New Books in 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3 features close-readings from Professor Laurie Maguire of some of the play’s key speeches: Caliban’s extraordinarily lyrical description of the island; Prospero’s beautiful and disturbing evocation of theatre, and perhaps the world, coming to an end; and Prospero’s renunciation of his magic. Speeches and performers: Caliban, 3.2, “Be not afeard …” (Kelly Hunter, MBE) Prospero, 4.1, “Be cheerful, sir. Our revels now are ended …” (Anton Lesser) Prospero, 5.1, “You elves of hills …” (Dame Harriet Walter) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Professor Laurie Maguire, Part 2 explores the play’s many ambiguities — its uncertain geography, mental space, and genre — and how they reflect the play’s ethical ambiguities. Does Prospero contrast with or resemble the “foul witch” who was Caliban’s mother, or the brother who betrayed him for the sake of power? Is he a figure of spiritual regeneration or of colonization? We also look more closely at Prospero’s relationship with Caliban and with Ariel, another servant in bondage, who forces Prospero to look at his humanity in a new way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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

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

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

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