introduced all kinds of terms to describe the dystopian society of his novel, such as “thought police”, “memory hole”, “big brother”, and “unperson.” And in his view, Orwell wasn’t attempting to describe a fantastical world with no correspondence to our own, or even just satirizing the excesses of the Soviet regime. He was sounding a warning to his own society. Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution and Time’s Monster: How History Makes History See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "Dreaming up the Change Disability Makes" and leads the CLA Interdisciplinary Collaborative Workshop on “Refusing Disposability: Racial and Disability Justice Toward Another World.” Professor Row’s scholarship has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and a Solmsen Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often, they’re dramatically different. We come to realize that there are larger, invisible forces that tend to have just as much a say, or more, in how our lives go as we do. In her 1871 novel Middlemarch, the English writer George Eliot explored this experience of ‘middleness’—a time halfway between what has already happened, and what has yet to happen. A time when we feel more sharply our own limitations. Nicholas Dames is Theodore Kahan Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870, and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization. In Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them (Lexington Books, 2021), Kate Christina Moore Koppy argues that the increasing popularity and presence of fairy tales within American culture is both indicative of and contributing to this shift. By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fairy-tale pastiches, Koppy shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, as much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to. In this interview with New Books Network, author Kate Koppy and host Carmen Gomez-Galisteo talk about Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them and how they are relevant in today’s society, despite some parents’ and educators’ misgivings that they may instill traditional, outdated values into children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the post-reconstruction era through the Harlem Renaissance. Tara T. Green builds on Black feminist, sexuality, historical and cultural studies to create a literary biography that examines Dunbar-Nelson's life and legacy as a respectable activist – a woman who navigated complex challenges associated with resisting racism and sexism, and who defined her sexual identity and sexual agency within the confines of respectability politics. It's a book about the past, but it's also a book about the present that nods to the future. Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

“All men must die”: or “Valar Morghulis,” as the traditional Essos greeting is rendered in High Valyrian. And die they do – in prodigious numbers; in imaginatively varied and gruesome ways; and often in terror within the viciously unpredictable world that is HBO's sensational evocation of Game of Thrones. As acclaimed medievalist Professor Carolyne Larrington writes in All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones (Bloomsbury, 2021), the stories George R.R. Martin brings to life are epic in scope and in imaginative breadth, telling of the dramatic rise and fall of nations, the brutal sweeping away of old orders, and the advent of new autarchs in the eternal quest for dominion. Yet, as her book reveals, many potent and intimate narratives of love and passion can be found within these grand landscapes of heroism, honour, and death. They focus on strong relationships between women and family, as well as among the anti-heroes, the “cripples, bastards and broken things.” In this vital follow-up to her book, Winter Is Coming (also published by Bloomsbury), Larrington explores themes of power, blood-kin, lust, and sex in order to draw entirely fresh meanings out of the show of the century. Carolyne Larringon is Professor of Medieval Literature at University of Oxford, UK. She completed her DPhil in Old English and Old Norse at Oxford and now teaches Old and Middle English literature as well as English and Old Norse-Icelandic languages. Previous publications include books on Norse mythology and literature and another book on the series called Winter Is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones. Also, Professor Larrington has been awarded the Order of the Falcon by the President of Iceland for her services to Icelandic literature. Carrie Lynn Evans is currently a PhD student of English Literature with Université Laval in Quebec. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When it comes to epic poetry, there’s a strong case to be made that the Ancient Indian story the Mahābhārata is the most epic. Clocking in at around 100,000 verses, the Mahābhārata is roughly seven times The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. This foundational Hindu text tells the story of a war between two sets of cousins who are fighting over who gets to rule their kingdom. The text is said to contain the universe, but it is best to leave it unfinished. Bad things are said to befall those who read it from beginning to end. Nell Shapiro Hawley is the Preceptor in Sanskrit at Harvard University and is the co-editor of Many Mahābhāratas (forthcoming from SUNY Press), a collection of eighteen essays on retellings of the Mahābhārata across South Asian languages and literary genres. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Books that Made the European Enlightenment: A History in 12 Case Studies (‎Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Gary Kates looks at the multifaceted significance of bestsellers from the time. Kates explores a crucial innovation of the age: the rise of the 'erudite blockbuster', which for the first time in European history, helped to popularize political theory among a significant portion of the society. Gary Kates is H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of History at Pomona College. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Italian Renaissance was an era of rebirth in the arts, sciences, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. But also for literature. One of the most influential works from this period was Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando innamorato. While read by the literate upper classes, Boiardo’s incredible story of knights-errant, adventure, justice, chivalry, and true love became popular among the public through puppet theatre in Sicily. Boiardo combined genres to create a beloved work of art that continues to influence Italian culture today. Jo Ann Cavallo is a professor of Italian at Columbia University. Professor Cavallo has adapted episodes from Orlando innamorato that have been performed in various regions of Italy and New York City. She is also the author of Orlando Innamorato per ragazzi. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Grant Faulkner. We discuss National Novel Writing Month, of which Grant is the executive director, 100 Word Story, of which Grant is a practitioner and editor, and Grant's book of short stories All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Here's a bit about the book, a book I highly recommend you buy and read. "With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence. Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise." Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Means (Mariner Books, 2022), is her first novel. Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University. Book Recommendations: Holly Pelesky, Cleave Violaine Swartz, Papers Sheng Wang, Sweet and Juicy(Netflix Stand-Up Comedy) Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature (U Toronto Press, 2021) considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literature of Spain. The book considers a variety of perspectives and material cultures, such as the pre-Colombian conception of chocolate, the commercial enterprise surrounding chocolate, and the darker side of chocolate's connections to witchcraft and sex. Encapsulating both historical and literary interests, Chocolate will appeal to anyone interested in the global history of chocolate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sindya Bhanoo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Tsunami Bride,” which appears in The Common’s new fall issue. Sindya talks about her experience reporting from India after the 2004 tsunami, and how that experience eventually became a story about a journalist in the same position, told from a local’s perspective. She also discusses how the training and techniques she developed as a journalist have shaped her drafting and revision process for fiction, how food often makes its way into her stories, and how her 2022 story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere came together. Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A longtime newspaper reporter, she has worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She teaches at Oregon State University. Read Sindya’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/tsunami-bride. Read more from Sindya at sindyabhanoo.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight (Mariner Books, 2022). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida. Recommended Books: Sheila Heti, Pure Color Claire Keegan, Foster Namwali Serpell, The Furrows Giada Scodellaro, Some of Them Will Carry Me  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The eight-legged essay (bagu wen) was the one genre of writing that dominated in late imperial China. As the primary mode of expression in which men were schooled, writing and reading shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) epitomized literary production in Ming-Qing China, and it was vitally important for every  student, examination candidate, and examiner to master and know the genre intimately — but this genre hasn't yet been approached from a literary perspective.  Alexander Des Forges' new book Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China (Harvard UP, 2021) does just that. Focusing on literary practice (the work of writing, reading, and commenting), this book explores how features such as literary voice, parallelism, subjectivity, and aesthetic originality were constructed in a genre not typically thought of as literature. Through careful reading, rich analysis, and the deft translation of eight-legged essays, Alex looks at prose aesthetics not as settled conclusions, but as features that prose writers developed, adhered to, and/or contested, all while they developed as a social class of literary producers.    Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation (U California Press, 2022) provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia. This book is available open access here.  Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the book business. Where once having a translator’s name on a book cover would be sure to kill interest, now there are movements to display author’s and translator’s names together. Ann reads an excerpt in Italian from Primo Levi’s The Truce, followed by her re-translation of the autobiographical story for The Complete Works of Primo Levi. She then offers an extraordinary walk through of her decision-making process by honing in on the difficulty of translating one key word “scomposti.” Listening to Ann delineate and discard choices, we are reminded of Italo Calvino’s assertion (echoed by Ann) that translation is indeed the closest way to read. This season’s signature question on “untranslatables” yields another brilliant meditation on word choice and the paradoxical task of arriving at precise approximations. Plus, Ann and Saskia reveal some of their favorite Italian women writers, several of whom Ann has brought into English for the first time. Mentions: --Elena Ferrante --Jennifer Croft --Primo Levi, The Periodic Table --Primo Levi, The Truce, from The Complete Works of Primo Levi --Stuart Woolf, original translator of Levi, If This is the Man --Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story --Italo Calvino --Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia --Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island --Emily Wilson, only female translator of The Odyssey --Jenny McPhee --Cesare Garboli Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently. They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized? Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity. Discussed in this episode: The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan Dune, Frank Herbert “Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome Libra, dir. Patty Newman “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore The Wall, John Lanchester Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin Read here: RTB Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961 that 'Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,' meaning that the violence of colonialism can only be counteracted in kind. As colonial legacies linger today, what are the ways in which we can disentangle literary translation from its roots in imperial violence? In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), twenty-four writers and translators from across the world share their ideas and practices for disrupting and decolonising translation. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of love in the early Renaissance. As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio's collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero's words, a "symphony of life." Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo, the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science was still developing. Wells viewed science as an incredibly powerful force. He knew it could either help or hurt humanity--even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science. When Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, he kicked off a 50-year-long writing career. He was a pioneer in the science fiction genre, and his stories have inspired generations of audiences, artists, filmmakers, and other writers around the world. Sarah Cole is the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century and At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland, among other works. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stokes talks about melancholy. One of the four humors in ancient humoral medicine, melancholy, or black bile, is a fluid substance and spiritual principle that was thought to move within the human body. A proper quantity of black bile allows one to be calm and contemplative, thoughtful and withdrawn. A superabundance produces sadness, indigestion, and a host of other evils. Research is a melancholy practice; scholars are prone to melancholic dispositions. Throughout the episode Laura refers to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, an early modern text that describes the sources, symptoms, and treatments for a surplus of melancholy, in a rather meandering way, with an entire separate disquisition on love melancholy. It was published in multiple versions over Burton’s lifetime – people usually cite the 1638 edition. Laura Stokes is an associate professor of history at Stanford University where they study Early Modern Europe. Their first book Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430-1530 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) examines the origins of witchcraft prosecution in fifteenth-century Europe against the backdrop of a general rise in the prosecution of crime and other measures of social control. They are currently working on a microhistory of a murder conspiracy within the Basel butchers’ guild at the turn of the sixteenth century, which is really about Early Modern economic cultures. And they run pretty amazing summer reading groups. Image: © 2022 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kayla Maiuri holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Born in the greater Boston area, she now lives in Brooklyn. Mother in the Dark (Riverhead Books, 2022) is her first novel. Recommended Books: Anna Hogeland, The Long Answer Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman should be read as an allegory that responds to the crises of the Anthropocene, in which the oceans have become a site of warfare and mass death. Poll contends that the series, which works to bridge the terrestrial and watery worlds, can be understood as a form of comics activism by visualizing and verbalizing how the oceans are both beyond the projects of the "human" and "humanism," and simultaneously, all-too-human geographies that are inextricable from the violent structures of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The New 52 Aquaman, Poll demonstrates, proves an important form of ocean literacy in particular and ecological literacy more generally. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1818, the East India Company defeated the Maratha confederacy, acquiring vast domains in central and western India. Through coercion if not outright violence, the Company transformed many aspects of India's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book charts one such shifting landscape-Marathi language literary culture-in order to expand the field of world and comparative literature. Kedar A. Kulkarni describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, especially balladry and epic storytelling, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture, owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound wide availability of print technology. However, the process was far from a simple mutation of genre. He demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers, translators, among many others. And, these people also participated in a global conversation that left its mark on theory in the twentieth century.  Ultimately, World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890 (Bloomsbury, 2022) situates Marathi literature within contemporary world literature studies and critiques “eurochronology”- the perceived backwardness of colonial and postcolonial locales when compared with literatures produced in Euro-American metropoles. Reading through archives and ephemera, it demonstrates that literary cultures in colonized locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity. Dr. Kedar A. Kulkarni teaches at FLAME University, Pune. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP, 2019), Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's Fledgling as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's Midnight Robber theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's African Immortals series contests dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics. Clayton Jarrard is a Research Project Coordinator at the University of Kansas Center for Research, contributing to initiatives that bridge research, policy, and community efforts. His scholarly engagement spans the subject areas of Cultural Anthropology, Queer Studies, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, and Religious Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (Ibidem Press, 2022) scrutinizes current debates to bring historical and contemporary South-South entanglements to the fore and to develop a new understanding of world literature in a multipolar world of globalized modernity. The volume challenges established ideas of world literature by rethinking the concept along the notion of “entanglements”: as a field of variously criss-crossing relations of literary activity beyond the confines of literary canons, cultural containers, or national borders. The collection presents individual case studies from a variety of language traditions that focus on particular literary relationships and practices across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe as well as new fictional, poetical, and theoretical conceptions of world literature in order to broaden our understanding of the multilateral entanglements within a widening communicative network that shape our globalized world. Dr. Jarula Wegner is Hundred Talents Young Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.  Dr. Andrea Gremels is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at Institute for Romance Languages and Literatures at Goethe Universität at Frankfurt am Main. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe.  Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming.  In Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton UP, 2022), Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of world literature to draw vital lessons about how we put ourselves on the path of climate change—and how we might change paths before it’s too late. From the Epic of Gilgamesh and the West African Epic of Sunjata to the Communist Manifesto, Puchner reveals world literature in a new light—as an archive of environmental exploitation and a product of a way of life responsible for climate change. Literature depends on millennia of intensive agriculture, urbanization, and resource extraction, from the clay of ancient tablets to the silicon of e-readers. Yet literature also offers powerful ways to change attitudes toward the environment. Puchner uncovers the ecological thinking behind the idea of world literature since the early nineteenth century, proposes a new way of reading in a warming world, shows how literature can help us recognize our shared humanity, and discusses the possible futures of storytelling. If we are to avoid environmental disaster, we must learn to tell the story of humans as a species responsible for global warming. Filled with important insights about the fundamental relationship between storytelling and the environment, Literature for a Changing Planet is a clarion call for readers and writers who care about the fate of life on the planet. Prof. Martin Puchner is Byron and Anita Wien Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.  Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life’s calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did. In fact, Thucydides is one of the first Western historians to document a historical event year by year. Professor Richard Billows is a professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman history. He is the author of Before and After Alexander and Marathon: The Battle that Changed Western Civilization, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her daughter were discovered by slave catchers. Rather than have her return to slavery, Garner killed her child. In Beloved, Morrison’s character Sethe has a similar story, but years later she meets a young girl who is the incarnation of the daughter she had killed. When Beloved came out, it immediately became Morrison’s most acclaimed work. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved examines community, motherhood, identity, slavery, freedom, and our relationship to the past. Amy Hungerford is the Vice President for Arts and Sciences as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. She is a professor of English and the author of Making Literature Now and The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South. Recommended Books: Elizabeth Tan, Rubik Gwendolyn MacEwan, Julian the Magician  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, personal ambivalences, and the reality of sci-fi as a problematic genre. Adopting an intersectional perspective, the book shows how race, age, and gender all play a role in the way feminist women interpret some of the biggest sci-fi franchises, as well as how they think about iconic characters. Crucially the analysis foregrounds the agency of feminist women sci-fi fans, demonstrating how they are challenging and changing the genre and its fan community for the better. Theoretically and empirically rich and deep, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in fandom! Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Beginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,” laid bare the biases of Orientalist study, and transformed the course of humanities scholarship. Stathis Gourgouris is a professor of classics, English, and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Lydia Millet about her new novel Dinosaurs (Norton, 2022). Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family. Recommendations: Dan Flores, American Serengeti Dan Flores, Wild New World  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Erin is a former Research Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, at the University of London, and is the recipient of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hancock Award for a distinguished article on the poet. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic geniuses Homer and Virgil, he wanted to surpass them. Decades later, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, reworking and embellishing the stories of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise and Satan’s fall from heaven to create what is unquestionably the greatest epic poem written in English. Erik Gray is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include The Art of Love Poetry, Milton and the Victorians, and The Poetry of Indifference: from the Romantics to the Rubáiyát. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation into French of McKay’s 1941 Amiable with Big Teeth, which paints a satirical portrait of efforts by 1930s Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia. Brent and Jean-Baptiste consider McKay’s lasting legacy and ongoing revival in the U.S. and France. Translating McKay into French, they note, is a matter of reckoning with France’s own imperial history. That history, along with McKay’s complex understanding of race both in the U.S. and abroad, is illuminated in this conversation about one of the Harlem Renaissance’s most celebrated writers. Be sure to check out this episode’s special bonus material for a dramatic, bilingual reading from Amiable with Big Teeth by Jean-Baptiste! Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words." The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing." Mentioned in this episode: "Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine "Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020. Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth. Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964. Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016 Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883. Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985. Listen to the episode here Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history. Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, and “enigma of sexual violence” in the Free State/Republic. Join us as we chat about psychoanalysis, the struggle to write about child sexual abuse, the anti-trans and homophobic rhetoric of current Florida and Texas “child protection” laws, and the window that literature provides for thinking about Irish history. Averill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

You probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve travelled through culture, adapted and readapted in each retelling and reaching as far as the popular Disney movies that our kids watch over and over. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm saw the power of this folklore and made it their life’s mission to compile and preserve it. But while we tend to think of Grimms’ Fairy Tales as stories for children, the themes found in Jacob and Wilhelm’s book can be pretty mature…and a little dark. Columbia professor Annie Pfeifer discusses how the Grimm brothers ended up creating a whole new literary genre and their stories have been shaped and molded throughout history. Annie Pfeifer is an Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. She has published articles in The New German Critique, German Life and Letters, and the peer-reviewed volumes Que(e)rying Consent and Iran and the West and edited a collection of essays titled “Walk I absolutely Must” in 2019. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Hester Blum, editor of a new edition of Moby-Dick (Oxford UP, 2022). "It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this." Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Narrator Ishmael, along with the whaleship Pequod's other meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, is beguiled into joining Captain Ahab in his vengeful pursuit of the white whale that dismasted him. But along the way, Ishmael takes the reader along many a detour into variegated ways of knowing. In a tone strangely compounded of fun and fury, Moby-Dick brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus (MIT Press, 2022). This book offers the first English translation of Ruysch's guide to his collection, along with all the illustrations from the original volume, photographs of some his most imaginative extant specimens, and more. Ruysch was at once a brilliant scientist, a preternaturally gifted technician, an esteemed physician, a religious moralizer, and an artist whose prime form of expression was the medium of human remains. His works were sometimes described as Rembrandts of anatomical preparation; today they seem so strange that we can hardly believe that they even existed, much less that they were so popular in their time. His combination of the religious and the scientific, the painstakingly accurate and the extravagantly fantastical, offers vivid testimony of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art. Essays accompanying Ruysch's text and images consider such topics as the historical context of Ruysch's work, the paradox of an artist of death whose work engenders the illusion of life, the conservation of Ruysch's specimens, and the shifting ascendancies of romanticism and rationality in the natural sciences. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain in 1924, tuberculosis had a deadly hold on Europe and the United States, killing one in seven adults in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If that wasn’t enough, Mann’s writing was interrupted by the First World War, so it took him twelve years to finish the book. Mann was a modern, experimental writer who wrote about the major issues of his time—not only the war and the pandemic, but also industrialization, class resentment, and rising nationalism. The characters of The Magic Mountain live in a sanitorium, recovering from tuberculosis. The experiences they have and the people they meet there symbolize many of the big ideas circulating Europe at the time. Professor Pericles Lewis of Yale University discusses Thomas Mann’s literary legacy and the encyclopedic nature of The Magic Mountain. Pericles Lewis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at Yale University. His works include Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel and Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature. -From the Cambridge University Press website. Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but also a more textured world of unruly emotions, gendered family disputes, calligraphic creativity and scandal simmering under the surface of mundane domestic life. Ed Pulford is an Anthropologist and Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and indigeneity in northeast Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish-Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide--a Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue (Stanford UP, 2019) is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people. Drora Arussy, EdD, MA, MJS, is the Senior Director of the ASF Institute of Jewish Experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is freedom? If we are free, why do we feel anxiety? How do I relate to the world? Saint Augustine of Hippo asked himself these questions around 400 AD as he wrote Confessions—indeed, as he lived his life. At various points in his life, Augustine was a Manichaean, a Platonist, an academic, a father, and a thief. He was on a quest for truth, an understanding of himself as an individual and a human being. Augustine wrote this text in his forties when he was a bishop. Formally speaking, it is a prayer, a confession to God, but it also an extremely influential philosophical text and one of the earliest ever autobiographies. Columbia Professor Dhananjay Jagannathan discusses the huge existential questions that Augustine tackled and the conclusions he drew that have influenced modern philosophy. Dhananjay Jagannathan is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. His research focuses on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and the history of ethics, and he is currently writing a book on Aristotle’s moral epistemology. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Saronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represented her connection with the cosmos. Image: “Rescued from the rough streets of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Princess Marmalade earned her PhD in Meowological Studies in 2019, with an advanced certificate in acritical napping.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess holds a B.A. in English with an Honor’s Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. After graduating in 2015, she began an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. After earning her MFA, Tess worked alongside her former professor Jonathan Safran Foer, providing research and writing for his book of nonfiction about the climate crisis. We Are the Weather was published by FSG in 2019. As a freelance writer, editor, and research assistant, Tess’s experience also includes documenting the history of the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns; contributing a history of Westside, Atlanta to an urban revitalization plan by Thadani Architects + Urbanists; creating science content for the American Museum of Natural History; editing Bruce Rits Gilbert’s debut book, John Prine, One Song at a Time, a tribute to the folk musician written in the wake of Prine’s death from the novel coronavirus; and working as a fact-checker on Mysteries of Mental Illness, a PBS docuseries about the history of psychiatry in America. In 2021, the publishing houses Knopf (North America), Éditions Gallmeister (France), Guanda (Italy), and Kiepenheuer & Witsch (Germany) preempted Tess’s debut novel The Rabbit Hutch, along with her sophomore novel Honeydew. Recommended Books: Hernan Diaz, Trust Sean Carroll, Something Deeply Hidden  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and sleep were deeply indebted with the Stoic principle of oikeiosis. While sleep could imperil the Christian soul, insomnia too could have deleterious effects on both communal and individual life. In Parris’s analysis, early modern writings by William Shakespeare, Jasper Heywood, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish on the conjunction of sleep and care—and the Stoic philosophy that influenced those writers—opened onto startling revelations about both our obligation to the self and to an ethical engagement with society at large. Parris is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and his work has appeared in Shakespeare Studies, Modern Philology, and SEL: Studies in English Literature. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

There’s nothing better or more important in life than a good friend. For Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, the emphasis was on “good.” Cicero lived through the assassination of Caesar, one of the most famous examples of betrayal between friends in history. But according to Cicero’s treatise On Friendship, you must be virtuous to be a good friend, and, he argues, bad people cannot really be friends. In this text, Cicero examines true friendship, tough love, social transaction, and affection. Professor Katharina Volk of Columbia University discusses the role of friendship in ancient Rome and how this text in particular has kept Latin alive. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In 1848, as political movements and events were sweeping Europe and Marx and Engels penned their famous Communist Manifesto, Kierkegaard wrote in a letter: “No, politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics, is nowadays an impossibility, for me, at any rate. I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same.” This negation of politics (and it’s negation) is the starting point for Bartholomew Ryan with his book Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukacs, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014), which looks at Kierkegaard’s own thinking and it’s effect on several more explicitly political thinkers. Kierkegaard’s own politics are somewhat ambivalent, and one might struggle to fit them onto today’s political landscape, but Ryan has a different project in mind. Instead, Kierkegaard’s elusiveness, ambiguity and cultivation of the single individual in all their inner psychological and spiritual richness are shown to be inspiring for thinking politics and history in new ways. In the four figures Ryan looks at Kierkegaard’s presence in all their thinking, both explicit and implicit, emerging with a sophisticated form of inwardness capable of standing against despair, despotism and reification. Bartholomew Ryan is a philosophy research fellow at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy at the NOVA University Lisbon, where he works at the intersection of literature and philosophy. He is a coeditor of several books; Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (2021), Faces of the Self: Autobiography, Confession, Therapy (2019), Nietzsche and Pessoa: Ensaios (2016), and Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When reading a crime novel, we usually learn the crime within the first few page turns; the trick is discovering the perpetrator. Perhaps this is what makes Franz Kafka’s 1914 book The Trial so haunting—the crime itself is never revealed. Kafka was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1883 and died in 1924, never experiencing the Nazis or Hitler’s totalitarian rise to power. Yet his book seems to prophesize the most dangerous aspects of unchecked bureaucracy, legal systems, and arbitrary power.  Columbia University Professor Mark Anderson discusses the legacy of Franz Kafka and how his brutal and terrifying novel helped birth the term “Kafkaesque.” Mark Anderson is the Director of Undergraduate Germanic Studies and a Professor of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. He is the author of books such as Kafka’s Clothes and Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siecle. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Saronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat. Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 Image: “Beatrix or Bea or BeaBea is a tiny cat living her tiny cat life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Against Marginalization: Convergences in Black and Latinx Literatures (Ohio State University Press, 2022), Jose O. Fernandez examines thematic, aesthetic, historical, and cultural commonalities among post-1960s Black and Latinx writers, showing how such similarities have propelled their fight against social, cultural, and literary marginalization by engaging, adopting, and subverting elements from the larger American literary tradition. Drawing on the work of scholars in both literary traditions--including those who engage with the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s--Fernandez finds intriguing points of convergence. His cross-cultural and comparative analysis puts Black and Latinx authors and literary works into the same frame as he considers the plays of Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez, the fiction of James Baldwin and Rudolfo Anaya, the essays of Ralph Ellison and Richard Rodriguez, novels by Alice Walker and Helena María Viramontes, and the short fiction of Edward P. Jones and Junot Díaz. Against Marginalization thus uncovers points of correspondence and convergence among Black and Latinx literary and cultural legacies, interrogating how both traditions have moved from a position of literary marginalization to a moment of visibility and critical recognition.  Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrei Nae's book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games (Routledge, 2021) investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science and editor of “Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the transformation of subjectivity, desire and sense of belonging in the postsocialist era” (4). After exploring the history of homosexuality’s (re-)emergence in China’s reform era by tracing public, intellectual discourse, Bao counters the misperception that Chinese gay and lesbian identities are the result of the influence of global (Western) gay culture. Instead, he identifies a variety of gender and sexual subjectivities unique to China’s postsocialist conditions and historical context. Each chapter then explores rich case studies from queer China, touching upon a wide variety of cultural production types. From poetry to papercutting art, from comrade (tongzhi)/gay literature to girls’ love fan fiction, from lesbian films to activist documentaries, and from a drag show in Shanghai to a public performance of a same-sex wedding in Beijing, Queer China provides unique analysis and insights and also acts as an archive of queer cultural production in postsocialist China. Laurie Dickmeyer is an Assistant Professor of History at Angelo State University, where she teaches courses in Asian and US history. Her research concerns nineteenth century US-China relations. She can be reached at laurie.dickmeyer@angelo.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help isn’t just an advice manual. It represents the invention of a genre, and not a moment too soon. Smiles was writing at a time when work conditions were extremely poor, and people were looking for ways to educate themselves and improve their conditions. Although Smiles may have written Self-Help with one particular society’s troubles in mind, his advice swiftly travelled around the globe to places like Japan and Egypt. Beth Blum is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University. She specializes in modernist and contemporary literature. She is the author of The Self-Help Compulsion: Searching for Advice in Modern Literature. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Kim talks with Gina Dominick about Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” and the philosophical stakes of Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Le Guin’s story was published in her collection, The Compass Rose (Harper Collins, 1982). There are many PDFs of it scattered across the internet. Gina mentions Jacques Derrida’s writing on “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago UP, 1981). Much the same is true of the PDF scattering here. Gina Dominick is a medievalist, anti-capitalist rebel, and co-conspirator in the original high theory. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at NYU, who teaches high school philosophy and spent Halloween afternoon re-caulking her tub. She knows way more about Adorno than Kim does. By far. Image: “Leo was rescued off the streets of Harlem 3.5 years ago and has lived comfortably in a town house with two humans ever since.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As the first study of its kind, Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing (Anthem, 2022) offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need to be looked at alongside women’s diaries and autobiographies so that we have an overall picture of gendered lives from imaginative fiction, memoirs and biographies. In the late nineteenth century, ideas of the cosmopolitan and local were in conversation with the secular and sacred across different Indian literatures. Emerging poets from the zenana can be traced back to Zahida Khatun Sherwania from Aligarh and Haya Lakhnavi from Lucknow who had very unique trajectories as sharif women. With the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, the Indian women’s movement gathered force and those who had previously been confined to the private sphere took their place in public as speaking subjects. The influence of the Left, Marxist thought and resistance against colonial rule fired the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s. The pioneering writer and activist Rashid Jahan was at the helm of the movement mediating women’s voices through a scientific and rational lens. She was succeeded by Ismat Chughtai, who like her contemporary Saadat Hasan Manto courted controversy by writing openly about sexualities and class. With the onset of partition, as the progressive writers were split across two nations, they carried with them the vision of a secular borderless world. In Pakistan, Urdu became an ideological ground for state formation, and Urdu writers came under state surveillance in the Cold War era. The study picks up the story of progressive women poets in Pakistan to try and understand their response to emerging dominant narratives of nation, community and gender. How did national politics and an ideological Islamisation that was at odds with a secular separation of church and state affect their writing? Despite the disintegration of the Progressive Writers Movement and the official closure of the Left in Pakistan, the author argues that an exceptional legacy can be found in the voices of distinctive women poets including Ada Jafri, Zehra Nigah, Sara Shagufta, Parvin Shakir, Fahmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed. Their poems offer new metaphors and symbols borrowing from feminist thought and a hybrid Islamicate culture. Riaz and Naheed joined forces with the women’s movement in Pakistan in the 1980s and caused some discomfort amongst Urdu literary circles with their writing. Celebrated across both sides of the border, their poetry and politics is less well known than the verse of the progressive poet par excellence Faiz Ahmed Faiz or the hard hitting lyrics of Habib Jalib. The book demonstrates how they manipulate and appropriate a national language as mother tongue speakers to enunciate a middle ground between the sacred and secular. In doing so they offer a new aesthetic that is inspired by activism and influenced by feminist philosophy. Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. Check out their latest book chapter Queer Love: He is also Made in Heaven. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrea Barrett began writing fiction seriously in her thirties and published her first novel, Lucid Stars, in 1988. She’s particularly well known as a writer of historical fiction. Barrett, whose work reflects her lifelong interest in science and natural history, received the National Book Award for her fifth book, Ship Fever, a collection of stories featuring scientists, doctors, and naturalists. In 2001 she received a MacArthur Fellowship and was also a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. In addition to other prizes and awards she’s also been a finalist for The Story Prize and received the Rea Award for the Short Story. Today I talked to her about Natural History: Stories (Norton, 2022). Barrett has lived in Rochester, NY and in western Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing for fifteen years at Williams College. She and her husband, photographer Barry Goldstein, now live on the eastern side of the Adirondack Mountains, in the Champlain Valley. Recommended Books: Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book Ed Yong, An Immense World Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Modern imagination of the Puritans typically casts them in a repressive, conservative light. But that wasn't always the case. Abolitionist activists in the nineteenth century, especially in New England, understood their Puritan heritage as one with radical political and spiritual responsibilities. Kenyon Gradert's new book, Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination (U Chicago Press, 2020) tells the surprising story of unexpected connections between the English Civil Wars and the literary drumbeats for a holy war in late antebellum America.  Your host, Ryan Shelton (@_ryanshelton) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of the Vault, we hear Harry Berger’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci and Vassari’s "Lives of the Painters." Harry Berger was a scholar of Renaissance English literature who wrote books about art history, anthropology, and philosophy. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, where he was an emeritus professor until he died in 2021, at age 96. Since 1977, the New York Institute for the Humanities has brought together distinguished scholars, writers, artists, and publishing professionals to foster crucial discussions around the public humanities. For more information and to support the NYIH, visit nyihumanities.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is such a complex and clever allegory of Brazilian society that many readers didn’t initially understand just how searing its critique really was. Its author, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was the grandson of former slaves writing to and about the slaveholding class at the time and is widely regarded as the most prominent Brazilian writer of all time. His writing is noted for its formal experimentation, and while this book is certainly funny and self-aware, it also communicates the cruelty of the Brazilian elite. Flora Thomson-DeVeaux is the translator of a new English version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, as well as many other texts. Sidney Charlhoub is a professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His books include Machado de Assis, historiador, about the literature and ideas of Machado de Assis and A força da escravidão: ilegalidade e costume no Brasil oitocentista on illegal enslavement in nineteenth-century Brazil. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Reframing Disability in Manga (University of Hawaii Press, 2020) analyzes popular Japanese manga published from the 1990s to the present that portray the everyday lives of adults and children with disabilities in an ableist society. It focuses on five representative conditions currently classified as shōgai (disabilities) in Japan―deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder―and explores the complexities and sociocultural issues surrounding each. Author Yoshiko Okuyama begins by looking at preindustrial understandings of difference in Japanese myths and legends before moving on to an overview of contemporary representations of disability in popular culture, uncovering socio-historical attitudes toward the physically, neurologically, or intellectually marked Other. She critiques how characters with disabilities have been represented in mass media, which has reinforced ableism in society and negatively influenced our understanding of human diversity in the past. Okuyama then presents fifteen case studies, each centered on a manga or manga series, that showcase how careful depictions of such characters as differently abled, rather than disabled or impaired, can influence cultural constructions of shōgai and promote social change. Informed by numerous interviews with manga authors and disability activists, Okuyama reveals positive messages of diversity embedded in manga and argues that greater awareness of disability in Japan in the last two decades is due in part to the popularity of these works, the accessibility of the medium, and the authentic stories they tell. Scholars and students in disability studies will find this book an invaluable resource as well as those with interests in Japanese cultural and media studies in general and manga and queer narrative and anti-normative discourse in Japan in particular. Yoshiko Okuyama is Professor of Japanese studies at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, USA. Her recent publications include Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime (2015) and Reframing Disability in Manga (2020). Shu Wan is currently matriculated as a doctoral student in history at the University at Buffalo. As a digital and disability historian, he serves in the editorial team of Digital Humanities Quarterly and Nursing Clio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In part one of our Halloween Special on Cats, Kim talks with John Guilliory about Montaigne’s essay “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Montaigne asks us: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” John Guillory is a professor of English at New York University. He is a scholar of Renaissance literature, who is known for his work on why we read what we read, in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (University of Chicago Press: 1993). Image: “Lyra is half-seductress, half-glutton, all puss.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Chelsea Martin's new book Tell Me I'm An Artist (Soft Skull Press, 2022).  Martin's first novel, tell me i'm an artist, is published with Soft Skull Press. Her previous books include caca dolce (Soft Skull, 2017), even though i don't miss you (short flight/long drive, 2013), and others. She currently lives in spokane, wa with her husband and child. Recommended Books: Emma Bolden, The Tiger and the Cage Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By the early 19th century, slavery was still a brutal reality in southern U.S. states, and a growing movement to abolish slavery nationwide was taking hold. In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her first novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was intended to be an anti-slavery book, to provide a positive view of Black people in America. But it also has another, more complicated legacy, unintentionally birthing new racist stereotypes. Professor Robin Bernstein is a Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is the author of Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights as well as Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater and a children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Brothers Karmazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel. In it, he presents his ideas about culture, the human soul, and God, and he uses his characters, the brothers Ivan, Dimitri, and Alyosha, as examples of his philosophical ideas. These brothers have to reconcile with the past, but also for their part in it. This book was a response to the conditions in Russia at the time it was written. And since then, it’s continued to shape philosophy itself. Yuri Corrigan is an Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University. He studies the intersections of philosophy, religion, and psychology in modern Russian and European literature. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self and is working on two new books, titled Soul Wars and Chekhov as a Moral Thinker. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translator and finalist for the International Booker Prize talk with Novel Dialogue host Chris Holmes about a novel that has shaped their lives as writers and thinkers: The Hole by José Revueltas. Sophie and Alia discuss how The Hole, written while Revueltas was held in the infamous Lecumberri prison, purposefully makes readers feel lost in a small, confined space. Reading a section from her co-translation of The Hole, published in 1969 as El Apando, Sophie considers how the novel’s intense feelings of confinement and limitation prompt a contemplation of what exactly defines freedom. The conversation turns on how the novel does not spare you from having “been victim of a violent book yourself,” and that literature which confronts our shared inhumanity toward prisoners should make you feel uncomfortable. In a series of thoughtful exchanges, the novelist and her translator confront the difficulties of preserving the immersiveness of the novel’s affect while being attuned to the precise choices and sacrifices of drawing out the novel in English. The episode ends with our season’s signature question, and a wonderful example of untranslatable Chilean Spanish from Alia. Mentioned in this episode: Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2020) Paradais, Fernanda Melchor, trans. Sophie Hughes (2022) The Hole, José Revueltas, trans. Sophie Hughes and Amanda Hopkinson (1969/2018) El Luto Humano (The Stone Knife), José Revueltas (1990) Jorge Borges Sergio Chejfec Amanda Hopkinson, translator Lecumberri Prison, “The Black Palace” Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do children love most about books? Leaving their mark on inviting white spaces? Or that enchanting feeling when a book marks them as its own, taking them off to where the wild things are? Back in 2021, Elizabeth and John invited illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price to decode childhood reading past and present. The conversation explores the tactile and textual properties of great children’s books and debate adult fondness for juvenile literature. Leah asks if identifying with a literary character is a sign of virtuous imagination, or of craziness and laziness. She also schools John on what makes a good association copy, and reveals her son’s magic words when he wants her to tell a story: Read it! For many years an English Professor at Harvard, Leah is founder and director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, and she tweets at @LeahAtWhatPrice. Her What We Talk About When We Talk About Books recently won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award. Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the concern about distinguishing between juvenile and adult books seemed to shift from moral panic about speeding up sexual maturity to worry about turning back the clock on what we now call adulting through the mainstreaming of young adult literature. Mentioned in the episode: Patrick Mc Donnell, A Perfectly Messed-Up Story “Association copy”–e.g. Frida Kahlo’s goofily annotated and illustrated Works of Edgar Allen Poe. Mo Willem, We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) Manners with a Library Book Dorothy Kunhardt, Pat the Bunny Erica Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar Peggy Rathmann, Ten Minutes Till Bedtime Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are Richard Wilbur, The Disappearing Alphabet Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote Charlotte Lenox, The Female Quixote  Recallable Books: what else should I read if I enjoyed this episode? (Leah) Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading (Elizabeth) E. Nesbit The Railway Children: not to mention The Phoenix and the Carpet and Five Children and It (John) Wanda Gag, Millions of Cats: it’s The Road for cats… John also wrote a children’s book, back when his kids were tiny: Time and the Tapestry: A William Morris Adventure Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Martin Fárek's India in the Eyes of Europeans: Conceptualization of Religion in Theology and Oriental Studies (Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2021) is centred around the claim that although the research in Oriental and religious studies seemingly presents unbiased, objective interpretations of Indian traditions, it really puts forward distorted images which primarily reflect the researchers’ own European culture. A thorough examination demonstrates to what extent Oriental studies as well as other humanities are still influenced by theological preconceptions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What would an “anti-field history” of Buddhist Studies look like? What does the social history of knowledge look like when it both includes and exceeds the West/Nonwest binary, the ethnonational subject, the secular humanist gaze, and the moral narratives and metaphysical content of modernism? Matt W. King explores these critical questions and models innovative approaches in his second monograph, In the Forest of the Blind (Columbia University Press 2022), which uses Faxian’s Record of Buddhist Kingdoms to expose “ecologies of interpretation” in both nineteenth-century European Orientalist scholarship and Inner Asian monastic cultures. Although Faxian’s The Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Foguoji) is a fifth-century CE travelogue about the Chinese Buddhist monk’s journey into Central and South Asia, it later became the subject of Europe’s first study of “Buddhist Asia” in the nineteenth century in Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat’s Relation des Royaumes Bouddhiques, which was then translated from French into Mongolian by the Buryat scholar Dorji Banzarov, and then by the Mongolian monk Zava Damdin Lubsangdamdin from Mongolian into Tibetan. Tracing this fascinating history of trans-Eurasian circulation of knowledge production, King argues that “the circulatory history of Faxian’s Record is not simply about Buddhist Asia forged in Europe into other places that were not Europe,” rather, the story is organized “by a chain of site-specific and differing orientations to knowledge itself – of treatments for traces of the past, of methodology.” In six creatively organized chapters, King discusses first discusses how Faxian’s Record “orders time by means of space” in its early Chinese context, and then delves into the history of Orientalist Buddhist Studies showing how Abel-Rémusat’s “poaching” of Qing sources facilitated the disciplining of Buddhist Asia into an object of a transregional science. In Chapters 3 and 5, we see an inversion of the Orientalist gaze and learn about the reception and reinterpretation of Orientalist scholarship among the “Oriental” subjects themselves, who attempted to make sense of Buddhist history, geography, and Asia’s place and time in the world through Faxian’s Record, via Abel-Rémusat’s translation and scholarship. Here, King shows us that Abel-Rémusat’s science of Buddhist Asia was turned, or rather silenced, into chö-jung (history of the Dharma). Unlike models from world history and transcultural studies that tend to focus on movement, contact, and exchange, In the Forest of the Blind instead focuses innovatively on connected but place-bound interpreters who hardly knew of each other and “who began anew from the silence of analytical practices staged elsewhere.” As an example of an “anti-field history,” this book, in King’s words, attempts “not to look past the fetish of the subject, but to find the disciplinary implications of centerless, overlapping, and mutually incomprehensible relations of knowledge-power that are coproductive but unbeholden to any specific relation of force (such as colonizer/colonized).” The aim of the book, King explains, is “to imagine new disciplinary futures in Buddhist and Asian studies by implicating the disciplinary present in a more diverse, global, subversive, and dispersed disciplinary past that is more attentive to negative space and absence than to impact or influence.” Ending the book with a complete, annotated English translation of the Tibetan version of Faxian’s Record, which was translated from a Mongolian translation of the French translation of the Chinese original, In the Forest of the Blind provides the readers with rich notes about continuities and discrepancies across all four trans-Eurasian versions. Matthew King is an Associate Professor in Transnational Buddhism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke UP, 2022), Cameron Awkward-Rich thinks with the bad feelings and mad habits of thought that persist in both transphobic discourse and trans cultural production. Observing that trans studies was founded on a split from and disavowal of madness, illness, and disability, Awkward-Rich argues for and models a trans criticism that works against this disavowal. By tracing the coproduction of the categories of disabled and transgender in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and analyzing transmasculine literature and theory by Eli Clare, Elliott DeLine, Dylan Scholinski, and others, Awkward-Rich suggests that thinking with maladjustment might provide new perspectives on the impasses arising from the conflicted relationships among trans, feminist, and queer. In so doing, he demonstrates that rather than only impeding or confining trans life, thought, and creativity, forms of maladjustment have also been and will continue to be central to their development. The Terrible We is the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient Cameron Awkward-Rich is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of Dispatch and Sympathetic Little Monster. Sohini Chatterjee is a PhD Candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Western University, Canada. Her work has recently appeared in Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, South Asian Popular Culture and Fat Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Tenth Edition introduces diverse, compelling, relevant texts-from Civil War songs and stories to The Turn of the Screw to The Great Gatsby to poems by Juan Felipe Herrera and Claudia Rankine to a science fiction cluster featuring Octavia Butler and N. K. Jemisin. And continuing its course of innovative and market-responsive changes, the anthology now offers resources to help instructors meet today's teaching challenges. Chief among these resources is InQuizitive, Norton's award-winning learning tool, which includes interactive questions on the period introductions and often-taught works in the anthology. In addition, the Tenth Edition maintains the anthology's exceptional editorial apparatus and generous and diverse slate of texts overall. Available in print and as an annotatable ebook, the anthology is ideal for online, hybrid, or in-person teaching. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen's existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names-"enemies of the people;" the "missing," the "disappeared," "ghost" detainees in "black sites"-but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure.  Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life "unbearable," unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the "life" of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused (Edinburgh UP, 2022) argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor 'illness is a fight' and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence. Wohlman has developed the vade mecum for Metaphor Method. You can find it here (in the right column). For the PDF file, click here. Anita Wohlmann is an associate professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at SDU. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s episode focuses on the new book by Lydia Moland, who is a Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her book, Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (U Chicago Press, 2022) offers a powerful window into questions of humility and its relationship to racism and other forms of discrimination in American history. We talk about Child’s ideas, particularly as they relate to many of the issue facing contemporary American society. John Kaag is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Joseph Conrad, who published 20 books and several best-sellers by the time of his death, was also a sailor. Heart of Darkness follows seaman Charles Marlow’s journey down a river in Africa. It is Conrad’s most well-known book today. This tale of colonialism in Africa is shrouded in mystery, and the book itself has fallen in and out of favor since its publication. Harvard professor Maya Jassanoff discusses why Heart of Darkness is an exemplar of what it means to read a text within its historical context. Maya Jassanoff is a Harvard professor of History. Her book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World won the Cundill Prize in History. She is also the author of Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World and Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sandeep Banerjee's book Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-Figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2021) illuminates the spatial utopianism of South Asian anti-colonial texts by showing how they refuse colonial spatial imaginaries to re-imagine the British Indian colony as the postcolony in diverse and contested ways. Focusing on the literary field of South Asia between, largely, the 1860s and 1920s, it underlines the centrality of literary imagination and representation in the cultural politics of decolonization. This book spatializes our understanding of decolonization while decoupling and complicating the easy equation between decolonization and anti-colonial nationalism. The author utilises a global comparative framework and reads across the English-vernacular divide to understand space as a site of contested representation and ideological contestation. He interrogates the spatial desire of anti-colonial and colonial texts across a range of genres, namely, historical romances, novels, travelogues, memoirs, poems, and patriotic lyrics. The book is the first full-length literary geographical study of South Asian literary texts and will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of Postcolonial and World Literature, Asian Literature, Victorian Literature, Modern South Asian Historiography, Literature and Utopia, Literature and Decolonization, Literature and Nationalism, Cultural Geography, and South Asian Studies. Dr. Sandeep Banerjee is Associate professor at McGill University in Canada.  Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ellen Doré Watson speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “In Which Raging Weather is a Gift,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Ellen talks about the importance of letting a poem surprise you as the first draft comes together. She also discusses her thoughts on the revision process, her work translating poetry and prose, and the years she spent running the Smith College Poetry Center. Ellen Doré Watson’s fifth full-length collection is pray me stay eager. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. She has translated a dozen books from Brazilian Portuguese, including the work of Adelia Prado. Watson served as poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review and director of the Poetry Center at Smith College for decades, and currently offers manuscript editing and workshops online. ­­Read Ellen’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/ellen-dore-watson. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Daniel Majchrowicz, and Sunil Sharma's edited anthology Three Centuries of Travel Writing by Muslim Women (Indiana University Press 2022) is a collection of travel writings from the late 19th century to the early and mid-20th century. It captures the fascinating lives of diverse Muslim women as they travelled for religious pilgrimage, political reasons, education, and for leisure. This anthology not only recovers the voices of women from a broad range of languages, Urdu, Punjabi, Turkish, and Persian but also provides the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the full significance of what these women were trying to convey of their experiences in their context. Such fascinating travel excerpts include those of Mirza Khalil and the Nur Begum’s pilgrimage to hajj or those of the Egyptian Huda Shaarawi or Amina Said’s travel related to their thinking of feminism, the Indonesian communist Suharti Suwarto’s visit to the Soviet Union or the Indian nurse Mehr al-Nisa navigating new life in Ohio, to name just a few of the 45 examples documented here. The historical experiences of Muslim women offers a fascinating and understudied point of insight into the role of imperial, colonial, and global history.  The original texts gathered are accessible via the accompanying website for you to check out and explore. This anthology will be of interest to anyone working on travel, colonial history, Muslim women, and comparative literature, Islamic Studies. It will also be an excellent resource in many courses that cover a range of topics be it religious piety, feminism, travel, travel writing, and much more. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rebel Book Club is an online and in-person book club. Each month, over 1,000 people get together to discuss a non-fiction book, occasionally with the author as a participant.  For new members, use code: REBELREADER Ben Keene is an entrepreneur, author, and food journalist. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ramzi Fawaz, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a new book that weaves together the more contemporary history of feminism and women’s liberation, the gay liberation movement, feminist and queer theory, and iconic popular culture artifacts in order to understand gendered and sexual forms in context of gender and sexual fluidity. This is a brilliant book, interdisciplinary in scope and approach, taking the reader on a journey through theoretical frameworks and interpretive understandings of where we often see queer forms, and what we think about those forms. Fawaz notes that he is working to tell a story, interpreting cultural artifacts to forefront the ideas from feminist and queer theory, knitting these approaches together to guide us through a fascinating understanding of what we see when we watch films, or television, or read comics, or enjoy Broadway performances. These interpretations provide us with ways of seeing identity and shape within narrative forms and creative storytelling. But Fawaz is also pushing against an excess of thinking that all identities and forms are fluid—instead, Queer Forms (NYU Press, 2022) examines the capacity of identity and forms to, essentially, shapeshift, which is not the same as being fluid, since shapeshifting is an adaption, and thus is not without form itself. Form has little meaning until or unless they are/it is interpreted by others. The thrust of the work that Fawaz is doing in Queer Forms ultimately is about freedom and how we can each exist as free individuals, especially when there are often social and legal rules that constrain us as individuals with distinct identities that traverse a host of markers and qualities. Popular culture artifacts can provide the room and opportunity to imagine identities in different forms and contexts. Queer Forms provides the reader with an archive of culture forms as a kind of gift, helping us to see and understand how we might interpret or reinterpret the queer and feminist past so that we approach our daily contemporary life with that understanding. Fawaz explains the variegated theories that frame these interpretations and gets at this historical foundation—especially of the liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s—in order to engage in a valuable consideration of freedom. Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, violent disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These conflicts have renewed the Culture Wars over the legacy of the 1960s, becoming entangled in national politics and leading to a new set of questions. Does a concern with race, gender, and sexuality, with unacknowledged power and privilege, with identity, give present critics the right to criticize the great works of the past? If we have learned to see those works in terms of historical differences rather than universal truths, how is it that they speak to us at all? In the study of the world's cultures, there is more than one way to avoid being Eurocentric; which way should we choose?  Re-examining key thinkers since 1970, including Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Hortense Spillers, Fredric Jameson, and Stuart Hall, Bruce Robbins' book Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford UP, 2022) offers both a non-specialist introduction to recent cultural theory and a strong new interpretation of how this theory applies to the everyday issue of what cultural critics do and how they should feel about what they do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Watching our favorite TV shows and movies today, it’s easy to take the relatable characters and familiar settings for granted. But when Henrik Ibsen debuted his play A Doll’s House, realism was a shocking, new approach. Professor Derek Miller discusses what realism can teach us about our reality and how A Doll’s House rocked the 19th century theatre scene. Derek Miller is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He teaches in the English department as well as courses in theater, dance, and media. He is the author of Copyright and the Value of Performance, 1770-1911 and is currently working on a project titled Visualizing Broadway. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode from the Vault, we hear from historian Eric Hobsbawm, a frequent visitor at the New York Institute for the Humanities. His talk, Literacy and the Tower of Babel, took place in November 1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Censorship, Urdu literature, Islam, and progressive secular nationalisms in colonial India and Pakistan have a complex, intertwined history. Sarah Waheed, Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina, offers a timely examination of the role of progressive Muslim intellectuals in the Pakistan movement in her new book, Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She delves into how these left-leaning intellectuals drew from long-standing literary traditions of Islam in a period of great duress and upheaval, complicating our understanding of the relationship between religion and secularism.  Rather than seeing 'religion' and 'the secular' as distinct and oppositional phenomena, this book demonstrates how these concepts themselves were historically produced in South Asia and were deeply interconnected in the cultural politics of the left. Through a detailed analysis of trials for blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition, and feminist writers, Waheed argues that Muslim intellectuals engaged with socialism and communism through their distinctive ethical and cultural past. In so doing, she provides a fresh perspective on the creation of Pakistan and South Asian modernity. In our conversation we discuss leftist Muslim ideals, Urdu literary network, deconstructing the religious/secular binary, the banning of the controversial “Burning Embers” collection, the renowned writer Saadat Hasan Manto, the politics of sexuality, South Asia’s colonial legacies, poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Islamic traditions of aesthetics and ethics, legal trials on obscenity and blasphemy, feminist poet Fahmida Riaz, the gender politics of progressive intellectual spaces, and notions of South Asian Muslim nationalism and communal identity. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A. M. Homes most recent book is The Unfolding (Viking, 2022). Her previous work includes, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Days of Awe, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, the bestselling memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter along with a travel memoir, Los Angeles: People, Places and The Castle on the Hill, and the artist’s book Appendix A: A.M. Homes has been the recipient of numerous awards including Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, NYFA, and The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, along with the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis. She was a Co-Executive Producer and Writer on David E. Kelly and Stephen King’s, Mr. Mercedes, Co-Executive Producer and Writer on Falling Water and has created original television pilots for HBO, FX and CBS and was a writer/producer of the Showtime series The L Word. Recommended Books: Melissa Febos Maria Popova, Figuring —”The Marginalian”  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In August of 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than a year later, American journalist John Hersey traveled to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors of the bombing. The subsequent article was published by The New Yorker in 1946. Hiroshima was published as a book two months later. MIT Professor Christopher Capozzola discusses why he thinks every American should read Hiroshima. Christopher Capozzola is a professor of History at MIT. He is the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen and Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Build America’s First Pacific Century. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Join the conversation on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham UP, 2019) argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures. Jennifer Wenzel teaches at Columbia University.  Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I spoke with Carles Prado-Fonts on his recently published book Secondhand China: Spain, the East, and the Politics of Translation (Northwestern UP, 2022). This transcultural study of cultural production brings to light the ways Spanish literature imagined China by relying on English- and French-language sources. Carles Prado-Fonts examines how the simultaneous dependence on and obscuring of translation in these cross-cultural representations created the illusion of a homogeneous West. He argues that Orientalism became an instrument of hegemony not only between “the West and the rest” but also within the West itself, where Spanish writers used representations of China to connect themselves to Europe, hone a national voice, or forward ideas of political and cultural modernity. Uncovering an eclectic and surprising archive, Prado-Fonts draws on diverse cultural artifacts from popular literature, journalism, and early cinema to offer a rich account of how China was seen across the West between 1880 and 1930. Enrique Gaspar, Luis de Oteyza, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and lesser-known authors writing in Spanish and Catalan put themselves in dialogue with Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, W. Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Pearl Buck, and André Malraux, as well as stereotypical figures from popular culture like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Throughout, Prado-Fonts exposes translation as a technology of cultural hegemony and China as an appealing object for representation. A timely contribution to our understanding of how we create and consume knowledge about the world, Secondhand China is essential reading for scholars and students of Orientalism, postcolonial studies, translation studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies. Dr. Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist of China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality. Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced. Mentioned in the episode Yoshikazu Nango, "A new form of 'solitary space'...." (2021) Haruki Murakami's detailed fictional worlds of the 1980's onwards: real-feeling yet not actual history. Walter Scott's Waverley novels: can we also understand the novel as an immersive machine that leaves readers half in their actual world? Lewis Carrol's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with its interplay between enclosure and expansion, and its shrinking/expanding motif) Ian Bogost on e-readers C S Lewis's wardrobe as portal in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Lukacs focuses on the dizzying and transformative scale in Naturalism in "Narrate or Describe?" (1936) Wearable heart monitors as feedback machines for watching scary movies. The pre-history of Pokemon Go is various games played by early users of VR headsets on trains. Sword Art Online is a breakout popular example of Japanese stories of players trapped inside a game-world Thomas Boellstroff, Coming of Age in Second Life We Met in Virtual Reality Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) coined the concept of the metaverse. Recallable Books Madeline L'Engle The Wind in the Door (1973). Cervantes, Don Quixote (1606/1615) Futari Okajima Klein Bottle (1989) Collections such as Immersed in Technology, Future Visions, Virtual Realities and their Discontents; also, other early VR criticism of the 1990s including early feminist critique, scattered across journals in the early to mid 1990s . Paul feels someone should put together those germane articles into a new collection. Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies