New Books in Literary Studies

Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago. Mentioned in this episode By Katie Kitamura: Intimacies A Separation Gone to the Forest Japanese for Travelers The Longshot Also mentioned: Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation” Henry James, Portrait of a Lady Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Elsa Morante, Lies and Sorcery Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables John Steinbeck, East of Eden Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy 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 enigma of William Shakespeare's religious beliefs has long tantalized scholars and enthusiasts alike. Vernon Press's latest publication, Christian Shakespeare?: A Collection of Essays on Shakespeare in His Christian Context (Vernon Press, 2022), dives deep into this mystery. The collection of essays, edited by renowned scholars Michael Scott and Michael J. Collins, invites a discourse on the profound impact of Christian faith and the religious controversies of Shakespeare’s era on his poetry and plays. The contributors, unrestricted by any particular theoretical framework, freely explore the complex interplay between the medieval and the early modern, the Catholic and the Protestant, which colored Shakespeare’s England. This exploration reveals the openness of Shakespeare’s work to interpretation, highlighting the careful and sensitive readings by the contributors. Despite the depth of analysis, the true nature of Shakespeare’s Christianity remains as indeterminate and elusive as ever. The essays collectively capture the breadth of opinions on Shakespeare’s stances, from being ambiguously evasive to taking definitive stances on the religious and political turmoils of his time. Michael Scott, Fellow and Senior Dean at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, is a distinguished Shakespearean scholar with numerous publications under his belt, including Shakespeare and the Modern Dramatist and Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction. He has delivered lectures globally, from the USA to China, enhancing the understanding of Shakespeare's works worldwide. Michael J. Collins is a Teaching Professor of English and Dean Emeritus at Georgetown University. His editorial works include Reading What’s There: Essays on Shakespeare in Honor of Stephen Booth. Collins has contributed extensively to the academic dialogue on teaching Shakespeare and reviewing Shakespearean performances. Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership Vernon Press stands out as an independent publisher of scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences. Their mission is crucial — to make scholarly ideas accessible to a broader audience while maintaining high standards of originality and intellectual rigor. Through their diverse catalog, Vernon Press engages with global readers, contributing to academic and public discourse. Dessy Vassileva, the Marketing & Design expert at Vernon Press, brings a 360º multidisciplinary approach to her work at Vernon 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

Palestinian writing imagines the nation, not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into a distinct set of formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so that we might move beyond the idea of an incomplete or fragmented reality and speak frankly about the nation that exists and the freedom it seeks. In Novel Palestine: Nation Through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (U California Press, 2023), Nora E. H. Parr traces a vocabulary through which Palestine can be discussed as a changing and flexible national network linking people across and within space, time, and community. Through an exploration of the Palestinian literary scene subsequent to its canonical writers, Parr makes the life and work of Nasrallah available to an English-language audience for the first time, offering an intervention in geography while bringing literary theory into conversation with politics and history. A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program, here. Nora E. H. Parr is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and at the Center for Lebanese Studies. She coedits Middle Eastern Literatures. 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 Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2021), by Huda Fakhreddine, examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poem. When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring, often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy. This ‘new genre’ is here explored as a poetic practice and as a critical lens which gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about the definition of an Arabic poem, its limits, and its relation to its readers. Huda Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated. Miguel Monteiro is a PhD Student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. [email protected]. 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 the past live on within our experience of the present? And how does our decision to speak about or write down our recollections of how things were change our understanding of those memories--how does it change us in the present? Asking those questions back in 2019 brought RTB into the company of memory-obsessed writers like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Discussing autofiction by Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, John and Elizabeth begin to understand that the line between real-life fact, memory, and fiction is not quite as sharp as we had thought. Joining Recall This Book for this conversation is philosopher Helena De Bres, author of influential articles including “The Many, not the Few: Pluralism about Global Distributive Justice”, “Justice in Transnational Governance”, “What’s Special About the State?” “Local Food: The Moral Case” and most recently "Narrative and Meaning in Life". (Her website contains links to her many fine articles for fellow philosophers and for the general public). She has recently begun to work on moral philosophy, especially the question of what makes a life meaningful, and on philosophy of art. John ranks his favorite anthropologists, while Elizabeth wonders whether autofiction necessarily takes on the affect of an academic department meeting--and what that affect has to do with Kazuo Ishiguro. Discussed in this episode: "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf "Finding Innocence and Experience: Voices in Memoir," Sue William Silverman The Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life, Sheila Heti An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro The Moth The Day of Shelly's Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief, Renato Rosaldo Memoir: An Introduction, G. Thomas Couser The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism, Alex Woloch 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

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene. Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010). Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures 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

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the monumental Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu, has profoundly affected the literature, art, religions, and cultures of South and Southeast Asia from antiquity to the present. Filled with thrilling battles, flying monkeys, and ten-headed demons, the work, composed almost 3,000 years ago, recounts Prince Rama’s exile and his odyssey to recover his abducted wife, Sita, and establish a utopian kingdom. Now, the definitive English translation of the critical edition of this classic is available in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation (Princeton UP, 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

Contemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that interrogate the ingrained patriarchal paradigm. Through a rigorous analysis, Wang delineates changes in both content and narrative that allow contemporary interpretations to reimagine the gender politics and contexts of the tales retold. With a broad transmedia approach and a nuanced understanding of intertextuality, this work contributes to the ongoing negotiation in academic and popular discourse between past and present, traditional and contemporary, and text and reality in a globalized and postmodern world. Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters offers an engaging interdisciplinary investigation of issues at the heart of these traditional tales such as gender and status hierarchy, marriage and family life, and in-group/out-group distinction. Beyond the content of these individual stories, Wang ties these narratives together across time using cognitive literary criticism, especially affective narratology, to shed new light on the adaptation of literary and cultural texts and their sociopolitical contexts. Dr. Cathy Yue Wang is a lecturer in Department of Chinese Language and Literature, School of Humanities, Shanghai Normal University in China. She received her PhD from Macquarie University in Australia. She is particularly interested in applying feminist and queer perspectives into examinations of adaptation and retelling, children and young adult literature, as well as boys’ love subculture and fandom in the East Asian context. She is the author of Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) and editor of Catching Chen Qing Ling: The Untamed and Adaptation, Production, and Reception in Transcultural Contexts (Peter Lang, forthcoming). Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include 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

An intellectual who hated intellectuals, a socialist who didn't trust the state--our foremost political essayist and author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a man of stark, puzzling contradictions. Knowing Orwell's life and reading Orwell's works produces just as many questions as it answers. Celebrated Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor guides fans and new readers alike through the many twists and turns of Orwell's books, life and thought. As a writer he intended his works to be transparent and instantly accessible, yet they are also full of secrets and surprises, tantalising private histories, and psychological quirks. From his conflicted relationship with religion to his competing anti-imperialism and fascination with empire, Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell (Yale UP, 2024) delves into the complex development of this essential yet enigmatic voice. Taylor leads us through Orwell's principal writings and complex life--crafting an illuminating guide to one of the most enduringly relevant writers in the English 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

Through an original framework of literary sensory studies, Sensing the Sinophone: Urban Memoryscapes in Contemporary Fiction (Cambria, 2022) provides a comparative analysis of how six contemporary works of Sinophone fiction reimagine the links between the self and the city, the past and the present, as well as the physical and the imaginary. It explores the connection between elusive memories and material cityscapes through the matrix of the senses. Joining recent efforts to imagine world literature beyond the international, this monograph engages in a triangular comparison of fiction from Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taipei – three Sinophone cities, each with its own strong urban identity that comes with unique cultural and linguistic hybridities. Sensing the Sinophone combines narratological tools for studying time in fiction with critical concepts of spatiality in order to establish an analytical focus on narrative voice and reliability (including the inaccuracy of memory), structural non-linearity (such as mental time travel), and the construction of fictional parallel cities as loci for plot development. In this study, the conventional sensorium and its role in recollection is explored and amplified to include whole-body sensations, habitual synesthesia, and the emotional aspects of sensations that produce a sense of place or self. Astrid Møller-Olsen is an international research fellow with Lund University (Sweden), University of Stavanger (Norway), and University of Oxford (United Kingdom); her position is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Dr. Møller-Olsen holds an MA in comparative literature and a PhD in Chinese studies. Her research has been published in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, SFRA Review, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature, and International Journal of Heritage Studies. She hosts the podcast Sinophone Unrealities and the literary blog xiaoshuo.blog. Tong He is a Lecturer in English at Central China Normal 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

Written by iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, this classic of love, desire, and family breakdown smashed through taboos when first published in Arabic and continues to captivate audiences today It is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is not because of the age gap or because of the fact that she does not love, or even really know, her fiancé. No, it is because she is involved with another man. This other man is Dr Hashim Abdel-Latif, and while he is Amina’s first love, she is certainly not his. Also many years her senior, Hashim is well-known in polite circles for his adventures with women. A Nose and Three Eyes tells the story of Amina’s love affair with Hashim, and that of two other young women: Nagwa and Rahhab. A Nose and Three Eyes is a story of female desire and sexual awakening, of love and infatuation, and of exploitation and despair. It quietly critiques the strictures put upon women by conservative social norms and expectations, while a subtle undercurrent of political censure was carefully aimed at the then Nasser regime. As such, it was both deeply controversial and wildly popular when first published in the 1960s. Still a household name, this novel, and its author, have stood the test of time and remain relevant and highly readable today. Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (Author, 1919–1990) is one of the most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction of the twentieth century. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Abdel Kouddous graduated from law school in 1942 but left his law practice to pursue a long and successful career in journalism. He was an editor at the daily Al-Akhbar and the weekly Rose al-Yusuf, and was editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram. The author of dozens of books, his controversial writings and political views landed him in jail more than once. A Nose and Three Eyes is his second book to be translated into English, and his first was I Do Not Sleep. Hanan al-Shaykh (Foreword by) was born and raised in Beirut. She is the author of The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in London. Jonathan Smolin (Translated by) is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College in the US. He is the translator of several works of Arabic fiction, including Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me by Youssef Fadel, and I Do Not Sleep and A Nose and Three Eyes by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and the author of The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (forthcoming Stanford University Press). He lives in Hanover, NH. 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

Adam Kabat’s The River Imp and the Stinky Jewel and Other Tales: Monster Comics from Edo Japan (Columbia UP, 2023) is an in-depth introduction to the rich and ribald world of kibyōshi, a short-lived (1778-1807) subgenre of books combining text and illustration on the same page, much like comic books and manga today. This book presents a selection of five kibyōshi in which monsters play central roles. Each of these short books is reproduced in its entirety, accompanied by Kabat’s translations and commentary. Kabat’s selection of tales communicates the entertainment value and thematic variety of these stories, as well as their deep web of interconnections with contemporary culture and the urban economy. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of premodern history and literature, but also to a larger audience including the growing ranks of manga and anime fans. 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 book analyses the way that changes in the comics industry, book trade and webcomics distribution have shaped the publication of long-form comics. The US Graphic Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2022) pays particular attention to how the concept of the graphic novel developed through the twentieth century. Art historians, journalists, and reviewers debated whether it was possible for a comic to be a novel – debates that accelerated after the term ’graphic novel’ was coined by the comics fan Richard Kyle in 1964. This study underlines the proximity of the graphic novel to other media, showing that this cultural form is not only the meeting place between periodical comics and books, but that graphic novels are in dialogue with films, posters and computer screens. Dr. Paul Williams is an Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century literature and culture at the University of Exeter in the UK. His research is centrally concerned with comics and graphic novels. His monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel broke new ground by explaining how graphic novels were published, circulated, and discussed in North America between the mid-1960s and 1980. Dr. Williams has also co-curated the exhibition The Great British Graphic Novel at the Cartoon Museum in London, which was visited by over 10,000 people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Seamus O’Malley is an associate professor at Yeshiva University. His first book was Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2015). He has co-edited three volumes, one of essays on Ford Madox Ford and America (Rodopi, 2010), a research companion to Ford (Routledge, 2018) and a volume of essays on the cartoonists Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell (Mississippi, 2018). He is the chair of the Ford Madox Ford Society and co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies. In this interview he discusses his new book, Irish Culture and "The People": Populism and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2022), a study of the rhetoric of populism and uses of the seemingly simple concept “The People” in Irish political and literary discourse. Irish Culture and ‘The People’ argues that populism has been a shaping force in Irish literary culture. Populist moments and movements have compelled authors to reject established forms and invent new ones. Sometimes, as in the middle period of W.B. Yeats's work, populism forces a writer into impossible stances, spurring ever greater rhetorical and poetic creativity. At other times, as in the critiques of Anna Parnell or Myles na gCopaleen, authors penetrate the rhetoric fog of populist discourse and expose the hollowness of its claims. Yet in both politics and culture, populism can be a generative force. Daniel O'Connell, and later the Land League, utilized populist discourse to advance Irish political freedom and expand rights. The most powerful works of Lady Gregory and Ernie O'Malley are their portraits of The People that borrows from the populist vocabulary. While we must be critical of populist discourse, we dismiss it at our loss. This study synthesizes existing scholarship on populism to explore how Irish texts have evoked "The People"--a crucial rhetorical move for populist discourse--and how some writers have critiqued, adopted, and adapted the languages of Irish populisms. 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

Never before have comics seemed so popular or diversified, proliferating across a broad spectrum of genres, experimenting with a variety of techniques, and gaining recognition as a legitimate, rich form of art. Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures (UP of Mississippi, 2016) examines this trend by taking up philosopher Umberto Eco's notion of the open work of art, whereby the reader--or listener or viewer, as the case may be--is offered several possibilities of interpretation in a cohesive narrative and aesthetic structure. Ahmed delineates the visual, literary, and other medium-specific features used by comics to form open rather than closed works, methods by which comics generate or limit meaning as well as increase and structure the scope of reading into a work. Ahmed analyzes a diverse group of British, American, and European (Franco-Belgian, German, Finnish) comics. She treats examples from the key genre categories of fictionalized memoirs and biographies, adventure and superhero, noir, black comedy and crime, science fiction and fantasy. Her analyses demonstrate the ways in which comics generate openness by concentrating on the gaps essential to the very medium of comics, the range of meaning ensconced within words and images as well as their interaction with each other. The analyzed comics, extending from famous to lesser known works, include Will Eisner's The Contract with God Trilogy, Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches, Hugo Pratt's The Ballad of the Salty Sea, Edmond Baudoin's The Voyage, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, Moebius's Arzach, Yslaire's Cloud 99 series, and Jarmo Mäkilä's Taxi Ride to Van Gogh's Ear. Dr. Maaheen Ahmed is associate professor of comparative literature at Ghent University, Belgium. Dr. Ahmed is the primary investigator of the COMICS Project, which is focused on the intercultural history of children and comics. Dr. Ahmed is author of Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics and Openness of Comics: Generating Meaning within Flexible Structures, both published by University Press of Mississippi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Stephanie Bastek has been with The American Scholar for 10 years, where she is now senior editor. She hosts and produces the magazine’s Smarty Pants podcast, with has just returned with a new miniseries called “Exploding the Canon” about the student protests at her alma mater, Reed College, over the mandatory freshmen humanities course eight years ago. The American Scholar plays a unique role in the literary-journalism realm: its writings often offer a response to newsworthy events but may do through an interdisciplinary approach that weaves in history or literature, for example, and aims to be far-ranging and reflective. In this episode, the first essay we focus on is Hugh Martin’s “Shooting a Dog” from the Winter 2024 issue. Set in Iraq, it invokes a parallel to George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant” set in what was then called Burma. In each case, the supposedly superior Westerner fears being seen as a fool by those he lords over. Similar tensions involving masculine pride, patriotism, and more, surface here. A second essay being covered is “The Lives of Bryan” by Jennifer Sinor from the Summer 2023 issue. The author’s brother has had four previous brushes with death, before a heart attack ends his life. A distraught father’s insistence that what Bryan has hoarded in his mobile equates to “throwing away a piece of your brother,” brings up issues of loss, transience, and the uncertain vagaries we all try to navigate as best we can. “An Outrage Sacred to the Gods” by Greg Afinogenov from the Winter 2024 issue explores his father’s death, and the role of alcoholism as a death wish that the author struggles to overcome in his own life. With “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Patricia Hampl from the Spring 2023 issue, being an outsider is front and center. Hampl has made a pilgrimage to visit a close associate of the writer Katherine Mansfield, only to be rebuffed, leading to a more fruitful connection with her guide for the occasion, an editor whose “pure homosexual” accent places him, like his American visitor, outside England’s class structure. 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

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly makes time for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and ND host John Plotz. She reads from The Wren, The Wren (Norton, 2023) and discusses the “etherized” state of our inner lives as they circulate on social media. Anne says we don't yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority, but that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”--though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos...is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also gently corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they're "just Irish." Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want--while simultaneously “mortifying them...condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.” Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to the signature question: A. A. Milne’s Now We are Six. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Advancing Medical Posthumanism Through Twenty-First Century American Poetry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) places contemporary poetics in dialogue with posthumanism and biomedicine in order to create a framework for advancing a posthuman-affirmative ethics within the culture of medical practice. This book makes a case for a posthumanist understanding of the body—one that sees health and illness not as properties possessed by individual bodies, but as processes that connect bodies to their social and natural environment, shaping their capacity to act, think, and feel. Tana Jean Welch demonstrates how contemporary American poetry is specifically poised to develop a pathway toward a posthuman intervention in biomedicine, the field of medical humanities, medical discourse, and the value systems that guide U.S. healthcare in general. 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 Ways of Seeking: The Arabic Novel and the Poetics of Investigation (U California Press, 2024), Emily Drumsta traces the influence of detective fiction on the twentieth-century Arabic novel. Theorizing a “poetics of investigation,” she shows how these novels, far from staging awe-inspiring feats of logical deduction, mock the truth-seeking practices on which modern exercises of colonial and national power are often premised. Their narratives return to the archives of Arabic folklore, Islamic piety, and mysticism to explore less coercive ways of knowing, seeing, and seeking. Drumsta argues that scholars of the Middle East neglect the literary at their peril, overlooking key critiques of colonialism from the intellectuals who shaped and responded through fiction to the transformations of modernity. This book ultimately tells a different story about the novel’s place in the constellation of Arab modernism, modeling an innovative method of open-ended inquiry based on the literary texts themselves. Emily Drumsta is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is editor and translator of Revolt Against the Sun: Selected Poetry of Nazik al-Malaʼika 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

Following Art Spiegelman's declaration that 'the future of comics is in the past,' Drawing from the Archives considers comics memory in the contemporary North American graphic novel. Cartoonists such as Chris Ware, Seth, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and others have not only produced some of the most important graphic novels, they have also turned to the history of comics as a common visual heritage to pass on to new readers. This book is a full-length study of contemporary cartoonists when they are at work as historians: it offers a detailed description of how they draw from the archives of comics history, examining the different gestures of collecting, curating, reprinting, forging, swiping, and undrawing that give shape to their engagement with the past. In recognizing these different acts of transmission, this book argues for a material and vernacular history of how comics are remembered, shared, and recirculated over time. Dr. Benoît Crucifix is assistant professor of Cultural Studies at KU Leuven and researcher at the Royal Library of Belgium, working on the FED-tWIN “Pop Heritage” project. The aim of the project is to valorize collections of popular print culture. He is interested in the cultural practices that move and reframe existing comics in a variety of contexts and settings. 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 the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies: Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic (Rutgers UP, 2023) reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions, teaches us how to become better readers. Dr. Shiamin Kwa is Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. Her written work explores relationships between form and content, text and image, self and self-presentation, surface and depth, and the conflicts between what we say and what we mean. Her research interests include theater and fiction, food studies, graphic narratives, literary studies, cultural studies, comparative and world literature, and literary and narrative theory. Her published articles analyze a broad variety of topics, including Italian opera, contemporary Chinese literature, and North American and European graphic narratives. 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 I decided to try my hand at interviewing authors for the New Books Network, one of my dream guests was Steve Mentz. Steve’s work in the environmental humanities marries a rigorous archival work, pathbreaking close readings, and a fluent and innovative approach to scholarly writing. I think he’s charted a course for early modern ecocriticism that has been both impressive and energizing. Steve Mentz is a Professor of English at St. John’s University. He has produced numerous books that have shaped the emerging field of the blue humanities, including Shipwreck Modernity; At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean; the Bloomsbury Objects entry Ocean; and the recent An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. He has published a chapbook of poetry, Swim Poems. His Bookfish blog is also a wonderful index for scholarly and creative work happening right now. Today, I am excited to discuss his most recent book of blue poetry, Sailing Without Ahab, just published by Fordham University Press in 2024. 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 the Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula was home not to Spain and Portugal but rather to al-Andalus. Ruled by a succession of Islamic dynasties, al-Andalus came to be a shorthand for a legendary place where people from the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace. That reputation is not entirely deserved, yet, as On Earth Or in Poems: The Many Lives of Al-Andalus (Harvard UP, 2023) shows, it has had an enduring hold on the imagination, especially for Arab and Muslim artists and thinkers in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. From the vast and complex story behind the name al-Andalus, Syrians and North Africans draw their own connections to history’s ruling dynasties. Palestinians can imagine themselves as “Moriscos,” descended from Spanish Muslims forced to hide their identities. A Palestinian flamenco musician in Chicago, no less than a Saudi women’s rights activist, can take inspiration from al-Andalus. These diverse relationships to the same past may be imagined, but the present-day communities and future visions those relationships foster are real. Where do these notions of al-Andalus come from? How do they translate into aspiration and action? Eric Calderwood traces the role of al-Andalus in music and in debates about Arab and Berber identities, Arab and Muslim feminisms, the politics of Palestine and Israel, and immigration and multiculturalism in Europe. The Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish once asked, “Was al-Andalus / Here or there? On earth … or in poems?” The artists and activists showcased in this book answer: it was there, it is here, and it will be. Eric Calderwood is Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the author of the award-winning Colonial al-Andalus. He is a contributor to NPR, the BBC, and Foreign Policy. 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

Although we often think of friendship today as an indisputable value of human social life, for thinkers and writers across late mediaeval Christian society friendship raised a number of social and ethical dilemmas that needed to be carefully negotiated. On Amistà: Negotiating Friendship in Dante’s Italy (University of Toronto Press, 2023) analyses these dilemmas and looks at how Dante’s strategic articulations of friendship evolved across the phases of his literary career as he manoeuvred between different social groups and settings. Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall reveals that friendship was not an unequivocal moral good for the writers of late mediaeval Italy. Instead, it was an ambiguous term to be deployed strategically, describing a wide range of social relationships such as allies, collaborators, servants, patrons, rivals, and enemies. Drawing on the use of the language of friendship in the letters, correspondence poems, dedications, narratives, and treatises composed by Dante and his interlocutors, Dr. Coggeshall examines the way they skillfully negotiated around the dilemmas that friendship raised in the spheres of mediaeval Italian literary society. The book addresses instances of inclusivity and exclusivity, collaboration and self-interest, hierarchy and equality, and alterity and identity. Employing literary, historical, and sociological analysis, On Amistà presents a genealogy for the innovative and tactical use of the terms of friendship among the works of late mediaeval Italian authors. 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

Recent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing (Ohio State UP, 2023) offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East--from blockbusters like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis to more local efforts such as Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi--Santesso explores why the graphic form has become a popular and useful medium for articulating Muslim subjectivities. Further, she shows how Muslim comics "bear witness" to a range of faith-based positions that complicate discussions of global ummah or community, contest monolithic depictions of Muslims, and question the Islamist valorization of the shaheed, the "martyr" figure regarded as the ideal religious witness. By presenting varied depictions of everyday lives of Muslims navigating violence and militarization, this book reveals the connections between religious rituals and existence in warscapes and invites us to more deeply consider the nature of witnessing itself. Dr. Esra Santesso received her B.A. from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, and her PhD from the University of Nevada. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia. She specializes in postcolonial theory and literature with an emphasis on Muslim identity, diasporic and immigrant experiences, and human rights narratives. Her first book, Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) investigates the extent to which the questions and theories of postcolonial identity can be applied to Muslim subjects living in the West. She is the co-editor of Islam and Postcolonial Literature (Routledge, 2017), which offers a collection of essays on religion’s role in self-representation explored via film, theater, poetry, visual arts, performance pieces. 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, Elizabeth talks with Steven Gonzalez, anthropologist and author of speculative fiction under the pen name E.G. Condé. They discuss the entanglement of politics, Taíno animism, and weather events in the form of a hurricane named Teddy. Steve describes the suffusion of sound he has experienced in Puerto Rico and the soundlessness at the heart of hurricanes, and tells us about his academic work on data centers, and a collaborative speculative film that imagines a world without clouds. Steve and Elizabeth reflect on current shifts within anthropology that are opening the discipline to other modes of expression, including speculative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, in the tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin (the subject of a recent episode and of John's recent book Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea: My Reading) and of Arkady Martine, Byzantine historian and author of A Memory called Empire, and A Desolation Called Peace. As her Recallable Book, Elizabeth offers an anthropological space opera, The Expanse. Mentioned in the episode: "World without Clouds" by Jia Hui Lee, Luísa Reis Castro, Julianne Yip, Steven Gonzalez, and Gabrielle Robbins. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City by Vera S. Candiani. Haraway, Donna. "Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective 1." In Women, science, and technology, pp. 455-472. Routledge, 2013. Marcus, George E. "On the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now: Notes on a contemporary anxiety in the making of ethnography." Cross Cultural Poetics 12, no. 12 (2003): 7-20. 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

Glynne Walley, translator of classic Japanese novel Hakkenden, joins us on the podcast again to talk about his second translated volume: Hakkenden, Part 2: His Master’s Blade (Cornell East Asia Series: 2024). Unlike Part 1—which is all preamble!—in Part 2 we meet some of the fabled eight dog warriors and the Confucian virtues they represent: Shino, for filial piety; Gakuzo, for duty; Dosetsu, for loyalty. There’s betrayal, drama…and a lot of secret, intertwined family relationships. Glynne Walley is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon and author of Good Dogs: Edification, Entertainment & Kyokutei Bakin's Nansō Satomi hakkenden (Cornell East Asia Series, 2017), the first monograph-length study of Hakkenden, a landmark of premodern Japanese fiction. Today, Glynne and I talk about Part 2, how the novel connected to readers at the time—and how Hakkenden ends up being a lot like our Marvel Cinematic Universe. Catch our first interview with Glynne on Part 1 here! You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. 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

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genre of hard science fiction: to whom does it appeal and what is it trying to accomplish? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Zenithism (1921-1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (Academic Studies Press, 2023) is the first-ever English language anthology of zenithism – an eclectic avant-garde movement that operated in the Yugoslav region between 1921 and 1927. The founder of Zenithism – poet Ljubomir Micić – envisioned the movement as a fusion of futurism, dada, constructivism, expressionism, and proto-surrealism, with the movement’s philosophy embodied in the figure of the Balkan Barbarogenius (barbarian-genius). A hallmark of the movement was its embrace of cross-genre writing, from Micić’s ciné-poem Rescue Vehicle and Branko Ve Poljanski’s lyric novel 77 Suicides to MID’s lyric philosophic treatise The Sexual Equilibrium of Money. Reaching the wider international audience for the first time, this anthology sheds light on an untapped chapter in European modernism. Aleksandar Bošković is Lecturer in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian within the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University. He is a scholar of Russian and East European modernism, Yugoslav, post-Yugoslav and Balkan Studies, with a strong background in comparative literature, critical theory, and visual studies. Bošković specializes in avant-garde literature and experimental art practices explored through the lenses of comparative media. Steven Teref is a translator from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. He specialists in translating Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian poetry, focusing on writers from the early 20th century through to the present. 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

Zakariyya Tamir is Syria’s foremost writer of short stories, and his works are widely read across the Arab world. In Zakariyya Tamir and the Politics of the Syrian Short Story: Modernity, Authoritarianism, and Gender (I. B. Tauris, 2023), the first English-language monograph on Tamir’s entire oeuvre, Alessandro Columbu examines Tamir’s literary development in the context of changing political contexts, from his beginnings as a short story writer for local magazines in the late 1950s until the Syrian revolution of 2011. Thus, the movements from independence and Western-inspired modernisation to the rise of nationalism and socialism; war, defeat, and occupation in the 1960s; the emergence of authoritarianism, and the cult of personality of Hafiz al-Assad in the 1970s are charted in the context of Tamir’s works. Therein, the significance of masculinity and patriarchy and its changing nature in relation to nationalism and authoritarianism are revealed as Tamir’s foremost vehicles for social and political critique. The role of female sexuality and its disrupting/empowering nature vis-à-vis patriarchal institutions is also explored, as is the question of literary commitment and the relationship between authors and the authoritarian regime of Syria, homosexuality, and representations of unconventional sexualities in general. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability 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 most exhaustive mapping of contemporary literary theory to date, Jeffrey R. Di Leo's book Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (Bloomsbury, 2023) offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the field of contemporary literary theory. Examining 75 key topics across 15 chapters, it provides an approachable and encyclopedic introduction to the most important areas of contemporary theory today. Proceeding broadly chronologically from early theory all the way through to postcritique, Di Leo masterfully unpacks established topics such as psychoanalysis, structuralism and Marxism, as well as newer topics such as trans* theory, animal studies, disability studies, blue humanities, speculative realism and many more. Featuring accessible discussion of the work of foundational theorists such as Lacan, Derrida and Freud as well as contemporary theorists such as Haraway, Braidotti and Hayles, it offers a magisterial examination of an enormously rich and varied body of work. 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

Coins, flax, spinning wheels, mud, pigs. Each of these objects were ubiquitous in the premodern cultural representation of the Irish. Through case studies of these five objects, Colleen Taylor’s new monograph Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2024) recovers the sometimes-oppressive, sometimes-liberatory meanings invested in nonhuman matter. Irish Materialisms collects a rich archive of material from William Carleton’s “Phil Purcel, the Pig Driver,” to the it-narrative The Adventures of a Bad Shilling in the Kingdom of Ireland, Gulliver’s Travels to Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Colleen Taylor is Professor of English at Boston College. She has held the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Award at University College Cork. Irish Materialisms is her first monograph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Narratives of Mistranslation: Fictional Translators in Latin American Literature (Routledge, 2023) offers unique insights into the role of the translator in today’s globalized world, exploring Latin American literature featuring translators and interpreters as protagonists in which prevailing understandings of the act of translation are challenged and upended. It looks to the fictional turn as a fruitful source of critical inquiry in translation studies, showcasing the potential for recent Latin American novels and short stories in Spanish to shed light on the complex dynamics and conditions under which translators perform their task. Kripper unpacks how the study of these works reveals translation not as an activity with communication as its end goal but rather as a mediating and mediated process shaped by translators’ unique manipulations and motivations and the historical and cultural contexts in which they work. In exploring the fictional representations of translators, the book also outlines pedagogical approaches and offers discussion questions for the implementation of translators’ narratives in translation, language, and literature courses. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability 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

We often misuse the word melodrama with abandon, especially to characterize other people’s behaviors, but Greg Vargo defines it for us once and for all. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the predominant Western theatrical form, it is a genre of crisis. To that end, it employed hyperbolic language, extreme situations, extraordinary coincidences, stark oppositions and so on. Greg talks about his own ongoing work on melodramas about race, their histories of performance, and the storied career of the African American actor Ira Aldridge. Greg Vargo is Associate Professor at the Department of English, New York University. His research focuses on the literary and cultural milieu of nineteenth-century British protest movements and the interplay between politics, periodical culture, the novel and theater. His first book, An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel (Cambridge UP, 2018), won the 2019 North American Victorian Studies Association’s award for best book of the year in Victorian Studies. He has recently edited Chartist Drama (Manchester UP, 2020), a collection of four plays written or performed by members of the working-class movement for social and political rights known as Chartism. A new project focuses on anti-imperialism in nineteenth-century popular culture (across such media as penny novels and stage melodrama) as well as in radical politics. Image: © 2024 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

Tim Lanzendörfer's Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary American Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2023) highlights the emergence of a literary mode, speculative historism, over the past two decades in U.S. literature. Discussing in depth novels by writers such as Ken Kalfus, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colson Whitehead, among others, it integrates questions of critical method, genre, form, and literary theory, all of which have some urgency today. Addressing itself to the question of how to read this mode through a form of utopian hermeneutics, this study explores the formal constitution, narrative choices, and place in the wider literary market of a mode that it believes to be constitutively important for understanding American literature's struggle with the possibility of imagining hopeful 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 Memoriam: David Ferry (1924-2023) In this Recall This Book conversation from 2021, poets David Ferry and Roger Reeves talk about lyric, epic, and the underworld. The underworld, that repository of the Shades of the Dead, gets a lot of traffic from heroes (Gilgamesh, Theseus, Odysseus, Aeneas) and poets (Orpheus, Virgil, Dante). Some come down for information or in hopes of rescuing or just seeing their loved ones, or perhaps for a sense of comfort in their grief. They often find those they have loved, but they rarely can bring them back. Comfort they never find, at least not in any easy way. The poets talk about David’s poem Resemblance, in which he sees his father, whose grave he just visited, eating in the corner of a small New Jersey restaurant and “listening to a conversation/With two or three others—Shades of the Dead come back/From where they went to when they went away?” "I feel the feathers softly gather upon My shoulders and my arms, becoming wings. Melodious bird I'll fly above the moaning Bosphorus, more glorious than Icarus, I'll coast along above the coast of Sidra And over the fabled far north Hyperborean steppes." -- from "To Maecenas", The Odes of Horace, II: 20. Their tongues are ashes when they’d speak to us. David Ferry, “Resemblance” Roger reads “Grendel’s Mother,” in which the worlds of Grendel and Orpheus and George Floyd coexist but do not resemble each other, and where Grendel’s mother hears her dying son and refuses the heaven he might be called to, since entering it means he’d have to die. Henry Justice Ford, ‘Grendel’s Mother Drags Beowulf to the Bottom Of The Lake’, 1899 So furious. So furious, I was, When my son called to me, called me out Of heaven to come to the crag and corner store Where it was that he was dying, “Mama, I can’t breathe;” even now I hear it— Roger Reeves, “Grendel’s Mother” Mentioned in this episode David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, University of Chicago Press Virgil, The Aeneid, translated by David Ferry, University of Chicago Press Horace, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux Roger Reeves, King Me, Copper Canyon Press Roger Reeves, Best Barbarian, W.W. Norton Press Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric, Harvard University Press Read transcript of the episode here. Listen to 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

Shakuntala Gawde's book Narrative Analysis of Bhagavata Purana: Selected Episodes from the Tenth Skandha (Dev Publishers, 2023) presents an analytical study of selected narratives of the tenth skandha of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa with the framework of Narratology. It checks the possibilities of interpretation of some popular narratives from Kṛṣṇa saga. Book gives an exhaustive introduction dealing with Purāṇas, the growth of Vaiṣṇnavism and Narratology with special reference to Bhāgavata Purāṇa which sets precursor to the further analysis. It undertakes hermeneutic interpretation of episodes – Lord Kṛṣṇa’s birth story, Lifting of Govardhana Mountain, Syamantaka jewel, exploits of Pūtanā and other demons, uprooting of Arjuna trees, the expulsion of Kāliya, Gopīcīraharaṇam, Rāsapaῆcādhyāyī, story of Kubjā, story of Śrīdāman and Rukmiṇī Svayaṁvara. All these narratives are categorised into three themes – 1) Assimilation and acculturation 2) Exploits of demons and 3) Bhakti Narratives. The Narrative structure of each episode is analysed to derive the meaning from it. Theoretical frameworks developed by K. Ayyappa Paniker, Genette and Roland Barthes are applied to the selected narratives of the tenth skandha of Bhāg. P. to understand the deeper meaning of the narratives. The toolbox approach is taken into consideration while doing textual exegesis and hermeneutic interpretation. It explores socio-historical, psychological and philosophical aspects of the above narratives through textual analysis of the tenth skandha of Bhāgavata Purāṇa using the tools like intertextuality and intratextuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior-from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America (U Minnesota Press, 2023) explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take. Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a "majority minority" population and the growing diversification of America's political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives. The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934. Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Casting a wide net, Pittman analyzes fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing by Black women along with songs performed and written by classic blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Victoria Spivey. This innovative approach allows Pittman to show how women from these two generations approached issues of class, respectability, uplift, and empowerment. 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 period immediately following World War II was an era of dramatic transformation for Jews in America. At the start of the 1940s, President Roosevelt had to all but promise that if Americans entered the war, it would not be to save the Jews. By the end of the decade, antisemitism was in decline and Jews were moving toward general acceptance in American society. Drawing on several archives, magazine articles, and nearly-forgotten bestsellers, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Rachel Gordan examines how Jewish middlebrow literature helped to shape post-Holocaust American Jewish identity. For both Jews and non-Jews accustomed to antisemitic tropes and images, positive depictions of Jews had a normalising effect. Maybe Jews were just like other Americans, after all. At the same time, anti-antisemitism novels and “Introduction to Judaism” literature helped to popularise the idea of Judaism as an American religion. In the process, these two genres contributed to a new form of Judaism—one that fit within the emerging myth of America as a Judeo-Christian nation, and yet displayed new confidence in revealing Judaism's divergences from Christianity. 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. 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 their edited volume Veil Obsessed: Representations in Literature, Art, and Media (Syracuse University Press, 2024), Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat complicate discussions of the veil and highlight the prevalent anxieties surrounding it. The edited volume is unique in its focus and engagement of the veil as it appears in various literary, artistic, and popular cultures, such as of historical Algeria and contemporary Iranian television series, Bollywood films, and street art in Europe. The book locates these critical discussions and theoretical interventions within both a postcolonial and neocolonial critique of how the veil was orientalised and fetishized historically, for example in the Victorian transmissions of the 1001 Nights, and how the veil, specifically the burka, is deployed in reductive and harmful ways in contemporary state projects today, as seen in France, and even in popular liberal discourses (such as in the United States). The essays in this collection are sharp and accessibly written and will be useful as a teaching tool in various undergraduate courses. The book will also be of interest to those who work on literature, popular culture, gender, Islam, and much more. 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 status of art and culture in a world dominated by apps, algorithms, and influencers? Anna Kornbluh’s newest book Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023) analyzes a swath of cultural forms from auto-fiction to Netflix binges and immersive art installations. For Kornbluh, neoliberalism’s economic disintermediation manifests itself in a new dominant cultural style that renounces complex forms of representation, abstraction, and mediation in favor of instantaneity, memoir, and literalism. An ambitious and far-reaching intervention into politics and aesthetics, Immediacy is ultimately an impassioned defense of the power of art to reflect, critique, and transform the world. Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English and a member of the United Faculty bargaining team at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching center on literature, film, and Marxist cultural theory. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, and Realizing Capital. David Maruzzella is a writer, editor, and translator specializing in philosophy and contemporary art currently based in Chicago. He received his PhD in philosophy from DePaul 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

The Life of Padma, or the Paümacariu, is a richly expressive Jain retelling in the Apabhramsha language of the famous Ramayana tale. It was written by the poet and scholar Svayambhudeva, who lived in south India around the beginning of the tenth century. Like the epic tradition on which it is based, The Life of Padma narrates Prince Rama's exile, his search for his wife Sita after her abduction by King Ravana of Lanka, and the restoration of his kingship. The second volume recounts Rama's exile with Sita and his brother Lakshmana. The three visit various cities--rather than ashrams, as in most versions; celebrate Lakshmana's marriages; and come upon a new city built in Rama's honor. In Dandaka Forest, they encounter sages who are masters of Jain doctrine. Then, the discovery of Sita's disappearance sets the stage for war with Ravana. Eva De Clercq's The Life of Padma (Harvard UP, 2023) is the first direct translation into English of the oldest extant Apabhramsha work, accompanied by a corrected text, in the Devanagari script, of Harivallabh C. Bhayani's critical edition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Presenting engaging, thought-provoking stories across centuries of military activity, Shakespeare at War: A Material History (Cambridge UP, 2023) demonstrates just how extensively Shakespeare's cultural capital has been deployed at times of national conflict. Drawing upon scholarly expertise in Shakespeare and War Studies, first-hand experience from public military figures and insights from world-renowned theatre directors, this is the first material history of how Shakespeare has been used in wartime. Addressing home fronts and battle fronts, the collection's broad chronological coverage encompasses the Seven Years' War, the American War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian War, the First and Second World Wars, and the Iraq War. Each chapter reveals an archival object that tells us something about who 'recruited' Shakespeare, what they did with him, and to what effect. Richly illustrated throughout, the collection uniquely uncovers the agendas that Shakespeare has been enlisted to support (and critique) at times of great national crisis and loss. 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

Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in The Inhumans and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024) you'll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy's satirical novella about a lost race of Bengali supermen in Uganda. Also included are Jagadananda Ray's “Voyage to Venus” (1895), Nanigopal Majumdar's “The Mystery of the Giant” (1931), and Manoranjan Bhattacharya's “The Martian Purana” (1931). The stories were selected and translated by Dr. Bohdisattva Chattopadhyay. 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 Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America (Princeton UP, 2023), Korey Garibaldi explores interracial collaborations in American commercial publishing—authors, agents, and publishers who forged partnerships across racial lines—from the 1910s to the 1960s. Garibaldi shows how aspiring and established Black authors and editors worked closely with white interlocutors to achieve publishing success, often challenging stereotypes and advancing racial pluralism in the process. Impermanent Blackness explores the complex nature of this almost-forgotten period of interracial publishing by examining key developments, including the mainstream success of African American authors in the 1930s and 1940s, the emergence of multiracial children’s literature, postwar tensions between supporters of racial cosmopolitanism and of “Negro literature,” and the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements on the legacy of interracial literary culture. By the end of the 1960s, some literary figures once celebrated for pushing the boundaries of what Black writing could be, including the anthologist W. S. Braithwaite, the bestselling novelist Frank Yerby, the memoirist Juanita Harrison, and others, were forgotten or criticized as too white. And yet, Garibaldi argues, these figures—at once dreamers and pragmatists—have much to teach us about building an inclusive society. Revisiting their work from a contemporary perspective, Garibaldi breaks new ground in the cultural history of race in the United States. Korey Garibaldi is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 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

The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author (PostHill Press, 2024) by Rebecca Rego Barry is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books annually, she was dubbed “about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the US.” On top of that, Wells wielded her pen in just about every literary genre, producing several immensely popular children’s books and young adult novels; beloved anthologies; and countless stories, prose, and poetry for magazines such as Thrilling Detective, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. All told, Wells wrote over 180 books. Some were adapted into silent films, and some became bestsellers. Yet a hundred years later, she has been all but erased from literary history. Why? How? This investigation takes us on a journey to Rahway, New Jersey, where Wells was born and is buried; to New York City’s Upper West Side, where she spent her final twenty-five years; to the Library of Congress, where Carolyn’s world-class collection of rare books now resides; and to many other public and private collections where exciting discoveries unfolded. 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 American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Dr. Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organisations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War. 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

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yellow Book. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journal The Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, Dr. Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favoured men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease and unwanted pregnancy. 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

Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. In The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900 (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution. Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts. In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies