New Books in Literary Studies

Shengqing Wu’s gorgeous new book begins by exploring the image of the treasure pagoda to introduce readers to an aesthetics of ornamental lyricism in Chinese poetry at the turn of the twentieth-century. Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900-1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) then continues gorgeously, exploring practices and discourses of classical poetry in early twentieth-century China in beautiful prose that carries a powerful argument. Challenging some widespread assumptions about the practice of classical poetry in modern China, and simultaneously problematizing the relationship between the spoken and written word in modern Chinese literary discourse, Wu argues that Chinese lyric poetry from 1900-1937 saw the innovative development of a new aesthetic style, ideological commitment, and social practice in reaction to political, cultural, and historical necessities of the time. Paying careful attention to the formal aspects of these poems, the three main sections of Modern Archaics consider the relationship between history and lyricism in contexts of (1) historical trauma and loss; (2) the development of affective communities that treated lyric composition as an integral part of shared social practice; and (3) travel and translation. There’s also some wonderful material on gendered lyric composition and women’s history. It’s well worth reading for anyone interested in modern Chinese literature, the histories of poetry and/or translation, and literary theory. 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 Henry Stubbe and the Beginnings of Islam: The Originall and Progress of Mahometanism (Columbia University Press, 2014), Nabil Matar masterfully edits an important piece of scholarship from seventeenth-century England by scholar and physician, Henry Stubbe (1632-76). Matar also gives a substantial introduction to his annotated edition of Stubbe’s text by situating the author in his historical context. Unlike other early modern writers on Islam, Stubbe’s ostensible goals were not to cast Islam in a negative light. On the contrary, he sought to challenge popular conceptions that understood Islam in negative terms, and although there is no evidence that Stubbe entertained conversion, he admits many admirable characteristics of Islam, ranging from Muhammad’s character to the unity of God. The English polymath was well versed in theological debates of his time and therefore equipped all the more to write the Originall, given the benefit of his comparative framework, which in part explains why the first portion of his text devotes itself to the history of early Christianity. Strikingly, however, it seems that Stubbe never learned Arabic, even though he studied religion with a leading Arabist of his time, Edward Pococke. Indeed, one novelty of Stubbe’s work was precisely his re-evaluation of Latin translations (of primary texts) that were already in circulation. Stubbe’s contributions to scholarship also speak to the history of Orientalism–a word that did not yet exist at Stubbe’s time–or how scholars in the “West” more broadly have approached Islam. Stubbe’s Originall offers insights into present-day Western discourses that still struggle–at times with egregious incompetence–to make sense of Islam and Muslims. In this regard, Matar’s detailed scholarly account of Henry Stubbe and his carefully edited version of the Originall remains as timely as ever. Undoubtedly, this meticulously researched book will interest an array of scholars, including those from disciplines of English literature, History, and Religious Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Where does love come from and where will it lead us? Throughout the years various answers have been given to these questions. In Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God (Yale University Press, 2013), William Chittick, professor at Stony Brook University, responds to these queries from the perspective of the rich literary traditions of Islam. He reveals how some Muslims explained the origins, life, and goal of love through a detailed investigation of authors writing in Persian and Arabic mainly from the eleventh to twelfth centuries. For these authors, love is manifest through the relationship between God and creation in all of its various iterations. Commentary and explanation are drawn from numerous sources beginning with the Qur’an but most extensively from Rashid al-din Maybudi’s Qur’an commentary, Unveiling of the Mysteries, and Ahmad Sam’ani’sRepose of the Spirits. In our conversation we discussed the role of the Persian Muslim tradition, the cosmological roles of Adam and Muhammad, the centrality of the heart in the spiritual psychology, states and stations, the macrocosm and microcosm, and the suffering of separation. 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 Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Mark Rifkin, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and incoming president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, explores three of the most canonical authors in the American literary awakening–Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville–demonstrating how even as their texts mount queer critiques of the state, they take for granted–even depend upon–conceptions of place, politics and personhood normalized in the settler-state’s engagement with Indigenous peoples. Rifkin’s exegesis is relevant far beyond nineteenth-century literary studies. As “settler colonialism” gains currency in left and academic circles as a descriptor of the present reality in the United States, Canada, Israel and elsewhere, there is a tendency to identify its workings only in the encounter between the colonizers and the colonized, the state and Indigenous peoples. This is a mistake, Rifkin warns. None of the novels he interrogates deal specifically with Native people. Yet colonialism is not, he writes, a dynamic that inheres only Native bodies. Rather, it’s a persistent “phenomenon that shapes nonnative subjectivities, intimacies, articulations and sensations separate from whether or not something recognizably Indian comes into view.” Colonialism is thus a common sense. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Martin Joseph Ponce‘s recently published book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (NYU Press, 2012), traces the roots of Filipino literature to examine how it was shaped by forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Rather than focusing on race and nation as main categories of analysis, Ponce uses a queer diasporic reading to consider the multiple audiences for Filipino literature. In doing so, he explores alternatives to the nation as the basis for an imagined community, and focuses instead on sexual politics and the transpacific tactics of reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Known primarily as a travel writer thanks to the frequent assignment of her Diary in high school history and literature classes, Nun Abutsu was a thirteenth-century poet, scholar, and teacher, and also a prolific writer. Christina Laffin‘s new book explores Abutsu’s life and written works, taking readers in turn through her letters, memoirs, poems, prayers, and travel diary, among others. Each chapter of Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women: Politics, Personality, and Literary Production in the Life of Nun Abutsu (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013) looks at one of Abutsu’s literary products and considers how and why the document was produced and what it can tell us about the literary environment for thirteenth century Japanese women. Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women is careful to read these sources not as transparent guides to fact, but instead as narrative forms that were shaped by conventions of their respective genres. From the diary Fitful Slumbers to the poetry manual The Evening Crane and beyond, Laffin also pays special attention to Abutsu’s scholarly interpretations of The Tale of Genji. Laffin’s book is a fascinating and carefully-wrought story, and in re-situating Abutsu’s work within Japanese literary studies it also opens a space for renewed attention to medieval women’s writing more broadly conceived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.” But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.” It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay. Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before. Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles. It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else. LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do. LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.” So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own. LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?” But what if we what we know is nothing? In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing. It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that 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

How much do we really think about the technology that we spend so much time using? More specifically, have you really ever considered the possible effects that the use of technology like your laptop, tablet, cellphone, etc. has on your reading, writing, and overall production of materials? In her new book, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Lori Emerson, an assistant professor of English and founder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, examines how ever changing technology mediates between what we read, write, and otherwise produce. To do this, Emerson combines both media archaeology and literary studies, and examines the possible dangers of the constant moves towards “invisibility” of the technology, and the rhetoric surrounding buzz phrases like “ubiquitous computing” and “user friendly.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

1949 was a crucial year for modern China, marking the beginning of Communist rule on the mainland and the retreat of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. While many scholars of Chinese literature have written 1949 as a radical break, Xiaojue Wang‘s new book takes a different approach. Modernity with a Cold War Face: Reimagining the Nation in Chinese Literature across the 1949 Divide (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) offers a new perspective on mid-twentieth century Chinese literature by situating it within the international context of the Cold War. After introducing the cultural and political policies of the 1940s and 1950s as espoused by Mao Zedong, Chiang Kaishek, and the New Confucianists, Wang guides readers through a series of chapters that each explore the work of an author who was busily imagining a modern nation while writing from mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. These case studies introduce a collection of fascinating writer-characters that include a historian who had a job writing labels for museum collections, a born-again revolutionary whose feminist writing had material consequences that followed her (and her corpse) after death, a translator of Rilke and Goethe, a compulsive re-writer who created a Nightmare in the Red Chamber, and many more. In the culmination of the study, Wang suggests a “de-Cold War criticism” as a way of thinking beyond the typical boundaries of literary history. Enjoy! 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 As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford, 2012), historian Michael Saler explores the precursors of the current proliferation of digital virtual worlds. Saler challenges Max Weber’s analysis of modernity as the disenchanting of the world, and demonstrates that modernity is deeply “enchanted by reason.” Saler demonstrates this argument by examining a new phenomenon: adult engagement with and immersion in fictional worlds. He argues that from the 1880s, a growing number of individuals both in Britain and in the US were enticed by fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes to “communally and persistently” inhabit worlds of the imagination. Readers were drawn in particular to a new literary genre “The New Romanticism” that rose in Britain in the 1880s. The genre combined the objective style of realism with the fantastic content of romance. Novels such as “Drakula” and “Treasure Island” made the fantastic seem plausible through the use of scientific detail and the inclusion of maps, photographs and footnotes. Victorian readers had acquired a sophistication that enabled them to immerse themselves in the fiction while keeping an ironic distance from it. Their delight was derived from their awareness to the fabrication rather than from being deluded by it. In addition to a theoretical framework, Saler provides an in-depth and enjoyable exploration of the work of authors that dominated the genre, and of the communities they inspired. Three chapters explain contemporary fascination with the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R Tolkien. The chapters also elaborate the important role of readers in sustaining their success. As such they provide an important contribution to the history of fan culture. Finally, Saler offers a defense against labeling the engagement with imaginary and virtual worlds as escapism. He argues that imagined worlds should be valued as safe havens to reflect on the ‘real’ world and consider social and cultural change. A space to practice empathy and tolerance that teaches us to think of the world not in “just so” terms but through the more forgiving “as if” perspective. Imagined and virtual worlds are a reminder that the ‘real world’ too is a social construct that can and should be questioned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lucy Hughes-Hallett‘s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio is a book with a big mission: to write inventively about the life of someone with whom most everyone outside of Italy is entirely unfamiliar whilst also promoting the literary legacy of a man celebrated within his own country and little translated (much less read) everywhere else. In the end, Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War (Knopf, 2013) succeeds on both fronts, which is precisely why it remains one of the most lauded biographies of the last year. It’s not a straightforward day-by-day narrative. Rather, the story zooms in and out, taking flight and exuberantly soaring through whole weeks, months, years only to, at other moments, slow down to sensuously revel in the details of a weekend on the beach or an afternoon spent in bed. There’s something about this technique that beautifully mimics the ways in which we often reflect upon our own lives, with whole boring years blotted from memory whilst every single detail of a particularly haunting evening is eternally seared upon the brain. This is, I imagine, in large part why the book is such joy to read- because (at the risk of making sound simple something which very much isn’t) we’re reading the life of a flamboyant character written in much the same way we tend to think upon our own. d’Annunzio thought words, written well, could inflame nations and excite history and change the world. For him, writes Hughes-Hallett, “writing was a martial art.” Artistically, he was a poet, novelist, playwright and lover (the classification isn’t accidental- for d’Annunzio experienced love affairs as real relationships and literary creations), but also a soldier, flier, and politician. Those are the raw ingredients of his story. Superficially fascinating, to be sure, but it’s Hughes-Hallet’s mixing of them that so animates the biography of this short, bald man with narrow sloping shoulders and terrible teeth. And it’s the tensions that emerge through the telling that ensure that, even if you’ve never read a word of d’Annunzio’s poetry, his story sticks with you, which is a sign of an both a good book and an interesting life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert Mitchell‘s new book is wonderfully situated across several intersections: of history and literature, of the Romantic and contemporary worlds, of Keats’ urn and a laboratory cylinder full of dry ice. In Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Mitchell argues that we are in the midst of a vitalist turn in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, and that this is only the latest in a series of eras of what he calls “experimental vitalism.” Experimental Life is largely devoted to exploring the first of those eras by tracing an experimental vitalism through a wide range of Romantic textual worlds from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After a wonderful discussion of the meanings of the “experimental” in the arts and sciences, Mitchell’s book proceeds to look at a series of cases through which we can understand how Romantic thinkers sought out the points of perplexity in vital phenomena, encouraged that perplexity, and often did so by exploring “altered states” that seemed to confuse life and death. These altered states included suspended animation, disorientation, digestion and collapsurgence, mediality, and encounters with the uncanniness of plant life, and Mitchell’s treatment of each case is both beautifully articulated and full of unusual and illuminating juxtapositions. Ultimately, Experimental Life offers readers not just a way of understanding these Romantic contexts, but also engages each case in a way that informs how we think about contemporary biomedical sciences and biopolitics. Experimental Life has also just won the annual book prize for the British Society for Literature and Science. Congratulations, Rob! 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 Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), Christopher P. Hanscom explores literary modernism in the work of three writers who were central to literary production in 1930s Korea. After introducing a useful critique of the standard approach to literary history and realism therein, the book unfolds in three pairs of chapters that each introduce a major figure in the study and offer a close reading of their work as a way to open up a larger theme and aspect of the book’s argument. Hanscom thus expertly guides us through the literary criticism and fictional work of three members of a modernist collective known as the Group of Nine: Pak T’aewon, Kim Yujong, and Yi T’aejun. Each of them was struggling with a larger “crisis of representation” and taking a skeptical stance toward the capacity of language to correspond to the world beyond. In Pak’s work we were a concern with a colonial “double-bind;” in Kim’s work we see an ironic discourse and a critique of empiricism in science, love, and aesthetics; and in Yi’s work we see the emergence of a hybrid form of prose lyric that experiments with what it means to “write speech.” In conclusion, Hanscom uses the example of Korean modernism to open up the way we think of comparative literature and literary history more broadly. It is a fascinating study. 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 end of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth, Paris was a center for the publication of numerous English-language books, including many of a sexually explicit, pornographic nature. Colette Colligan‘s new book, A Publisher’s Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014) explores the rich and fascinating history of these “Paris editions” across seven decades of literary publishing in France, in English. Troubling too-simplistic notions of British prudishness versus French sexual liberalism and “high” versus “low” literatures, Colligan’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Paris’s expatriate past, a past that remains part of the city’s mythology to this day. The book includes discussion of the cultural, legal, and commercial sides of this story, as well as closer textual analyses of some key examples of “degraded” and high modernist literature. In its chapters, readers will be introduced to characters and works that may not be so well known, including the British expatriate publisher Charles Carrington (whose publishing credits include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1908). In addition to illuminating the lives of lesser known figures and texts, A Publisher’s Paradise also situates the history of “dirty books” published in the French capital to literary legends Sylvia Beach (the owner of the Parisian landmark English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Co. and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922) and Vladimir Nabokov (whose novel Lolita was first published by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris in 1955). The book will be a rewarding read to anyone interested in the histories of publishing, pornography, and/or Parisian cultural life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alex Haley’s 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family still stands as a memorable epic journey into the history of African Americans during the enslavement period and after. The 1977 televised miniseries was a must-watch event of the day, and it remains an important production in television history. However, a little more than a decade after his success, Haley was in trouble. His wealth had dwindled and he had strained relationships with other writers. What happened? Adam Henig tells us in his new book Alex Haley’s Roots: An Author’s Odyssey (2014). Listen to this lively interview with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert Darnton, author of books, articles, and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard. Darnton joins host Jonathan Judaken to discuss the future of libraries, the printed press, and his project – the Digital Public Library of America, or D.P.L.A. – which he hopes will foster a culture of “Open Access” to help promote the free communication of knowledge and sharing of intellectual wealth in order to create this “digital commonwealth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It’s always a joy when I have the opportunity to talk with the author of a book that is clearly a game-changer for its field. In The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation (Cornell University East Asia Series, 2012), Scott Cook has given us a work that will change the possibilities of researching, writing about, and teaching the history of early China and beyond. The book is a massive two-volume study, transcription, and translation of the bamboo texts recovered in 1993 from a tomb in the village of Guodian in Hubei Province. In an extensive introduction to the volumes and the project, Cook discusses the challenges and processes of sorting and arranging the texts, reading and interpreting the characters in Chu script, transcribing and interpreting the graphs, and translating the texts for Anglophone readers. The book considers some of the ways that the texts (individually and collectively) contribute to the history of Chinese philosophy in some exciting ways. It offers both a detailed transcription, translation, and introduction to each text complete with an extensive scholarly apparatus that situates the text in its intellectual and textual context, as well as a running translation of all of the Guodian texts (unencumbered by the extensive scholarly apparatus) for ease of use in an undergraduate classroom or for a casual reader. It’s an incredible accomplishment and a tremendously useful resource. Over the course of our conversation, we talked about the project as a whole, many of the individual texts, and the relationship between music (one of the themes emerging from some of the texts) and language. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Erin Khue Ninh is the author of Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (New York University Press, 2011), which in 2013, won the Literary Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Ingratitude investigates the figure of the daughter in Asian American literature, which has lately been dismissed as a figure that downplays political and historical conflict by fulfilling model minority achievement. Ninh responds to this view by seeing the immigrant family as a form of capitalist enterprise, and thus the Asian American daughter as a locus of conflicting power. Through literary analyses of texts by Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Evelyn Lau and others, Ninh explores the figure of the Asian American daughter as a debtor, whose obligation to the parents are always designated to fail, and whose rebellion comes in the form of sexual freedom and through the act of writing itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sandrine Sanos‘s new book, The Aesthetics of Hate: Far-Right Intellectuals, Antisemitism and Gender in 1930s France (Stanford University Press, 2013), examines the central roles that gender, sexuality, and race played in the far-right ideologies of the 1930s. Re-reading the work and ideas of a group of male intellectuals known as the Jeune Droite or “Young New Right,” Sanos argues that aesthetics and politics were deeply intertwined in these authors’ representations of a crisis of French civilization and in the antisemitic, racist, and misogynist responses they articulated. Figures like Maurice Blanchot and Louis-Ferdinand Celine were some of the most famous members of an intellectual movement that elaborated an “aesthetics of hate” in which Jews, women, and homosexuals figured as emblems of decadence and decline. The book also traces in fascinating ways some of the crucial links between French anti-Semitism and imperialism, examining connections between metropolitan and colonial racisms. While Sanos is careful to point out that hers is not a history of fascism per se, The Aesthetics of Hate makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the far-right in France and beyond. The book illuminates the intersections between gender, sexuality, and race in modern France, as well as the fundamental interdependence of French culture and politics through the twentieth century. An archaeology of some of the more repugnant political ideas of the 1930s, the book also has broader implications for our understanding of contemporary French expressions of cultural anxiety, racism, and hateful politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We all know the commonplace that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. After reading Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2012), I’m inclined to extend this wisdom to titles. Though accurate, Metawritings doesn’t capture the storytelling power that editor Jill Talbot gathers in this collection of essays and interviews by thirteen fiction and nonfiction writers. In it, you’ll find a piece by Robin Hemley that opens, “It’s my first full day in Prague, and I desperately want to find someone to pickpocket me.” Or this one by Sarah Blackman that begins, “Once a person has been a girl, it’s hard to write about the subject.” You’ll find a pithy investigation into dating and a poignant account of a son reckoning with an estranged, ageing father. You’ll find writers in pursuit of Janis Joplin and going on blind dates, writers wrestling with the soul-crushing ugliness of Las Vegas and exploring the exotic dangers of Adventure Island. You’ll discover whether or not there’s a dog at the end of the world. And yet Talbot’s title does do import work, because it alerts us to the artistic and even existential investigations that drive these pieces. “Metawriting” is writing that reflects on its own nature as writing, that calls attention to itself as an artificial creation. Metawriting makes the writer’s often invisible hand visible. You might think of Tristram Shandy in his Life and Opinions, constantly belaboring the fact that he can’t get on with the telling of his life, or Hamlet, waxing about the nature of players and playing, in the play that bears his name. Here, however, the genre is nonfiction, so the pieces in Metawritings strike at questions that involve us all. What’s a fact? What’s a lie? What’s at stake if I don’t know or can’t tell the difference? Who is this person that, most days, I think of as me? And how do all those ways I present myself to others, whether I’m face-to-face or on Facebook, capture who I am? To say it in a more “meta-” manner, just how do we go about making selves out of ourselves? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Julia H. Lee is the author of Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (New York University Press, 2011). Dr. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Interracial Encounters investigates the overlapping of African American and Asian American literature. By focusing on the diverse attitudes that blacks and Asian Americans had towards each other, Dr. Lee pushes against dominant conceptions of these groups as either totally cooperative or as totally antagonistic. Lee also explores how American nationalism was produced through this comparison, and shows how Afro-Asian representations allowed readers and writers to consider alliances outside of the American nation-state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

By any measure, David Tod Roy‘s translation The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 1-5 (Princeton University Press, 1993-2013) is a landmark achievement for East Asian Studies, translation studies, and world literature. Comprising 100 chapters rendered across five volumes, including more than 800 named characters and supported by more than 4,000 endnotes, Roy’s work is a massive accomplishment of textual analysis, writing, research, and translation. Luckily for readers, it’s also a huge pleasure to read. If you, Gentle Reader, are anything like me, you will regularly pause in your poring over the pages of The Plum in the Golden Vase to admire the subtlety and deftness with which Roy has chosen render vernacular Chinese into corresponding English prose, whether one of the characters is claiming to be “a real dingdong dame” or another is being called a “ridiculous blatherskite.” (Blatherskite!) Yes, there is a great deal of explicit sexual description in the work, but it’s a treasure-house of so much more than that, including detailed descriptions of aspects of daily life in the late 16th century that cover everything from food preparation to medicinal recipes to funerary procedures. It was a deep honor, and a pleasure, to talk with David Roy about his masterwork. I hope you enjoy listening to him and reading his translation as much as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The first comprehensive biography of famed Yiddish novelist, story writer and playwright Sholem Aleichem, Jeremy Dauber‘s welcome new book The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem: The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of the Man Who Created Tevye (Schocken, 2013) offers readers an encounter with the great Yiddish author himself. Dauber writes in the rhythm of the language of Sholem Aleichem – Mr. How Do You Do – brilliantly structuring the book as a drama, with an overture, five acts, and an epilogue in ten scenes. He assumes the voice of a theater impresario, talking to his audience, just as the author Sholem Aleichem did, narrating his stories and reading them to the crowds whom he loved to entertain. The author Sholem Aleichem, most famous for his Tevye stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, was no Tevye, but rather a sophisticated and educated cosmopolitan businessman and writer. He possessed immense curiosity about every man, a unique ear for interesting stories, and the ability to connect with his audience; these talents ultimately united his life with Tevye’s. Although he could very well write in Russian and Hebrew, ultimately he chose Yiddish, the most natural language of the people whom he loved, to tell his universal stories of tradition confronting modernity and the struggles of people to deal with change. Read this engaging and very well written book to learn more about Sholem Aleichem and fall in love with this man and his writings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It’s getting harder and harder to trailblaze in the field of American Studies. More and more, writers have to follow paths created by others, imposing new interpretations on old ones in never-ending cycles of revision. But Jonathan Daniel Wells did find something new: Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge UP, 2011; paperback, 2013) is the first to focus in on women journalists, both black and white, in the nineteenth-century American South. The South had a vital periodical marketplace where curious women could engage with politics, belles lettres, science, diplomacy, and other allegedly unfeminine subjects. Examining evidence from both writers and readers, Wells’s book asks questions about literary culture, celebrity, the limits of dissent, and North-South differences that readers will find refreshing and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It is a struggle sometimes in biography to find new ways to write about subjects about whom many biographies have been written. This is particularly pronounced in the case of iconic figures of the 20th century (think: Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Onassis, Elvis Presley, F. Scott Fitzgerald), and an area in which the partial life biography can play an interesting role. Whereas biographers have more traditionally opted for what we call “cradle-to-grave” narratives, the partial life biography instead offers a slice of a life- a particular period that is explored in-depth. Such is the case with Elizabeth Winder‘s Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953(Harper, 2013). Plath’s is a story most everyone knows, and yet her time working in New York as an intern in Mademoiselle has not previously been studied outside of the context of all that came after, which is surprising because it’s an interesting period but also because her experiences then formed the basis for what she would later write in The Bell Jar. The summer is of not just biographical interest, but literary significance as well. There is about Pain, Parties, Work an inevitable sense of clouds brewing- the summer will end, Plath will return home, and she will attempt suicide by taking pills and crawling under her mother’s house- but there’s also a sensation of joy: the joy of young women alone in a big city, experimenting with boys and clothes and make-up and work. Pain, Parties, Work is bolstered by the fact that Winder was able to secure interviews with many of Plath’s fellow interns, voices that have been notably absent in many of the earlier accounts and which lend an immediacy to a well-known story. The interviews with these women do much to flesh out the concrete details of the experience as well as Plath’s unique struggles within it. The Plath we have here is young and eager, fond of make-up and boys, and already displaying a rare gift for words. The clouds are on the horizon, yes- we all know that- but, in the meantime, the city and the thrill of discovery provide an intoxicating distraction. Summer is a time in which anything can happen. Reading Winder’s narrative and meeting Plath in this context, one feels that keenly: the excitement of a girl in the city, the hope and heat of New York, an electricity in the air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Henrietta Harrison‘s new book is the work of a gifted storyteller. In its pages, the reader will find Boxers getting drunk on communion wine, wolf apparitions, people waking up from the dead, ballads about seasickness, and flying bicycles. You will also find a wonderfully rich account of three centuries of Chinese history. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (University of California Press, 2013) explores the modern history of a single Catholic town in Shanxi called Cave Gully by weaving together some of the most important tales and memories of its inhabitants. Through this very local story of lived religious practice, Harrison challenges dominant global histories of Christianity. In contrast to narratives that tell a story of a Christian religion that was alien to Chinese contexts and acculturated or adapted in order t o compensate for this incommensurability, Harrison’s book instead shows the significant commonalities between Christianity and Chinese religious culture and argues that the differences between Catholic practice and local folk religion have actually increased over the centuries. Each chapter of the book begins with a folktale told by the villagers of Cave Gully, following its themes and events through an archive of written sources. The chapters collectively explore a wide range of issues, including local/missionary relations, the challenges and opportunities posed by long-distance travel in the 19thcentury, the economics of global Christianity, local encounters with the Boxer Uprising, and much more. Harrison shows how people of Cave Gully gradually came to see themselves as part of a global organization, examining the consequences of this transformation within the town and well beyond it. In addition to all of this, it’s also a darn good story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

One of the most crowded sections of the sports library is the one devoted to autobiographies and memoirs. The shelves here are constantly adding new titles, by both legends and bit players. For instance, the past week has brought the release of new memoirs by Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes and Olympic rower Katherine Grainger, as well as books by Dave Hanson, one the Hanson brothers of the cult hockey film Slap Shot, and some guy named Ace Cacchiotti, the keeper of the film archive of old NFL games. We also find in these stacks some of the most acclaimed sports books ever written, like Ken Dryden’s The Game, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and Beyond a Boundary by C.L.R. James, to name just a few. Yes, sports memoirs can be tedious rehearsals of sports platitudes. But, as we learn in this episode, there are quite a few that offer vivid perspectives and thoughtful reflections on the games we watch. In this special seminar episode of New Books in Sports we take a close look at sports memoirs. We learn about the art of the fan memoir from Dave Roberts, author of the acclaimed books 32 Programmes and The Bromley Boys, and from John Harms, founder and editor of the Footy Almanac, a popular site for fan writing in Australia. Literary scholar James Pipkin looks at the themes and literary devices common to the autobiographies of American athletes, while historian Robert Edelman tells us what he finds in the memoirs of sport stars from the old Soviet Union. We get recommendations of favorite sports memoirs from Glasgow journalist Teddy Jamieson and historians of British sport Victoria Dawson and Daryl Leeworthy. Meanwhile, Patrick Hruby of Sports on Earth tells us why he’s not a fan of athlete autobiographies. We hear from Sharda Ugra, senior editor at ESPN Cricinfo, about her experiences as a ghostwriter. And long-distance swimmer Lynne Cox talks about researching and writing her books, including her best-selling memoir Swimming to Antarctica. As with our other seminar episodes–on European football, the Olympics, and sports books for children–this is twice the length of a normal edition of New Books in Sports. But with more smart guests, and more sharp insights, and more good books, it’s worth a listen. Consider it a crash course in sports literature–packed into less time than the game of the week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

We all know the song. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” And now, thankfully, we all know the controversy; celebrating a perpetrator of genocide might say a few unpleasant things about the country doing the celebrating. But there is something that most Americans don’t know: Europeans had visited the continent at least half a millennium before Columbus. Remembered in two medieval tales known as the “Vinland sagas,” and in 1960 corroborated by a major archaeological discovery, Indigenous people–most likely the ancestors of today’s Wabanaki Confederacy, among others–encountered Norse Viking sailors sometime around 1,000 CE. This used to be common knowledge in the United States. In fact, at moments of heightened xenophobia, Anglo-Americans even celebrated America’s “Norse ancestry,” considering it a far purer lineage than the Italian Columbus. Such debates are just one of the collected national anxieties Annette Kolodny traces in her masterful new book, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Angl0-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press, 2012). Combining her unparalleled expertise in literary criticism, close collaboration with Mi’kmaq, Passamaquody and Penobscot communities, and the consultation of innumerable sources, Kolodny deepens our understanding of the “Vinland sagas” and explores what’s at stake in national origin stories in a colonial 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

One phenomenon of movies made of classic novels is that the movie often says a lot more about the time of its making than about the time of the novel. And so Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is more a depiction of a 2012 idea of the 1920s than a realistic depiction of the ’20s themselves. But what of the ’20s? These years are, today, so coated in mythology that they’re hard to imagine as a real time in which real people lived. The myths surrounding Fitzgerald and his novel are equally entrenched, but Sarah Churchwell‘s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of the Great Gatsby (Virago, 2013) goes a long way towards peeling back the layers that have accrued around all of this- the author, the novel and the time- to, in her words, “throw into relief aspects of the novel we no longer see.” Here, the world of the ’20s- a world that so often seems impossibly ephemeral- assumes solidity through small details: hem lengths, traffic signals, the brightness of the lights. Churchwell’s aim may, at first, seem nebulous- to capture what was in the air whilst Fitzgerald was writing the book, the atmosphere, the mood- but, in the end, it yields a surprisingly concrete portrayal of the writing process (a notoriously nebulous thing) and the origins of a masterpiece. Careless People isn’t the life of an individual. Rather, it’s the early life of a work- a strand of biography that continues to provide fresh ways of considering classic works, the people who wrote them, the times from which they sprung, what they might have meant then and what they might mean now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

You know you are not going to get the same old story about progressive literacies and education from Carmen Kynard, who ends the introduction to her book with a saying from her grandmother: “Whenever someone did something that seemed contradictory enough to make them untrustworthy, my grandmother simply called it runnin’ with the rabbits but huntin’ with the dogs.” Kynard persuasively illustrates throughout her book the extent to which progressive and liberal educationalists hold up progress toward truly liberatory education for African Americans and Latinos because they seek to please both rabbits and dogs in the 21st Century. In her own words, Kynard begins with this critique: “American schools and universities, through their scholarship and instructional designs, have often upheld a racial status quo alongside a rhetoric of dismantling it. These [are] not the workings of contradictory and confused individuals merely locked within their space and time. My grandmother understood that such contradictions happen inside of a totemic system. And once she pointed out that someone or something was runnin with the rabbits and huntin with the dogs, the expectation was that I would question the process and work to achieve an alternative awareness, ideological approach, and set of cultural practices” (19). Kynard is not taking the easy road. She looking calling out the racial double-tongue that characterizes the current educational discourse on cultural relevant teaching and learning. This is why a book such as this, which traces the histories, legacies, and influences of black protest movements (mostly student lead) on education and literacy is a must read now. Please listen in as I discuss this book with Kynard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In her book, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010), Stacy Alaimo approaches the concepts of “science, environment, and self” in an extremely novel and inventive way. The central concept in Alaimo’s work is that of “trans-corporeality” which she describes as a way of theorizing the relationship between humanity and the world at large as not being clearly delineated and separate, but as fluid. As this relates specifically to nature and the environment, Alaimo’s intention is for the reader to reimagine questions of environmental ethics and environmental practices as not isolated issues but rather deeply personal as the environment and our material selves are bound up with one another in a deeply intimate manner. I found Alaimo’s central approach with “trans-corporeality,” theorizing the human as being “already in the world,” extremely refreshing when compared to the idea of human agency in postmodern studies. In this way, Alaimo provides an alternate framework for conceiving of human agency, and thus an “out” of sorts, a release, from the bounds of postmodernism’s isolated and castrated human agent. Alaimo calls this novel direction, “New Materialisms.” With this concept, Alaimo offers new insights into feminist thought and theory. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self is sure to appeal to many students and scholars of literary studies and critical theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do you do if you accompany a friend on her research trip to Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center and end up finding a treasure trove of letters, news articles, hand written notes, and original drafts of nonfiction by one of your favorite authors? Keith Clark wrote a book. A truly insightful and wonderful one on the known but understudied Ann Petry. The title? The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). Those familiar with the work of Petry probably know her mid-century, naturalist novel The Street and probably place among the likes of Richard Wright. However, Clark expands our notion of Petry’s work, takes us on a journey that shows her work within other traditions, such as gothic, modernism and realism. He also shows her as a politically active figure, even writing letters to presidents. This book is a must read for any interested in any of the topics Clark undertakes, since he handles each with care, deft, and discernment. He’s equally loquacious and informative during our interview. Please, listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Patrick James is the Dornsife Dean’s Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. A self-described intellectual “fox,” James works on a wide variety of subjects in the study of world politics. But one of his latest books, co-authored with Abigail E. Ruane, breaks even his eclectic mold. The International Relations of Middle-Earth: Learning from the Lord of the Rings (University of Michigan Press, 2012), sheds light on both international-relations theory and Tolkein’s epic fantasy by bringing the two subjects together. Fans, students, and scholars alike will find much of interest — and much to argue about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What did you read as a young sports fan? Maybe the sports pages in the local newspaper, or a glossy illustrated magazine? Did your school’s library carry biographies of famous athletes written for children, or did you go straight to the books for adults to satisfy the desire for more knowledge about your favorite sport? For this summer seminar episode of New Books in Sports, we’re talking about reading about sports as young fans. As with all of our seminar episodes, we hear from a variety of people who write about sports around the world. The guest list includes bloggers Maxi Rodriguez and Alexander Mais, journalists Patrick Donnelly, David Steele, and Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, and historian Raf Nicholson–all talking about the books and magazines they read as children, the works that shaped them as sports readers and writers. And we also hear about sports literature for children that is being published today. Authors Lil Chase, John Coy, Dan Gutman, and Tom Palmer tell us about writing for young readers and the stories behind their own sports-related books. Scholars Michael Buma and Jeff Wilhelm talk about the issues that children’s sports books address and the effect they can have in getting kids to read. And we hear about kids writing on sports from Phil Dimitriadis and Hannah Kuhar, who contribute to the student pages of the popular Australian fan site, the Footy Almanac. If you’re wondering what the kids are going to do during the months of summer holiday, you’ll hear plenty of suggestions of good books for children of all ages (and adults as well). But even if you’re not in the market for children’s books, you’ll appreciate being reminded of the book you used to read as a kid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

WorldCat is the largest online catalog in the world, accessing the collections of more than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. Using the catalog, a subject search of particular sports turns up the following tally of book titles in the world’s libraries: Boxing: 5164, Hockey: 7083, Cricket: 10,881, Horse Racing: 11,933, Basketball: 12,875, Golf: 16,660, Football: 18,592, Soccer: 19,933, Baseball: 31,206 That’s a lot of baseball books. Fortunately, Ron Kaplan has cut that number down to something a bit more manageable in 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). As host of the Baseball Bookshelf blog and bibliography editor of the Society for American Baseball Research, Ron has read a few thousand books on the sport, give or take a couple hundred. His book doesn’t rank them. As he explains in the interview, it was hard enough to pare down his list from 1001 to 501. Instead, he offers an annotated guide, with books grouped by subject. There are instructional books and novels, data-based analyses and tributes to ballparks, biographies of the great players and memoirs of ordinary fans. Ron includes the familiar classics, like Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, and makes the case for books that deserve the status of a classic, such as Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings. And Ron reveals a trove of older, overlooked gems: a 1915 instructional manual for college players, Bob Wood’s 1988 guide to ballpark food, and a compilation of Charles Schulz’s baseball-themed Peanuts comics (more than 600 strips when the book was published in 1977). Ron’s expert guide will help in your choices of summer baseball reading. Indeed, you’ll be eager to start on your baseball list after putting down Ron’s book. That is, if you can put it down. Ron’s thoughtful choice of titles and his insightful summaries of the selections make this not only a useful introduction to the baseball library but also a worthy–and enjoyable–addition to its shelves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Clio, Erato, Polyhymnia–among the nine muses of Greek mythology, there’s no muse for the essay. And that’s not only because the essay doesn’t appear, in name, until Montaigne publishes his first book of them in 1580. No, one gets the feeling that, even if Homer had composed essays about the... 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 suspension of the so-called “Indian Wars” did not signal colonialism’s end, only a different battlefield. “The calvary man was supplanted–or, rather, supplemented–by the field matron, the Hotchkiss by the transit, and the prison by the school,” writes Beth H. Piatote. “A turn to the domestic front, even as the last shots at Wounded Knee echoed in America’s collective ear, marked not the end of conquest but rather its renewal.” Yet the domestic space was not only a target of invasion; it was also a site of resistance, a fertile ground for Native authors to define what counted as love, home, and kin in an era of coercive assimilation. In Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), Piatote brilliantly reads the work of late nineteenth century writers like Pauline Johnson, S. Alice Callahan, D’arcy McNickle and others as a contest over settler domestication. Piatote offers an eloquent exploration of incredible courage and literary acumen, with resonance in our own political moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrei Williams‘ provocative new book on African American class divisions in Post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow America is sure to spark spirited debate among those interested in how the interplay of economic status and racial identity influence what has been called “the black experience.” Her insightful book is called Dividing Lines: Social Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction (University of Michigan, 2013). Specifically, the book examines how late-nineteenth-century black authors represent intra-racial stratification and class mobility. Analyzing works by such authors as Frances Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul L. Dunbar, and Charles Chesnutt, Williams casts doubt on the now two-easy distinction between sell out and black nationalist when it comes to class ascension as she historicizes the moment when blacks were seeking to compete in the mainstream. Her look at representations of class at the turn of the 20th Century is fresh and illuminating. Please, listen in to the discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a range of spaces of anime production that include studios, toy factories, fan conventions, and online communities. What results is a fascinating exploration of how the social aspects of media generate successful anime tv programs and films, forms of labor, and ways of thinking about masculinity, love, and modern life. Condry argues that collaborative creativity has been central to producing the social energy necessary for the global success of Japanese anime. For Condry, it also helps explain a broader “globalization from below” whereby new forms of media emerge from local and grassroots efforts to appeal to and impact a diverse range of audiences. Through a series of case studies that observe contemporary and historical anime production practices from different angles, readers of The Soul of Anime are offered a window into the many forms of labor necessary to produce the many different media that collectively make up anime production, from the painstaking production of handmade storyboards to the conceiving of innovative characters and worlds that serve as platforms for the creation and circulation of anime stories. In addition to all of this, there are little boy samurais with wind-up keys in their heads, gods that speak only in rap, egg-shaped characters that get hard-boiled when stressed out, mega-robots, men who want to marry 2D anime character-ladies, and a cameo by Samuel L. Jackson. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Eric Hayot‘s new book is a bold, ambitious, and inspiring call for revising the way we think about, practice, and teach literary history. Pt. I of On Literary Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2012) offers a critical evaluation of the notion of “worlds” in literary studies and beyond, offering a language for describing and comparing individual aesthetic works and their modes of worldedness. Pt. II proposes a way of thinking about the history of modern literature and categorizing its modes that makes the study of the non-West not just relevant, but absolutely necessary. At the same time it both contextualizes the history of ideas of the world in early modernity, and asks us to re-think our notions of what “context” is and how we access it. Pt. III of the book takes us into the institutional contexts of literary studies, showing how some basic assumptions about how to periodize literature dominate and constrict the discipline, A final set of appendixes in Pt. IV of the book offer myriad extensions of and ways forward from the project outlined in the previous chapters. The insights here are relevant and useful for scholars working in a wide range of disciplines, and as a historian I found Eric’s insights on how we might innovate our characterizations of textual worlds and temporal modes particularly enlightening. In the course of our conversation, we also talked about how these ideas have transformed Eric’s teaching. For his syllabus on “Comparative Cosmologies,” see this link. Eric Hayot is a contributor to Public Books. 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 makes something a poem? What defines “poetry,” and how has that changed over space and time? Critics and Commentators: The ‘Book of Poems’ as Classic and Literature (Harvard University Press, 2012) considers such questions as they chart a path through literary studies in Chinese history. From the comparative poetics of a Han dynasty “critic in the borderlands” to the theories of May Fourth intellectuals, Bruce Rusk’s elegantly written and carefully argued new book traces the changing relationships between secular and canonical poetry over 25 centuries of verse in China. Rusk introduces readers to a cast of fascinating characters in the course of this journey, from a versifying “drive-by” poet to a gifted craftsman of textual forgeries. In the course of an analysis of the changing modes of inscribing relationships between classical studies and other fields in China, we learn about poems on stone and metal, literary time-travel, ploughing emperors, and how to excavate the first drafts of Zhu Xi. This is an exceptionally rich account that ranges from the history of literary anthologies to the circulation of interpretive tropes in poetic commentaries, and in doing so it transcends the disciplinary boundaries of historical and literary studies of China. Enjoy! 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 Will of a People: A Critical Anthology of Great African American Speeches (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) is a compendium of 22 orations delivered by African Americans over a span of over 265 years. Co-edited by frequent collaborators Richard Leeman and Bernard Duffy, both professors of communication studies, both interested in the American tradition of public address, have spotlighted the African American oral tradition in public testimonies, speeches, declarations, and jeremiads, among other possible categories of purpose in black oratory. Limited by such constraints as space and copy right law, the speeches included are those considered great, either because the speech itself is considered “famous,” like Sojourner Truth’s “A’n’t I a Woman?,” or because it is considered “the finest speech delivered by a an influential orator,” like Henry Turner’s “I Claim the Rights as a Man.” Whatever the reason for their inclusion, it’s no doubt the speeches collected are inspirational, informative, and worth studying as part of American cultural history, an oratorical history that continues to this very moment. In fact, capturing the contemporary milieu, the book also contains the first inaugural address by Barack Obama, the first U.S. president of color. Thus covering an impressive range, The Will of a People, will give readers much to think about, debate, and contemplate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do “Rip van Winkle,” Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Aesop’s Fables have in common? All of them were translated into Chinese by Lin Shu (Lin Qinnan, 1852-1924), a major force in the literary culture of late Qing and early Republican China. In Lin Shu, Inc.: Translation and the Making of Modern Chinese Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013), Michael Gibbs Hill charts the rise and precipitous fall of Lin’s career in an exploration of the making of the modern intellectual in China. Completing over 180 translations of Western literary works into classical Chinese while not knowing a single foreign language, Lin built a “factory of writing” dependent on the mental labor of 20 assistants trained in a range of foreign languages. Hill examines the texture of some of the translations produced by this network, offering a model for the close reading of translations both as literary sources and as sources of conflict over competing visions of intellectual, political, and national authority. Lin was ultimately caught in the crosshairs of prominent scholars and activists arguing over the relative roles of classical and vernacular language within a national project, but not before using his writing as a space to work out ideas about the roles of race, slavery, filial piety, and ethics in the transforming society of modern China. It’s a fascinating story about what it has meant in the past, and what it might mean in the future, to render ideas across linguistic realms. 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 very recent work, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past(University of Chicago Press, 2013), Amir Eshel presents us with a very interesting examination of what he refers to as “futurity” or literature’s ability to provide us with a way to access the past, rethink it, and move forward. Eshel’s work here can best be understood as part of the larger effort in literary studies to move beyond the tired and exceedingly fruitless lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion and the despairing chasm of postmodernity. As foci, Eshel examines postwar German literature and Hebrew literature particularly focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, the portion of Futurity that continues to linger with me is Eshel’s beautiful ruminations on W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece, Austerlitz. Eshel’s reflections on Austerlitz encouraged me to pick up that novel once more and for this alone I highly encourage anyone interested in postwar German literature, Hebrew literature, and or the future and meaning of literary studies to give Eshel’s work a read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

You were amused to find you too could fear “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces.” The astronomy love poems of William Empson, from which the preceding quote was taken, were just some of the many media through which people explored the ramifications of Einstein’s ideas about the cosmos in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Masterfully incorporating a contextual sensibility of the historian of science with a sensitivity to textual texture of the literary scholar, Katy Price guides us through the ways that readers and writers of newspapers, popular fiction, poems, magazines, and essays translated and incorporated Einsteinian relativity. Loving Faster Than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe (University of Chicago Press, 2012) situates this popular engagement with the physical sciences within the political transformations of early twentieth-century Britain, looking at how the scientific and publishing communities attempted (with different levels of success) to use media coverage of relativity to rally the support of a wider reading public. It is a rich study that has much to offer to those interested in the history of science, of literature, and of popular culture, while helpfully complicating all of those categories. “Fly with me then to all’s and the world’s end And plumb for safety down the gaps of stars Let the last gulf or topless cliff befriend, What tyrant there our variance debars?” *Both quotes above are from William Empson’s poems, and can be found on pages 167 and 162 of Price’s 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

When I agreed to host New Books and Science Fiction and Fantasy there were a number of authors I hoped to interview, including Michael Gordin. This might come as a surprise to listeners, because Michael is neither a science-fiction nor a fantasy author. He is, rather, a prominent historian of science at Princeton University. But his work intersects with the subject-matter of this podcast in a number of ways. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War asked us to consider what might have been had Tokyo refused to surrender and the US had continued to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Mike will soon start co-teaching a class on invented languages which includes a unit on Klingon. And the main subject of this interview, The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (University of Chicago Press, 2012), touches on both the history of science fiction, key themes within the genre, and where much of its source material comes from. Indeed, while this channel will continue to focus on new books within the SF and Fantasy genres, it will also interview scholars and practitioners whose expertise illuminates and enhances our understanding of those genres. I hope this interview does so for its listeners. For those of you interested in a different take on The Pseudoscience Wars, you should check out Michael’s forthcoming interview on the New Books in Science, Technology, and Society channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cosima Bruno‘s new book asks us to consider a deceptively simple question: what is the relationship between a poem and its translation? In the course of Between the Lines: Yang Lian’s Poetry through Translation (Brill, 2012), Bruno helps us imagine what an answer to that question might look like while guiding us through the sounds and spaces of contemporary Chinese poet Yang Lian. Between the Lines proposes an innovative way to read a poem through and with its translations, using a “triangular comparative analysis” that juxtaposes the original poem with a number of its translations to identify shifts in the lines of the poem that serve as landmarks in the conceptual and textual world of the poet. Bruno uses this translation-focused methodology of reading to reveal fascinating dimensions of time, space, and subjectivity in Yang Lian’s work, and to guide our attention to the performative importance of rhythm, blank space, punctuation, and sound in his verse. Readers who are interested in Chinese poetry will find much to absorb and transport them in these pages, and readers interested in the theory and practice of translation will find a clear articulation of a set of methodological tools that could potentially bear fruit when rendering texts across many different genres and languages. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Orientalism, the ideograph, and media theory grew up together. In Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010), Christopher Bush offers a wonderfully trans-disciplinary account of modernism through the figure of the ideograph, or Chinese writing as imagined in the West. The beginning of the book introduces the ways that modernism wove together speculations about Chinese writing and responses to technological media. The following four chapters develop this set of ideas by looking at different conceptions of the ideograph and the uses to which they were put in texts ranging from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Each chapter explores a particular author or authors’ engagement with China (or with an idea thereof) through a specific understanding of what Chinese writing was and how it related to a given technological medium. Bush thus takes us from Ezra Pound and Paul Claudel’s imagistic ideograph and photography, to Victor Segalen’s inscriptive ideograph and phonography, to Walter Benjamin’s mimetic ideograph and cinematography, and finally to Paul Valery’s historical ideograph and telegraphy. Bush’s work is particularly fascinating not just in integrating media theories into the history of thinking of/with China, but also in its attention to the ways that China was central to how modernists refashioned their ideas of time and space. It is a wonderful work that helps scholars of East Asia understand an important period in the history of engagement with one of the central objects of our field. Enjoy! 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 Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through libraries and bookshops. Mandeville (whomever he was – and we talk about this issue in the course of our conversation) offers extended discussions of the “Great Khan” of Cathay and of Prester John’s kingdom in India, peppering his tales with stories of dragons, descriptions of man-eating creatures that were half-hippopotamus and half-human, images of foreign alphabets, and many, many others. Bale’s translation is both fluidly rendered in an easily readable modern English prose, and supported by helpful annotations that situate Mandeville’s stories within a wider historical context, and explain Bale’s choices as a translator in terms of the broad range of printed and manuscript editions of Mandeville’s text. Over the course of our conversation we spoke about some especially memorable moments in the book, as well as Bale’s approach to rendering this fascinating but challenging work. Enjoy! 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 Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature (Routledge, 2007), Ulrich Plass makes the case for the importance and relevance of Adorno’s often forgotten and derided attempts at literary criticism. Plass specifically draws our attention to five subjects, Eichendorff, Rudolf Borchardt, Stefan George, Heinrich Heine, and Goethe, and Adorno’s response to their work as a way to make sense of the purpose, motivation, and significance of Adorno’s oeuvre. As Plass reminds us, and indeed shows us again and again, Adorno’s literary criticism can be quirky and enigmatic and yet strikingly impenetrable at its best, and utterly baffling and unreadable at its most trying. For Plass however, the determination and rigor required to make sense of Adorno’s literary criticism is worth the reward as he ultimately concludes that its true value lies not solely in its role as such, but rather as a companion and a primer of sorts to his larger philosophical work. The central focus of Language and History is not Adorno’s response to or criticism of any one writer or piece in particular though, rather it is the essay itself. The essay here more specifically represents what Plass comes to suggest is the medium by which Adorno is able to “act out” his understanding of language and aesthetics rather than ever being able to fully and cohesively conceptualize it in any one phrase or essay of literary criticism-to “say it”. In this sense what Plass leaves us with most is an invaluable tool with which to approach a unified understanding of Adorno in which his literary criticism and philosophy are not isolated singularities but rather complementary works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies