New Books in 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 [email protected] 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

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

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

Part 3 starts with a discussion of general reading strategies to help you discover the poetic techniques and insights of any individual sonnet. It concludes with a close-reading of three sonnets from Professor Michael Schoenfeldt that show the extraordinary range of tone, emotion, and perspective in Shakespeare’s poems. Speeches and performers: Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (Ashley Byam) Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Jeff Cornell) Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (Amanda Harris) Sonnet 129, “Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (Amanda Harris) 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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2 focuses closely on the two major “characters” to whom the sonnets are addressed: a beautiful young man, and a woman described as black. You’ll learn how the speaker represents his relationship to these figures and his desire for them, and what significance those relationships might have had in Shakespeare’s culture, as Professor Michael Schoenfeldt discusses sexual identity and race in early modern England. Sonnets Included in Episode 2 Sonnet 20, “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted” (Ashley Byam) Sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever, longing still” (Jeff Cornell) 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 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 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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The sonnet — a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, conventionally associated with love — was one of the most popular poetic forms in late Elizabethan England. In 1609, Shakespeare published a sequence of 154 sonnets that radically reimagined the question of what love can mean, including the question of who one might desire and what the experience of desire might be like. In the course, you’ll learn about the structure and history of the sonnet, hear individual sonnets of Shakespeare’s performed and analyzed by world-class actors and literary scholars, and discover how gender, status, and race intersect to shape this sonnet sequence. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a history and overview of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence with commentary by Michael Schoenfeldt, John R. Knott, Jr. Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. You’ll learn about the sonnet form and how it came to England from Renaissance Italy, what attracted Shakespeare to this form, and what attracted audiences to Shakespeare’s poetry. You’ll also discover the literary mysteries surrounding the sonnets that have intrigued readers for centuries, and how Shakespeare took this traditional form in unexpected directions. 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 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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies