New Books in Literary Studies

Paul K. Saint-Amour, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is a ruminative thinker and meticulous writer. These traits pay dividends in the surprising insights of his new book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015), which reframes total war and literature in the interwar years and in the present moment. The book’s articulation of the partiality of total war, especially its focus on violence committed in the so-called periphery–which denies civilians the protections of officially declared war–is all too familiar in the present. Tense Future, like the texts it examines, defamiliarizes works we thought we knew well. It also makes strange some of the familiar narratives within the field of modernist studies, like that concerning the genre of the Modern Epic. Tense Future decouples encyclopedic form from the modern epic, showing how the encyclopedia inspired interwar writers to playfully wrest totality out of the suffocating grip of total war. Saint-Amour’s boldest claim, that we live in perpetual interwar, sutures the drone attacks of the present to air-war theories developed after the zeppelin raids of WWI. Our own future, though not foreclosed, is nonetheless subject to the aperture of the past. Tense Future reminds us of futures past in order to pry open a little room for hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Eva Illouz is professor of sociology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her book Hard-Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers, and Society (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a feminist-sociological analysis of the soft pornographic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. The book, and its two sequels written by E.L. James, began as fan fiction and subsequently reached record-breaking sales as an e-book. With two central characters, a sexual ingenue and a powerful enigmatic anti-hero, the novel is poorly written and formulaic, yet managed to capture the imagination of millions of women. Illouz tells us how the novel was the perfect combination of fantasy and self-help delivered to an audience increasingly confuse and uncertain in negotiating their heterosexual relationships. With its sadomasochistic sex and images of female submission and male dominance, Fifty Shades of Grey, is a gothic romance adapted to modern sexual dilemmas and emotional confusion. Combining the romantic fantasy and self-help genres, it acts a catalyst for renegotiating heterosexual relationships. By placing the novel within the history of the commodification of the book, the dynamics of the sexual marketplace, and the sociology of sexuality, Illouz locates Fifty Shades of Grey in the contemporary context. The reader of Hard-Core Romance will find an intriguing argument for why after feminism and the sexual revolution dominance and submission, resistance and surrender, remain as enigmas of modern relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrew Cayton is a distinguished professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In his book Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) he has given us a lucid and beautifully written history of the transatlantic relationships among the circle of radical writers that included William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gilbert Imlay. Caught in the fervor revolutionary change, these free thinkers believing in the goodness of humanity and reason rejected the need for authority, hierarchies, and tradition in preserving social cohesion and wellbeing. Rather, mutuality and open exchange were offered as a better foundation for society. At the intersection of public lives and private desire, they sought to extend their radical vision beyond politics and into their intimate lives through new a model of egalitarian and free relationships between men and women. Deconstructing marriage their writings reflected the protested against the constraints of conventional society. Cayton demonstrates how these radicals embodied a modern interpersonal ethic arising with the liberal free trade in goods and ideas in which the personal was political. How the sexes were to relate to each other changed forever. Differing gendered understanding of “social commerce,” between men and women, brought uneven consequences. Relationships founded on freedom, openness and devoid of binding ties beyond reasoned desire could also produce the fruits of a masculinist frame of mind – the tragedy of neglect, abuse, and abandonment experienced by women. Cayton’s portrait of Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Imlay changes how we read them and how we understand our modern selves. 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 beginning of the 20th century, Jewish settlement in Palestine and the revival of Hebrew as a national language have profoundly impacted the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew. In a highly contentious political environment, the two languages have been identified with opposing national movements – Hebrew associated with Jews and Arabic with Palestinians. Lital Levy’s book destabilizes this categorization. Highlighting the space between these two languages, Levy asks not what it means to be Israeli or Palestinian, but rather how crossing the bridge between the two remakes Israeli and Palestinian cultures. Focusing on the work of Middle Eastern Jews writing in Arabic and various kinds of Hebrews, and Palestinians writing in Hebrew, Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton University Press, 2014) reveals a literary world in which Arabic and Hebrew have a symbiotic relationship. Through her analysis of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, Levy shows us how writers bring Arabic and Hebrew into conversation with one another in illuminating, and often subversive, ways. These writers use the language of the “other” to question “othering” and insist that literature interrogate simplistic identity classifications. Jews writing in Arabic or mizrahi registers of Hebrew cannot but challenge a nationalist project that depends, in part, on the nationalization of Hebrew. Likewise, Palestinians writing in Hebrew use the power of language to disrupt Zionism, which excludes them as non-Jews, from within. Bring the work of several generations of authors to light, Poetic Trespass call on readers to use the power of literature to question our own assumptions and to rethink the static categories of Arab and Jew. 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 institution” upon which the US nation was founded is still rich for examination.Perhaps this is why it is a subject to which 21st century authors continue to return. In this exploration of slavery, Paula T. Connolly, author of Slavery in American Children’s Literature 1790 – 2010 (University of Iowa, 2013), provides an expansive study of the ways in which proslavery and abolitionist literature framed discussions of slavery for the future of the nation: children. One of the questions to which Connolly’s investigation responds is whether US authors of children’s literature frame discussions of slavery in similar ways that writers of adult literature do. In the course of our conversation Connolly notes, “Many of us like to believe that we frame slavery differently for adults and children, but it’s simply not true.” Thus, readers will find that, similar to books for adults, children’s literature has conventional motifs of the subservient and grateful slave, or the kind and heroic master, for example. Additionally, character demonstration that he can properly manage his responsibility as master — a rite of passage — remains a shared theme. Connolly, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, reminds readers of the various genres of abolitionist and/or proslavery literature. She includes sharp analysis of popular plantation stories, slave narratives, post-plantation novels, proslavery adventure novels, confederate textbooks, Freedman’s schoolbooks, and neo-abolitionist texts throughout the various historical periods of her extensive research. Along the way, readers learn, interestingly, that at times both abolitionist and proslavery texts upheld the same old notions of white supremacy despite their oppositional goals. That both adult literature and/or children’s literature frame slavery through similar cultural lenses makes sense. After all, adults are the ones writing for children. Indeed, ideologies of the “white savior” or “needy slave” for example, remain firmly rooted as we learn that children’s literature long after the Civil War continues to reflect old beliefs. It remains clear that the act of emancipation did nothing to destroy deeply entrenched white hegemony in the nation. Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 — the first expansive study of slavery in children’s literature — is a fine example of the ways in which interdisciplinarity enhances the study of slavery in the US. The text brings together History, Literary Studies, Education, studies in Visual Arts, and what results is an enriching, multi-dimensional perspective on US pedagogy of race. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Wen Jin’s book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms (Ohio State Press, 2012), compares histories and modes of multiculturalism in China and the United States. Whereas many see few correlations between China’s ethnic policies and the multiculturalist policies of the U.S., Wen Jin brings these narratives and histories together to show their common themes. In attempting to incorporate diverse bodies into a state project, both multiculturalisms make their respective countries seem exceptional in their tolerance and acceptance of diverse peoples. Through this comparison, Wen Jin offers a rich study of multiculturalism that allows readers to see its more tangible form, rather than to see one as superior to the other. Wen Jin does this by reading literary narratives that feature a “double critique,” in that they are critical of both the U.S. and China for deploying discourses of diversity in order to justify and rationalize state power. Ultimately, Pluralist Universalism provokes forms of conciliatory or official multiculturalism and leads us to question the very identity politics that has formed the basis of globalization and capitalist growth in the 21st century. 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 a father? In Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014), Helena Gurfinkel offers an insightful new vision of fatherhood through an engagement with English literature, Freudian psychoanalysisand queer theory. The book takes a range of authors who have depicted ideas of fatherhood, patriarchal relations and homosociality along with depictions of queer ideas of the family and of fatherhood itself. From Trollope, through James and Forster, to Hollinghurst and contemporary queer media, the book explores how the tightly drawn boundaries of the Victorian paternal relationship are represented and transformed in over a century of literary works. Moreover the core theoretical approaches, for example Freud’s theory of the negative Oedipus, are presented in an accessible opening chapter, making the book a readable entry into literary uses of these ideas.The book concludes by considering contemporary queer texts from and about the Female to Male Trans experience, perhaps the ultimate destabilisation of the heteronormative family binary. The book will appeal to both students of literature and critical theory scholars. 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 does it mean to be a martyr? What does it mean to be an apostate? How should we understand people who choose one or the other? These are the questions asked by Shusaku Endo in his novel Silence, in which he tells the story of Japanese Catholics and foreign missionaries during Japan’s “Christian Century” (1549-1650). Despite being published nearly fifty years ago, this novel continues to receive attention and spark debate. Dr. Mark Dennis and Dr. Darren Middleton, both of Texas Christian University, continue the discussion in their edited volume Approaching Silence: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Classic Novel, published by Bloomsbury. Through a collection of thought-provoking essays, this anthology deals with these, and related questions, from multiple perspectives, leading to a rich discussion. This anthology also includes an afterword by Martin Scorsese on his film adaption of Silence. I hope you will enjoy the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Professor Robert P. Burns of Northwestern University School of Law offers an insightful critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his new work Kafka’s Law: ‘The Trial’ and American Criminal Justice (University of Chicago Press 2014). This interview explores the characteristics of Kafka’s “Law” and exposes where and how these characteristics exist within the American criminal justice system. Burns leads us through the absurd regime The Trial‘s protagonist must navigate after he finds himself accused of an unknown crime. Kafka’s dystopian law is unknowable, ubiquitous, overly bureaucratic and yet overly informal. In the story’s world the law functions like God and guilt is inevitable. These legal characteristics may appear to be part of an absurd dystopian fantasy world derived from the same wild imagination that produced a story in which a man metamorphoses into a bug. However, we learn in the second half of the interview that the dystopian themes in The Trial capture a present-day reality for many who are accused of crimes in America. Burns’s work exposing Kafkaesque aspects of our legal system and his search to find the most effective means of remedying these situations is vastly important to the societal goal of narrowing the gap between justice and law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Biography is, both etymologically and in its conventional forms, the writing of a life. But what is the role of place within that? And how do the stories of lives- some of them well known, others less so- realign when we see them through the lens of a particular place? That’s Justin Martin‘s way in to the stories of Walt Whitman, Artemus Ward, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Adah Menken and Edwin Booth, among others: their convergence, many an evening, at Pfaff’s basement saloon in mid-19th century Manhattan. Don’t let the name-check in the title fool you. Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians (Da Capo Press, 2014) is just as much about the other bohemians as it is about Whitman, and the Whitman we find here may not be the Whitman we thought we knew. He’s younger- his fate yet to be determined- and he’s paling around with a cast of characters equally compelling. When he went to Paris in 1849, Henry Clapp Jr. was so impressed with the local artsy-types that he decided to export their way of life to America, to consciously found a group of bohemians back in New York. And it’s the saloon where they congregated that first drew Martin to his story. Though his characters fan out across the country over the course of the narrative, they came from Pfaff’s and they seem to carry it with them wherever they go.Place plays a fundamental role in life and should, by extension, feature within the subsequent tellings of a life as well, but it’s a factor that is, all too often, unexamined at this level- the level of where one eats and drinks and hangs out. Places are ever-changing, Manhattan real estate most especially. But, as Rebel Souls proves, biography can play a provocative role in preserving their mystique and also their impact– recapturing the barroom beneath the city streets, the chatter swirling around the budding poet, the raucous laughter of his companions, the ice cubes clinking in the glass. The knowledge that this is where they came from, that this is where they were off-stage or on break, not only offers fresh insight into the things they were able to create, but it also reveals tantalizing dimensions of who they might have been. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sarah M. Allen‘s new book looks at the literature of tales in eighth- and ninth-century China. Shifting Stories: History, Gossip, and Lore in Narratives from Tang Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) situates Tang tales in the context of social story exchange among elite men. Allen’s work not only contributes significantly to how we understand and frame concepts like fiction and fact, authorship, gossip, and collection, but also presents a bookful of fascinating stories. These tales relayed gossip about rulers and high officials and became vehicles for the discussion and debate of popular events, they narrated travelers’ encounters with stranger that kept secrets, they offered riddles and games, and they transformed through reading and rewriting. Shifting Stories is a joy to read and should be on the shelves of anyone with an interest in Tang China, the history of storytelling, or histories of textuality and authorship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Wilt Idema‘s new book traces a story and its transformations through hundreds of years of Chinese literature. The Resurrected Skeleton: From Zhuangzi to Lu Xun (Columbia University Press, 2014) collects and translates variations of the tale of Master Zhuang in his encounter with a skeleton who comes back to life and wreaks all sorts of havoc in the lives of those around him. (In some versions, Zhuang instead comes across a grieving widow and becomes enmeshed in series of misadventures upon trying to help her.) The chapters of the book introduce and present three texts from the seventeenth-century, two short ballads from the nineteenth century or later, and one modern story by Lu Xun, all adaptations and variations of the story of Zhuang and the skeleton. While working through these masterful (and occasionally quite humorous) translations, readers also learn about different genres of texts that have embodied this story over time, from Ming narrative daoqing (sentiments of the Way) texts that incorporated poems, prose passages, and more; to youth books (zidishu, or “bannermen tales”); to precious scrolls (baojuan) meant especially to appeal to women; to satirical one-act dramas, and beyond. The Resurrected Skeleton is a gripping and brilliantly translated set of stories, equally suited to the research scholar, the pleasure-reader, and the teacher who might be on the lookout for excellent primary source translations for use in a university classroom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Tamara Chin‘s new book is a tour de force and a must-read for anyone interested in early China, the history of economy, or inter-disciplinarity in the humanities. Focusing on the reign of Han Emperor Wu (r. 141-87 BCE), Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) carefully considers how this earliest period of expansion of China’s markets and frontiers inspired scholarly debates over the relationships of frontier, market, word, and world. In a series of three chapters that each treat a discursive genre (philosophical dialogue, epideictic fu, and historiography) and two chapters that look at social practices (kinship and money), Savage Exchange traces the literary innovations that emerged within contexts of political economic debate. Chin’s story reads Han literary texts in a way that uncovers and traces multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives instead of the kind of linear story that often accompanies traditional readings of these works. The book shows that the “savagery of imperialism,” for many, was not about borders between the civilized and the barbarian, but instead was about modes and rituals of exchange across boundaries of gender, morality, numeracy, kinship, and materiality. Chapter 5 will be of particular interest to historians of money, and the final chapter of the book is a special treat for readers interested in the broader implications of Chin’s methodology, as it covers the importance of literary scholars engaging with the materials and texts produced by frontier archaeology, of comparative literature engaging with premodern histories of contact, and of the historiography of world systems engaging a broader set of approaches to documents and data. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Please listen to the fascinating conversation I had with Susan Byrne, Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of Undergraduate Studies for Spanish at Yale University, about her new work, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Byrne leads us through a close reading of Cervantes’ most famous work, revealing an overwhelming amount of legal details, all of which tie into early modern Spanish debates. 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 recent book, Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early Japanese Puppet Theater (Columbia University Press, 2013), R. Keller Kimbrough provides us with eight beautifully translated sekkyō and ko-jōruri. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Jenny Kaminer‘s new book, Women with a Thirst for Destruction: The Bad Mother in Russian Culture (Northwestern University Press, 2014) analyzes Russian myths of motherhood over time and in particular, the evolving myths of the figure of the “bad mother.” Her study examines how political, religious, economic, social, and cultural factors affect Russians’ conception of motherhood throughout history: what motherhood is, and what it should be. Kaminer focuses on three critical periods of transformation and consolidation: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. She investigates how good and bad mothers are depicted in various works of literature and culture, from Anna Karenina to media depictions of Chechen female suicide bombers in 2002. Winner of the 2014 Prize for Best Book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic 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

Paola Iovene‘s new book is a beautiful exploration of visions of the future as they have shaped a range of texts, genres, and editorial practices in Chinese literature from the middle of the twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2014) traces two different and related ideas of the future through children’s books, popular science, science fiction, poetry, fiction, and other kinds of text and practice: destination (defined in the book as “a condition of higher perfection, a time and place that is better than the present”), and anticipation (rendered as “the expectations that permeate life as it unfolds” and emergent in various ways throughout the book). The first three chapters focus on editorial and authorial strategies, and the last two chapters offer close readings of texts by Wang Meng and Ge Fei that themselves are concerned with literature and its uses. The chapter offers thoughtful reflections on science fiction in China and its relation to ideas of labor, embodied practices of composition and performance, literary translation as a mode of cultural exchange, the beginnings of an idea of “world literature” in modern China, the editorial strategies and modes of collaboration responsible for the emergence of Chinese avant-garde fiction, the surprising links between Tang poetry and contemporary fiction in China, the importance of fog or haze as a literary medium of toxicity, and much else. It’s a wonderfully provocative book, both for specialists of Chinese literary studies and for non-specialist readers looking for a glimpse into some wonderfully inventive works of modern Chinese literature that haven’t received much critical attention in English-language scholarship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. While The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) will satisfy even advanced scholars working on “object-oriented ontology” and related issues, it’s also a fantastic introduction for readers who have never heard of “correlationism” or panpsychism, don’t quite understand what all of the recent humanities-wide Whitehead-related fuss is all about, and aren’t sure where to begin. After a helpful introduction that lays out the major terms and stakes of the study, seven chapters each function as stand-alone units (and thus are very assignable in upper-level undergrad or graduate courses) while also progressively building on one another to collectively advance an argument for what Shaviro calls a “speculative aesthetics.”The Universe of Things emphasizes the importance of aesthetics and aesthetic theory to reading and engaging the work of Whitehead, Harman, Meillassoux, Kant, Levinas, Bryant, and others as an ongoing conversation about how we understand, inhabit, and exist as part of a material world. It’s a fabulous (and fabulously clearly written!) work that I will be recommending widely to colleagues and students. During the course of the interview we talked a bit about the opportunities that electronic and web-based media have brought to life and work in academia. On that note, you can find Steve’s blog here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) a new book by Steven Fielding, Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. The book explores how British politics has been represented in fiction from the late Victorian era through to the present. The book identifies a fascinating set of core themes, including how the political class has been defended and attacked, how the idea of populism has developed over time, along with the changing role of women in British political fiction. A State of Play does not over-claim, stressing that although an understanding of fiction is essential to understanding politics, we still don’t know the exact relationship between people’s political participation and political fiction. However, it does make a convincing case that any understanding of the British political system will be insufficient without understanding how it has been imagined and depicted. Indeed, as later chapters show, the mode of depiction itself has become an important territory for explaining British political culture. The book contains a huge range of examples, from the more well known television series, such as Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, through to obscure and perhaps forgotten books such asThe Mistress of Downing Street. Overall it will be of interest to academics and the public alike. 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 pre-modern Japan, Ise monogatari (also known as the Ise Stories or Tales of Ise) was considered to be one of the three most important works of literature in the Japanese language. Joshua S. Mostow‘s new book focuses on the reception and appropriation of these stories from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries. Paying special attention to the relationship of image and text in these works, Courtly Visions: The Ise Stories and the Politics of Cultural Appropriation (Brill, 2014) expertly interprets the Ise images to understand the very different ways that the stories were understood in different contexts. Courtly Visions pays careful attention to how different ways of framing class, gender, and religion shaped pre-modern reading and imaging of Ise, from a predominantly male salon in the ninth century, to aristocratic female readers of the Heian period, to a medieval courtier’s poems about a love affair, to a pair of imperial lines wrestling for power, to Noh theater, and beyond. The book is gorgeously illustrated with color images that are not only an immense pleasure to look at, but also serve as an important aspect of the book’s argument as Mostow guides us through visual readings of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth Driscoll, from University of Melbourne, extends and critiques the work of Pierre Bourdieu to account for modern literary tastes and the literary field in which those tastes are embedded. The book attempts to explore and defend the idea of the middlebrow in literature. ‘Middlebrow’ is defined by eight characteristics, whereby it is middle class, it has reverence to elite cultures, and it is entrepreneurial, mediated, feminized, emotional, recreational and earnest. In the main it is situated within the tension between the aesthetic and the commercial. The book uses four case studies to explore how this tension, along with the idea of the middlebrow, plays out. In the first case study the role of Oprah Winfrey as a tastemaker and cultural intermediary is explored as part of an analysis of book clubs. The analysis shows how Oprah’s book club was important in establishing markets for books as well as being a site for the struggle over what is, and what is not, legitimate taste. This legitimacy is tied to elements of the middlebrow aesthetic, which has earnestness and self improvement as an important component. This component is both the source of struggle with more elite elements of the literary field and a source of changing reading practices, for example in the way Harry Potter is used in schools. The final two case studies, of book prizes and literary festivals, add to the defence of the middlebrow as a vital form of aesthetic production and cultural consumption for both understanding the future of reading and the future of the market for literature in the era of social media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Melek Ortabasi‘s new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, “eccentric, dominating crackpot,” “brilliant, versatile iconoclast” and much more. The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) expands how we understand and evaluate his work by contextualizing it in terms of translation studies, simultaneously informing how we think about (and with) translation. Translation was a method of resistance for Yanagita, offering a way to work against a “homogenizing national narrative” in the first half of Japan’s twentieth century. Ortabasi considers Yanagita’s work as a poet, a travel writer, a folk studies scholar, a linguist, and a pedagogue: in every case, whether literally or figuratively, Yanagita was also acting as a translator. The Undiscovered Country takes us into some amazing texts that include a collection of oral tales from a rural castle town in northern Japan, travelogues, methodological introductions to academic fields, works on regional dialectical names for snails (snails!), language-maps, glossaries, children’s literature (including a history of fire!), a television show, and much more. It’s a fascinating study for readers interested in both modern Japan and translation studies alike. 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

Wai-yee Li‘s new book explores writing around the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, paying careful attention to the relationships of history and literature in writing by women, about women, and/or in a feminine voice. In a series of chapters that showcase exceptionally thoughtful, virtuosic readings of a wide range of texts, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) considers how conceptions of gender mediate experiences of political disorder. The first two chapters trace, in turn, the appropriation of feminine diction by men via a poetics of indirectness, and the use of masculine diction by women as a means of creating a space for political and historical engagement. The book continues from there to consider tropes of avenging female heroes, courageous concubines and courtesans, poet-historians and female knight-errants, chastity martyrs and abducted women, massacre and redemption. The conclusions to each chapter follow these seventeenth-century threads of discourse as they continue to weave themselves into the literature of modern China. It is a thoughtfully conceived and elegantly written study that serves simultaneously as a compellingly argued story and a reference packed with detailed readings of gorgeously translated primary texts. 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 Rani of Jhansi was and is many things to many people. In her beautifully written book The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Harleen Singh explores four representations of the famous warrior queen who led her troops into battle against the British. Analysing her various representations – as a sexually promiscuous Indian whore, a heroic Aryan, a great nationalist and a folk symbol of indigenous resistance – the book critically discusses what wider issues are stake in these depictions of such a mythical and marginal woman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bridget Conor’s new book, Screenwriting: Creative Labor and Professional Practice (Routledge, 2014), looks closely at the creative practice and profession of screenwriting for film and television in the US and UK. Situated within the critical media production studies paradigm, Screenwriting analyzes the history, current industrial practices, identities, and cultural milieu that surround this form of creative labor. Conor examines the professional myths that are often associated with screenwriting by looking back at its history during Hollywood’s golden age, beginning with the groundbreaking work of sociologist Hortense Powdermaker. Then, utilizing theoretical frameworks developed by luminaries of media production studies such as Angela McRobbie, John T. Caldwell, and David Hesmondhalgh, Conor outlines the contemporary labor scene for screenwriters. Through in-depth interviews with professional screenwriters, Conor underscores some of the commercial and creative tensions in the industry that often challenge these individuals’ professional autonomy and claims to authorship in their work. Lastly, Conor unveils some of the deep social inequalities that persist in this industry, many of which are unfortunately perpetuated though the numerous “how-to” manuals that serve to socialize budding screenwriters in the profession. Screenwriting also illuminates some of the fascinating changes being wrought by the Internet on screenwriters and their sense of autonomy in a new digital 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

Lawrence Lipking‘s new book, What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2014) examines the role of imagination and creativity in the seventeenth century developments that have come to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Whereas some accounts suggest that this period involved the rejection of imaginative thinking, Lipking traces it through the works of Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Hooke, and many others, demonstrating that the ability to envision new worlds is as crucial to their critical insights as rational thought.Each chapter of the book approaches a different discipline, from astronomy to natural history and the life sciences, exploring the intersection between imagination and the emerging ideas surrounding the scientific process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/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