New Books in Literary Studies

In this episode, I interview Cassandra Falke, professor of English Literature ad UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, about her book The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016). In the text, Falke situates herself within the current revival of the interest in ethics in literary criticism, which coincides with a rise in neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion that similarly have been incorporated into literary studies. Aware of these recent developments, Falke argues that literary study must ground itself philosophically—rather than just scientifically—in order to speak convincingly about literature’s relationship(s) to our ethical lives. To do this, The Phenomenology of Love and Reading recasts French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s articulations of a phenomenology of love onto the event of reading. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything—more than cognition and more than being itself. Falke shows through deft readings of both philosophical and literary texts, as well as ruminations on the experience of reading, how the act of reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits—attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Howard Sherman's Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's Our Town in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) provides a fascinating tour of contemporary productions of Wilder's great play. Why does this play from 1938 continue to speak to contemporary audiences, and how does it speak differently in different settings? How is it both timeless and continually timely? And how have contemporary stagings dealt with its reputation as a wholesome, dull chestnut? Whether performed in a maximum security prison, at a hospital, or at prestigious theatres like Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, Our Town communicates a universal message about paying careful attention to the small details of life. The "our" of its title refers not just to fictional Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, but to all of us. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Charles Hirschkind’s lyrical and majestic new book The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (University of Chicago Press, 2020) represents a profound work of retrieval that launches and executes a stinging rebuke of an ontology of Europe that presumes its exceptionalism. The central focus of Hirschkind’s study is Andalucismo, or a discursive, aesthetic, and political tradition that seeks to disrupt the alleged cleavage between medieval and modern Spain by recovering the deep and penetrating imprints of Muslim Iberia on contemporary Spanish society. To engage Spain’s Muslim and Jewish past not as a bygone and irrelevant relic but as indelibly entwined to the present requires a form of attunement to the past that is activated by the sensoria and suspicious of historicist rigor. In the course of this poetically charged book, one meets a range of thinkers from across the political spectrum, and travels in unexpected avenues of inquiry such as the centrality of Flamenco to Andalucismo. The Feeling of History combines piercing attention to the productive importance of the sensoria in encountering the past with an astonishingly lucid critique of dominant strands of the discipline of history. What emerges from this exercise is not only a richly textured interrogation of a hugely important though often lampooned tradition of Andalucismo, but also a politically urgent reconsideration of modern secular conceptions of how the past must engage and make claims on the present. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize. His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his pathbreaking graphic novel, Berlin (Drawn and Quarterly, 2018), Jason Lutes creates a multifaceted exploration of urban life during the Weimar Republic. The book contains a variety of mostly fictional characters, all of whom capture aspects of the political, cultural, and social life of Berlin during the final years of Germany’s first democratic experiment. Beautifully drawn, this work provides a compelling alternative to readers used to reading only textual accounts of the period. Much the narrative revolves around two characters: Marthe Müller and Kurt Severing. The former is an art student from Cologne, spending time in Berlin. The latter is a journalist and keen observer of Weimar politics. The journey of these two characters as well as many others reveals much about the specific situation in Germany during this era as well as elements of the human condition. The novel appeals not only to the increasing number of graphic book readers, but also to anyone interested in the failure of Weimar democracy, the nature of popular culture during the 1920s, and the history of sexuality. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In their co-edited volume, Ms. Marvel’s America: No Normal (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Jessica Baldanzi and Hussein Rashid focus on the superhero Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan. The first Muslim superhero to headline her own series, the teenager Kamala Khan is also a second-generation Pakistani immigrant who lives in New Jersey. Her complex identities and storyline in the comic world of Marvel welcomes a multifaceted exploration, one that exists at the nexus of religion, gender, culture, race, and much more. By bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines including literature, cultural studies, religious studies, pedagogy, and communications, the edited volume engages in a fascinating conversation around the character of Ms. Marvel. The book contains accessibly written essays from and about diverse voices on an array of topics, such as fashion, immigration, history, race, and fandom. The volume also includes an exclusive interview with Ms. Marvel author and cocreator G. Willow Wilson by gender studies scholar Dr. Shabana Mir. This text is a fantastic classroom resource that can work in numerous courses on Islam, such as those that focus gender or American Islam to broad courses on religion, such as religion and popular culture. The text is also useful text for educators, such as those in primary and secondary school, who may want to incorporate Ms. Marvel in their own curriculum. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Michelle Kundmueller, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Old Dominion University, presents a thoughtful analysis of both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in her analysis of how we might want to think about human excellence and human failings not only in classical literature, but in our own time. In Homer's Hero: Human Excellence in the Iliad and the Odyssey (SUNY Press, 2019), Kundmueller, a political theorist, brings together literary texts and classic political theory texts, most notably Plato’s Republic, to shape her reading of the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Kundmueller argues that we should read these two Homeric texts together, and that we can learn from both of them, given the distinct emphasis in each text on human excellence, but also on human failings, and how the texts emphasize the public and the private, and the attraction that each sphere holds. Homer’s Hero shows the intertwined relationship between the Iliad and the Odyssey, not as the continuation of a story per se, but as reflective of each other, tracing themes and concepts that are presented as connected but differently emphasized by the heroes central to each text. The thrust of the Iliad is the question that surrounds the love of honor and the value this love provides for the individual and for the society. This theme is braided into the Odyssey, but is not the thrust of the Odyssey, which is more focused on the desire and longing for home and for human community. These themes are woven through both texts, as Kundmueller explains, but each text has a greater emphasis on its particular theme. These themes are as important to us today as they were when Homer was singing these tales in ancient Greece. And Homer’s Hero helps us think about these broader themes as it also compels the reader to consider how these heroes, but Odysseus in particular, embody human excellence, or fall short in trying to reach that capacity. Finally, Homer’s Hero explores how these themes and ideals are connected to the concept of politics, especially our thinking about what it is that politics provides for us, as citizens in community. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different. In Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place (U Chicago Press, 2019), Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history. Tim Cresswell is the Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place was published in 2019 by the University of Chicago 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

Matthew A. Vogan, who has published several books on the religious history and literature of seventeenth-century Scotland, and several editions of works by Covenanter preachers and theologians, talks today about his latest project. David Dickson’s sermons on the Old Testament book of Lamentations were recorded in manuscript by one of his listeners in 1628. Since then, the notes have remained in private hands, most recently in the possession of the library of the University of Glasgow, where Dickson taught. In Sermons on Jeremiah's Lamentations (Reformation Heritage Books, 2020), Vogan (with Chris Coldwell) has edited these notes, presenting modern readers with an accessible and carefully annotated edition of an important sermon series from one of the most influential early modern Scottish theologians. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

During the nineteenth century, the grand hotel emerged as a vital part of London life. Originally catering to elite visitors needing a place to stay in the short term, they soon came to perform a variety of roles in the social and cultural life of the city. In Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories (The Ohio State University Press, 2019), Barbara Black describes what these majestic establishments represented to those who worked in them and those who patronized them. As she explains, hotels embodied a convergence of various trends, as steam locomotives brought an increasing number of affluent travelers to the capital. What the grand hotels offered them was a temporary fantasy of luxury in an environment that was neither public nor private but one that offered a mixture of the two. For some, hotels were a place of mystery and potential danger; for others, a destination where they could engage in behavior that would otherwise be restricted in public. Though many of these grand hotels have been demolished or repurposed, their legacy lives on in the literature of the era – an enduring testament to the impression they left upon their age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his exciting and thorough book, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur'an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam (Oxford, 2020), Michael Pregill explores the biblical and Qur'anic episode of the golden calf as understood by various Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. The incident refers, of course, to when the Israelites created a golden calf in the absence of the Prophet Musa. Pregill shows that the episode's various interpretations across time reflect the cultural, religious, ideological, social, textual, and other contexts in which the issue was being discussed. Each community sought to legitimate its own existence, theology, and tradition through its interpretation. So, for instance, the episode is central to Jewish and Christian arguments over the inheritance of the covenantal legacy of Israel. Each community also appropriates and subverts the apologetic renderings and tropes of the other communities, not passively accepting or rejecting but strategically negotiating with it to adapt to new contexts. The episode therefore becomes crucial for the community’s self-identification. More specific to Islam is a key component of his argument that while western academic scholars draw heavily from the tafsir tradition, they fail to situate the episode in its historical context in the late antique milieu. In our discussion today, Pregill describes the golden calf episode at length from biblical and Qur’anic perspectives. He summarizes some of the major arguments and contributions of the book, identifies scholars with whom he is in conversation, discusses the status of Qur’anic studies today, reflects on the identity of the mysterious Samiri in the Qur’anic version, emphasizes the recent diminished importance and the dire need of exploring tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) in the study of Islam, explains the relationship between western scholars of Islam (or the Qur’an specifically) and classical Muslim exegetes, and a lot more. Shehnaz Haqqani is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Islamic Studies with a focus on gender from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her dissertation research explored questions of change and tradition, specifically in the context of gender and sexuality, in Islam. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

On this episode, I interview Mario Telò, professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about his new book, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. In the text, Telò examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy locates the tragic genre's aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life and death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. In so doing, Telò forges a new model of tragic aesthetics. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Decades before he wrote his epic work Paradise Lost, John Milton was an active republican and polemicist. How Milton came to espouse such radical views is just one of the key themes of Nicholas McDowell’s Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (Princeton UP, 2020), the first book of a projected two-volume biography of the famous author. The son of a prosperous scrivener, Milton enjoyed the benefits of a quality education heavily influenced by Italian humanism. This extensive instruction in foreign languages and classical authors was viewed by Milton as a necessary requirement for a career as a poet, one to which he dedicated himself during his time at university. Yet as McDowell demonstrates Milton’s Puritan faith also played an important role in his intellectual development, especially as he found his beliefs increasingly at odds with the emerging Laudian influence on the Anglican church. This motivated the young intellectual to write a series of pamphlets after his return from a lengthy trip to France and Italy in 1638-9, works which signaled his growing engagement with politics on the eve of England’s plunge into a devastating civil war in the 1640s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to Michael Gorra about his new book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020). This episode touches on two of William Faulkner’s novels in particular: The Sound and the Fury as well as Absalom, Absalom! It considers the role of memory and history, Faulkner’s alcoholism, the sexual exploitation practiced by plantation owners, and the greater presence of Nathan Bedford Forrest over Robert E. Lee in Faulkner’s fiction writings. Ties to today’s reckoning for racial justice is a part of the episode, too. The author of Portrait of a Novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Gorra is a Professor English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.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

Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge: British Printscape’s Innovations, 1688-1832 (Brill, 2020) explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the British networks of publishers, printers, copyright-holders, readers and authors. This transdisciplinary volume skilfully recovers innovations and practices in the book trade between 1688 and 1832. It investigates how print circulated information in a multitude of sizes and media, through an evolving framework of transactions. The authority of print is demonstrated by studies of prospectuses, blank forms, periodicals, pamphlets, globes, games and ephemera, uniquely gathered in eleven essays engaging in legal, economic, literary, and historical methodologies. The tight focus on material format reappraises a disorderly market accommodating a widening audience consumption. Louisiane Ferlier, Ph.D. (2012, Université Paris Diderot), is the Digital Resources Manager at Centre for the History of Science at the Royal Society. She has published articles on John Wallis, the Bodleian Library and cross-Atlantic circulation of books. Bénédicte Miyamoto, Ph.D. (2011, Université Paris Diderot), is Associate Professor of British History at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She has published on eighteenth-century drawing manuals, sales catalogues and art markets. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at King’s College London. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, John Winthrop's famous phrase, "We shall be as a city upon a hill," has become political creed and rallying cry for American exceptionalism. But for over three centuries the text of Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" was largely forgotten in the American textual canon. In a charming book of textual history, the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Daniel T. Rodgers, tells a fascinating tale with surprising twists and turns about how an obscure Puritan treatise became indispensable political rhetoric for late-twentieth-century American politics and into the new millennium. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America's Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton University Press, 2018) traces Winthrop's model from its seventeenth-century context, through centuries of neglect and forgetfulness, to its unlikely and meteoric rise as a foundational text of the American idea. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this interview, I talk with Dora Zhang, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, about her book Strange Likeness: Description in the Modernist Novel, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. While description has been “near universally devalued” in literary thinking, and particularly in Modernism, Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers. She focuses on the works of Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust to investigate how modernist descriptive techniques shift from a transcription of visuals to a translation and revelation of relations—social, formal, and experiential—between disparate phenomena. These writers maintained realism’s descriptive intentions to empirically document the world but expanded these commitments in new ways to render immaterial phenomena into language. In doing so, Zhang carries us beyond the classic dichotomies between narration and description and definition and description in order to rethink description and its place in the novel and, more broadly, literature. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Teaching in Times of Crisis: Applying Comparative Literature in the Classroom (Routledge, 2021) explores how comparative methods, which are instrumental in reading and teaching works of literature from around the world, also provide us with tools to dissect and engage the moments of crises that permeate our contemporary political realities. The book is written in the form of a series of classroom reflections—or memos—capturing the political environment preceding and proceeding the 2016 US presidential election. It examines the ways in which the ethics involved in reading comparatively can be employed by teachers and students alike to map and foster "lifelines for cultural sustainability" (to borrow the term from Djelal Kadir’s Memos from the Besieged City) that are essential for creating and maintaining a healthy multicultural society. Nyawalo achieves this through comparative readings of postcolonial films, LGBTQ texts, French slam poetry, as well as episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation, among other materials. The classroom reflections captured in each memo are shaped by the Appalachian setting in which the discussions and lessons took place. Inspired by this setting, the author develops pedagogic ethics of comparison—a method of reading comparatively—which privileges the local educational spaces in which students find themselves by mapping the contested cultural politics of Appalachian realities onto a world literature curriculum. Mich Yonah Nyawalo is an Associate Professor of Critical Ethnic, Black/Race Studies at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. His areas of specialization are globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, African literatures (including audio and visual cultures from the continent), media studies, critical pedagogy, and service learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden, and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African diaspora, and African-American studies. Some of the classes he teaches include World Literature, Black Transnationalism, Comparative Feminist Literature, Comparative Queer Theory and Literature, Introduction to Media and Culture, Graphic Novels and Animation, as well as Video Games and Virtual Worlds. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sailor Song: The Shanties and Ballads of the High Seas (University of Washington Press, 2020) by performer and scholar Gerry Smyth includes lyrics and commentary for dozens of sea shanties, as well as a brief history of the genre. The world that emerges in these 19th century sailor songs is surprisingly multi-cultural; in a sense, sea shanties were the first sonic products of globalization, combining African-American work songs, Irish ballads, and English folk tunes. This book is designed to be used by performers and ensembles looking for singable versions of these ribald and entertaining songs. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Olena Palko’s Making Ukraine Soviet: Literature and Cultural Politics under Lenin and Stalin (Bloomsbury Academic Press 2020) offers an intriguing investigation that zeroes in on the intersection of history and literature, politics and literature. The main focus of the book is comprised of two iconic figures in the history of Ukrainian literature: Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Khvyl’ovyi. Through a complex and multilayered investigation of archival materials and historical documents, Olena Palko further advances the understanding of the formative years in the history of Soviet Ukraine. The two protagonists around whom the book seems to revolve offer additional venues for unraveling the highly entangled history not only of Ukraine under the Soviet Union but also of the Soviet Union itself. The theoretical framework of the book allows to consider multiple developments and influences that contributed to the specificity of the Soviet establishment in Ukraine. As the author of the book emphasizes, the conversation about the Soviet years in Ukraine asks not only for scrupulous reading of various documents but also for the acceptance of inherent ambiguities that the Soviet presence brought forth in Ukraine and beyond. Making Ukraine Soviet highlights the entangled and contested political and historical developments that took place in Soviet Ukraine, particularly during the first decade of the USSR; it also invites the readers to look at the writings by Tychyna and Khvyl’ovyi as an additional venue to not only better understand the milieu in which the writers worked but to also see how their writing responded to the environment that within a few years underwent profound and drastic changes. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer & Poetry in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2020) by Niloofar Haeri is a stunning and absorbing ethnography of the lived ritual experiences of contemporary Iranian women. The place of Persian poetry, especially in the tradition of erfan or mysticism, is central to many features of Iranian life, be it in school curriculum for children, who learn to recite these poems when they are young, or at family gatherings over meal. Poetry, particularly, informs other aspects of ritual life, namely prayer or namaz, and do’a (supplication). By capturing conversations that unfold during Qur’an and poetry classes, Haeri showcases how a group of educated, middle-class women encounter, engage, and embody the lived legacies of classical poetry of Rumi, Hafez, Saadi and many more in their day to day lives. In highlighting these intimate moments of conversation with God (do’a) or through the use of prayers composed by the Imams, Haeri highlights how prayer and ritual acts ebb and flow through affective moments of life while being subjected to intellectual challenges by its supplicant. Ritual life for these Iranian women is not rote or stale, but rather richly complex, deliberate, and emotive, challenging how we approach religious debates that are seemingly persistent in the landscape of Iranian society while further disrupting the use of simple binaries of secular-sacred or private-public when discussing gendered Muslim piety. This book will be of interest to those who think and write about ritual life in Islam, ethnography, Iran, Shi‘ism, gender, and much more. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at [email protected]. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Although nearly every other television form or genre has undergone a massive critical and popular reassessment or resurgence in the past twenty years, the game show’s reputation has remained both remarkably stagnant and remarkably low. Scholarship on game shows concerns itself primarily with the history and aesthetics of the form, and few works assess the influence the format has had on American society or how the aesthetics and rhythms of contemporary life model themselves on the aesthetics and rhythms of game shows. In Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), author Mike Miley seeks to broaden the conversation about game shows by studying how they are represented in fiction and film. Writers and filmmakers find the game show to be the ideal metaphor for life in a media-saturated era, from selfhood to love to family to state power. The book is divided into “rounds,” each chapter looking at different themes that books and movies explore via the game show. By studying over two dozen works of fiction and film—bestsellers, blockbusters, disasters, modern legends, forgotten gems, award winners, self-published curios, and everything in between—Truth and Consequences argues that game shows offer a deeper understanding of modern-day America, a land of high-stakes spectacle where a game-show host can become president of the United States. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to care for your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: differences between trade books and monographs, how to translate academic scholarship for wider audiences, risks and rewards of writing for trade, and trade books as a means to address justice issues related to access to knowledge and audience hierarchies. Our guest is: Dr. Donna Freitas, a longtime researcher and scholar on topics related to sex on campus, Title IX, and sexual assault. She has spoken about her work at more than 200 colleges and universities across the United States. Donna is also the author of many books, both fiction and nonfiction, among them, Consent on Campus: A Manifesto (Oxford University Press) and Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention (Little, Brown). She has appeared on NPR, The Today Show, and many other radio and news programs to talk about her research, and her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal among other places. Her novel, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano will be published in April 2021 by Pamela Dorman Books/Viking in over twenty countries and languages. She lives in Brooklyn. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher ed scholar and practitioner. Dana was a follower and admirer of Donna’s work for many years and had the good fortune to connect with her in person when Donna served as a reviewer for Dana’s book, From Single to Serious (Rutgers UP). Things that make Dana’s heart happy include making delicious, healthy food, yoga, and wandering the coastline of the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Freitas, D. (2017). The Happiness Effect: How Social Media is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost. Oxford University Press. Freitas, D. (2010). Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campus. Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in twelfth-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early seventeenth century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work of Chinese fiction more important to both the development of early modern Japanese literature and the Japanese imagination of China than The Water Margin. In The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon (Columbia UP, 2019), William C. Hedberg investigates the reception of The Water Margin in a variety of early modern and modern Japanese contexts, from eighteenth-century Confucian scholarship and literary exegesis to early twentieth-century colonial ethnography. He examines the ways Japanese interest in Chinese texts contributed to new ideas about literary canons and national character. By constructing an account of Japanese literature through the lens of The Water Margin’s literary afterlives, Hedberg offers an alternative history of East Asian textual culture: one that focuses on the transregional dimensions of Japanese literary history and helps us rethink the definition and boundaries of Japanese literature itself. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese Cultural and Literary History, University of Arizona Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Nerdfighteria started over a decade ago by brothers Hank and John Green who decided to provide literacy themed programming on their website and YouTube channel. With almost three million members, Nerdfighteria is more than just a space for fans to talk about the work of John Green and other young adult authors. In her new book, Narratives, Nerd Fighters, and New Media (University of Iowa Press, 2020), Jennifer Burek Pierce explores the ways the media platforms created by the Green brothers have become spaces for fans to not only learn about the writing of John Green, and more recently his brother Hank as well, but to also share their own fan art and make connections with one another. Burek Pierce examines the ways in which readers use videos and other activities to engage authors and other readers. Nerdfighters are readers and Burek Pierce's work examines not only the online community they have created, but how this community tells us about reading in the digital age. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Anthony Valerio's Before the Sidewalk Ended: A Walk with Shel Silverstein (Daisy H. Productions, 2020) is a startling portrait of the great writer of children's books, songs and plays Shel Silverstein. What he was like as a man and a friend. What interested and inspired him. Some of the women in his life. The loving, often hilarious relationship between Shel Silverstein and Anthony Valerio depicted in these pages entertains as much as informs. Take a ground-breaking walk beside them through Greenwich Village on a routine workday, their stops, their conversations. Lending beauty and life to this charming memoir of an historical time and place are never before seen photos by the great graphic artist and photographer Dave Barry. About Anthony Valerio, Shel Silverstein wrote: "He knows his people. He knows his craft. He gets in, tells his story and gets out. It's what good writing should be." 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 Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic: Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso (University of Delaware Press, 2019), Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divine Comedy, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies. Gerry Milligan is Professor of Italian at the College of Staten Island, where he serves as Director of Honors. He is Professor in Italian and Global Early Modern Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mark Nowak's Social Poetics (Coffee House Press, 2020) is a history of the poetry workshop "from below and to the left." Inspired by previous workers' poetry workshops led by writers like June Jordan and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Nowak's book traces the history of worker poetry both in the US and abroad. It also details Nowak's own involvement with workers' poetry workshops held with autoworkers facing layoffs, farm workers in Hudson Valley, and metal workers in South Africa. Nowak shows that poetry is not a luxury for the elite, but a vital tool in describing working class lives and in imagining a classless future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Myroslav Shkandrij’s Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine, 1910-1930: Contested Memory (Academic Studies Press, 2019) offers an insight into the development of the Ukrainian avant-garde, a topic which still remains unjustifiably understudied. The book is an important contribution to the reevaluation of the artistic legacies of the world-renowned artists: Kazimir Malevich, David Burliuk, Mykhailo Boichuk, Vadym Meller, Ivan Kavaleridze, and Dziga Vertov. As the title of the book prompts, the focus is made on the Ukrainian heritage and background that the above-mentioned artists manifested in and through their works. Here Shkandrij initiates an intervention into the scholarship that for many years dismissed the Ukrainian contribution when discussing the avant-garde development. Drawing attention to national and ethnic choices that the artists used to make, but which happened to be silenced or ignored in the subsequent critical reviews and investigations, the book, however, does not suggest to embrace a one-sided approach. Shkandrij balances the local and international contexts when outlining the Ukrainian color of the avant-garde artists that became recognized world-wide. Avant-Garde Art in Ukraine provides complex and multilayered milieus that help better understand how the Ukrainian pattern became to be dismissed or devalued in the conversations about the international avant-garde. The book welcomes a multifaceted approach to the discussion of how the artists developed their techniques, which seem to have responded to a multinational and multiethnic environment which appeared authentic for Ukraine at the beginning of the twentieth century. The subtitle of the book—contested memory—is a welcoming gesture towards further investigations of the Ukrainian avant-garde, which appears to be inherently grounded in a diversity of influences and overlaps that establish deep cultural bonds with the international movement. 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 preface to Robin Mitchell's new book, Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Georgia Press, 2020) moves me. In it, the author tells the story of her first research trip to Paris and the profound moment of her encounter with a plaster cast of Sarah Baartmann's body at the Musée de l'Homme. It is riveting, personal, and honest, the perfect entry into a book that is all of these things. Exploring the cultural production of French representations of three extraordinary Black women (Baartmann, Ourika, and Jeanne Duval), the book interrogates the visual and literary imaginaries that white French men and women developed in relationship to these women's lives and bodies. Subjected to a perverse "scientific" fascination, Baartmann's body became "famous" throughout and beyond France as white gazes and fantasies sexualized and pathologized her for years until she died. Brought to France from Senegal by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, Ourika became the subject of what Mitchell characterizes as a cultural consumptive "mania" that both emulated and rejected her story and the possibilities of her "Frenchness". The lover and common law wife of poet Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval lived an entire life in France, but could never be "French enough." Marked and minoritized by their racial difference, all three women became sites of fixation and memory for a white population seeking/needing constant shoring up of their gendered and racialized identities, and a society haunted by loss and defeat in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The book is so beautiful, so clearly written, so overflowing with injustice, meaning, and feeling. And Mitchell's voice is there throughout, finding and honouring the voices and lives of these women. It is a book for everyone. 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 its empire. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009). Her current research focuses on the history of French nuclear weapons and testing since 1945. Her most recent article, ‘“No Hiroshima in Africa”: The Algerian War and the Question of French Nuclear Tests in the Sahara’ appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of History of the Present. She lives and reads on the unceded traditional territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples known as Vancouver, Canada and hopes all listeners are keeping healthy and safe at this difficult time in our world. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email ([email protected]). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom (Routledge, 2018) proposes a way of constructing hidden psychological narratives of popular film and novels. Instead of offering interpretations of classic films, Trevor C. Pederson recognizes that the psychoanalytic tradition began with making sense of the seemingly inconsequential. Here he turns his attention to popular films like Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987). While masterworks like Psycho (1960) are not the object of interpretation, Hitchcock's film is used as a skeleton key. The revelation that Norman Bates' character had been his mother all along, suggests a framework of reading a film as having symptom characters who are excised to create a latent plot. The symptom character's behavior or inter-relations are then transcribed to an ego character. This is a shift in the tradition of literary doubling from hermeneutic intuition to a formal methodology that generates data for the unconscious. Pederson continues the project of unifying competing schools into a single model of mind and offers clinical examples from his own practice for all its terms. Psychodynamic techniques that emphasize the importance of working with the body, the id, and the ubiquity of repetition are introduced. A return to Freud's structural theory, in which complexes are anchored in the stages of superego development, is used to carefully plot and explain the social nature of the superego and its relation to authority in society (secondary narcissism) and the otherworldly (primary narcissism). Discrete phases of superego development and their ties to both the social and the id revive the grand promises of classical psychoanalysis to link with every field in the humanities. Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as scholars of film studies and literature interested in using a psychoanalytic approach and ideas in their work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jenn Shapland's My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books, 2020) is a fascinating cross-genre book that combines elements of traditional biography with Shapland's own personal narrative of researching McCullers and discovering the many ways her life and McCullers' mirror each other. McCullers was a lesbian, but many of her biographers have shied away from this aspect of her life, referring to her partners as "friends" or "obsessions." Shapland's book is a bold work of historical reclamation, insisting we view McCullers as a queer writer and drawing attention to previously-obscured elements of queerness in her work. It is also a portrait of a vibrant queer community existing beneath the placid surface of mid-century America: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Gypsy Rose Lee, and W.H. Auden all make memorable appearances in its pages. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a must-read for fans of McCullers, but it will also be of interest to fans of cross-genre writers like Maggie Nelson, Eileen Myles, and Hilton Als. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2020) recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocates collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, Elam foregrounds theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way rather to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of imperial rule, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Aligning Frantz Fanon’s political writing with Erich Auerbach’s philological project, Elam brings together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought to demonstrate how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present. J. Daniel Elam is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Zifeng Liu is a PhD candidate in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. His dissertation examines Black left feminism and Mao’s China. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: an overview of the publishing process (from the author side), what makes a strong proposal, common mistakes to avoid when approaching a university press, and advice for both aspiring and seasoned authors. Our guest is: Kimberly Guinta, Editorial Director at Rutgers University Press. In addition to managing the editorial program for the press, she is responsible for acquiring books in the areas of Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Caribbean and Latin American Studies. Kim arrived at Rutgers University Press in 2015 from Routledge, where she spent 15 years acquiring in U.S. and Latin American History. Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher ed scholar and practitioner. She specializes in relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana met Kim Guinta in 2015 when Kim served as the acquiring editor for Dana’s book, From Single to Serious. Things that make Dana’s heart happy include making delicious, healthy food, doing yoga, having inspiring conversations, and wandering the coastline of the Jersey shore. Listeners to this episode might be interested in: Ask UP Publishing programs in NYC: Pace University NYU Columbia Rachel Toor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, columns on publishing From Dissertation to Book (2nd ed.) by William Germano Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (3rd ed.) by William Germano Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (updated ed.) by Beth Luey Handbook for Academic Authors (5th ed.) by Beth Luey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up in a conservative, middle-class family in Texas, Claire Myers Owens sought adventure and freedom at an early age. At twenty years old, she left home and quickly found a community of like-minded free spirits and intellectuals in New York's Greenwich Village. There Owens wrote novels and short stories, including the controversial novel The Unpredictable Adventure: A Comedy of Woman's Independence, which was banned by the New York Public Library for its "risqu " content. Drawn to ideals of selfactualization and creative freedom, Owens became a key figure in the Human Potential Movement along with founder Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, and became an ardent follower of Carl Jung. In her later years, Owens devoted her life to the practice of Zen Buddhism, moving to Rochester, NY, where she joined the Zen Center and studied under Roshi Philip Kapleau. She published her final book, Zen and the Lady, at the age of eighty-three. In Rivers of Light: The Life of Claire Myers Owens (Syracuse UP, 2019), Friedman brings well-deserved attention to Owen's little known yet extraordinary life and passionate spirit. Drawing upon autobiographies, letters, journals, and novels, Friedman chronicles Owens's robust intellect and her tumultuous private life and, along the way, shows readers what makes her story significant. With very few role models in the early twentieth century, Owens blazed her own path of independence and enlightenment. Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. She seeks the extraordinary in the ordinary, and reinterprets the historical narrative in both traditional and creative forms. She supports her work-life balance with long walks and her love of photography, which you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In the several decades since scholars in the humanities have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, including visualization methods to create charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other graphic displays of information. But are these visualizations actually adequate for the interpretive approach that distinguishes much of the work in the humanities? Information visualization, as practiced today, lacks the interpretive frameworks required for humanities-oriented methodologies. In Visualization and Interpretation, Johanna Drucker continues her interrogation of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, reorienting the creation of digital tools within humanities contexts. Johanna Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Studying the New Testament Through Inscriptions (Hendrickson Publishers, 2020)through Inscriptions is an intuitive introduction to inscriptions from the Greco-Roman world. Inscriptions can help contextualize certain events associated with the New Testament in a way that many widely circulated literary texts do not. This book both introduces inscriptions and demonstrates sound methodological use of them in the study of the New Testament. Through five case studies, it highlights the largely unrecognized ability of inscriptions to shed light on early Christian history, practice, and the leadership structure of early Christian churches, as well as to solve certain New Testament exegetical impasses. Jonathan Wright is a PhD student in New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @jonrichwright, or jonathanrichardwright.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, explores both of these questions, drawing on his earlier work theorising territory, as well as an extensive discussion of numerous works of Shakespeare. The book considers a range of subjects associated with the concept of territory, from the geo-politics of King Lear, the idea of sovereignty in King John, and power in Richard II, to questions of the body in Coriolanus, and ideas of calculation and measurement in The Merchant of Venice. Alongside Shakespeare’s relevance for understanding territory, territory offers a framework for alternative readings of Macbeth and Hamlet, and draws attention to often neglected or even completely ignored parts of Henry V. Fascinating and wide ranging, at the intersection of geography and English literature, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2020), the burning of books and the looting of archives has long been a tool for controlling access to information and the power that it offers. Many rulers throughout history have deliberately targeted libraries and archives for plundering and destruction, knowing that doing so limits the ability of their victims to benefit from the knowledge therein. Ordinary individuals have often engaged in similar actions on a smaller scale in an attempt to control public perceptions of themselves and how they will be remembered. Ovenden shows how these efforts highlight the role that libraries and archives have long served in society, both as repositories of information and as institutions that work to ensure that knowledge and the power that comes from it is available to everyone and not just the few who seek to limit it for their own benefit. 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. Stanley Rabinowitz once again immerses us into the world of ballet and Akim Volynsky with his book And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom (Oxford UP, 2019). In this interview, Rabinowitz discusses his path to this book which is a lovely addition to his first book on Volynsky as well as some sage advice in publishing manuscripts. Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked with Jack Zipes about a life in Folklore Studies, about some of his many publications, and about publishing fairy tales. Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota and has previously held professorships at New York University, the University of Munich, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1997 he founded a storytelling and creative drama program, Neighborhood Bridges, in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis that is still thriving in the elementary schools of the Twin Cities and in other cities of the United States. Most recently, in 2018, he founded a small publishing house called Little Mole and Honey Bear with the motto to unbury talented and neglected writers and illustrators of fairy-tale books from the interwar years 1919-1940 before he himself is buried. Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as he sailed with his father, Christopher Columbus, on Columbus’s final voyage to the New World, which was a journey of disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library to collect everything ever printed. Colon’s library was a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues—which was really the very first database for exploring a diversity of written matter. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522 set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, and such was a race against time in realizing a vision of near-impossible perfection. Dr. Edward Wilson-Lee teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, and medieval literature for University of Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020), Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets. “This book presents the reader with an original hypothesis and a very thorough recapitulation of theories of translation. These theories inform Brune’s analysis, but the analysis also adds its own voice to the chorus of studies dealing with translation. In this way, Creative Transformations provides a new way to understand translation and the position of Brazilian literature and culture in a global context.” — Leila Lehnen, author of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature Krista Brune is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Pennsylvania State University. Victoria Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire? The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell UP, 2020) argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "audacious raconteurs": skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. The book tells the stories of four Indian narrators who lived in colonial India: a Goan Catholic ayah, a Telugu lawyer from the Raju community, a Tamil brahmin archaeologist, and a librarian from the medara (basket-weavers) caste. These four Indian narrators, through their vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism, dismantle the ideological bulwark of colonialism—colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge. This book is open access. 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 Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the East, including the palace at Khartoum where General Charles Gordon was killed. ‘It was a sorry sight, a ruin. His blood still upon the staircase’. The Sudan, or more properly, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of the Sudan lasted from 1898 to 1956, and was one of many glimpses of the exotic that appeared in the Holmes stories. That Conan Doyle included the little vignette about Gordon reveals the place of the Sudan in the public consciousness of empire. In Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Lia Paradis explores the myriad ways in which the Sudan, whose internal politics were influenced and shaped by Britain, figured in metropolitan culture. Like many locales of empire, the Sudan influenced literature, perceptions of self, framed ideals of manhood, of nation, and of Britain’s place in the world. This book is a ‘biography of an administrative cohort’, a meticulous and fascinating recovery of a network of officials and civil servants whose immersion in Sudanese culture shaped how this remote and foreboding corner of Africa found its way into letters, newspapers, magazines, images and volumes that were eagerly consumed in London. Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This book offers the first extensive study of the dialogue form in the Mahābhārata. Despite its importance, the variety of uses and implications of dialogue in the Mahābhārata remain relatively unexplored, which leaves a significant gap in the understanding of this key work of Indian literature. Dialogue is a recurring and significant feature of Indian religious and philosophical literature generally, but nowhere is it explored more elaborately and more profoundly than in the Mahābhārata. Brian Black's In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata (Routledge, 2020), therefore, examines the details of some of the central dialogical encounters in the text, including, structural features; intra-textual relationships with other dialogues; implicit methods of reasoning; and potential avenues for a meaningful engagement with interlocutors beyond the text. This attention to the dialogue form not only brings out otherwise unexplored aspects of the text's teachings, but also highlights aspects of the Mahābhārata that will have particular relevance to modern readers. This is a fresh perspective on the Mahābhārata that will be of great interest to any scholar working in Religious Studies, Indian/South Asian religions, Comparative Philosophy, and World Literature. 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 Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2020), Catharine Abell draws our attention to the character of Emma Woodhouse. She is handsome, clever, and rich. Or, at least, that's what Jane Austen writes about her in her fictional novel Emma. But why should we consider this a work of fiction, if it says true things about 19th century England? And if it's a fiction, how should we understand and interpret its content? Do we need to know what Austen intended to understand what she says about Emma? And how can we judge the truth of claims about a fictional entity? Do these characters need to exist for us to talk about them? Abell answers these questions in a unifying account of the epistemology and metaphysics of fiction which engages with existing and influential theories. Fictions are institutions governed by rules. On this view, we understand the content of fictive utterances by convention, though we can draw inferences to the best explanation about those utterances to a work's interpretive content, such as why Austen wrote the way she did. For Abell, fictional entities exist in the same way that marriages and corporations do, created by utterances which follow institutional rules, so that we can think and talk about Emma's fictionally having lots of money, even if there was no person "Emma" who had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. Malcolm Keating is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit philosophy 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 (and 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

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores how antiblack racism lived on through the figure of the Chinese worker in US literature after emancipation. Drawing out the connections between this liminal figure and the formal aesthetics of blackface minstrelsy in literature of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, Caroline H. Yang reveals the ways antiblackness structured US cultural production during a crucial moment of reconstructing and re-narrating US empire after the Civil War. Ultimately, The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery shows how the Chinese worker manifests the inextricable links between US literature, slavery, and empire, as well as the indispensable role of antiblackness as a cultural form in the United States. Dr. Caroline Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Florida State University. She is currently working on a dissertation about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama’s Carnival celebrations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes: Essays in honor of Marko Pavlyshyn (Academic Studies Press, 2020) is an impressive volume of essays on a variety of topics and issues pertaining to Ukraine and Ukrainian studies. The volume is compiled to honor the contribution of Marko Pavlyshyn to the development and establishment of Ukrainian studies in Australia, as well as across the globe. The diversity of the book, on the one hand, is a metaphor of Marko Pavlyshyn’s work and research that covers a myriad of specific topics, which, however, contribute to the multidirectional study of Ukraine. On the other hand, a number of essays of the volume interact with the representation of Ukraine on both local and global levels. In this regard, the bilingualism of the project is rather eloquent: not only does it introduce Anglophone readers to Ukraine, it also opens up the Anglophone community to Ukrainian voices. Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes is a monumental academic project that helps outline the perception of Ukraine from multiple interdisciplinary angles. At the same time, the book is a significant educational endeavor that facilitates the establishment of inter-and trans-national dialogues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Conspiracy theories prove to be popular and widely-spread. As a rule, we do not tend to take them seriously, but it would be wrong to suggest that audiences are not intrigued by them. What can conspiracy theories communicate about those who engage with them and about those who are this way or the other implicated? With Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Keith A. Livers explores the conspiracy theory on the theoretical and practical levels. The book offers a solid background that helps historicize the conspiracy preoccupations in Russia. By connecting the conspiracy manifestations in Russian culture across the centuries, Livers successfully demonstrates how deeply engrained the conspiracy culture is in Russia. The book analyzes in detail a diverse cultural material that includes, among others, Pelevin’s and Bekmambetov’s works: by combining chronologically diverse material, Livers looks into and dissects the mechanism of the persistent sustainability of conspiracy culture in Russia. An inseparable part of the conspiracy theory is history, which appears to be part of political dimensions: this aspect is extensively commented on by Livers. Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination complicates the issue of conspiracy culture and brings it to the level of discussion that offers insights into the current position of the Russian Federation on the local and global levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies