New Books In Literary Studies

In this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it means to be “American”. Teaching Jewish American Literature (MLA, 2020) consciously pushes against the boundaries of the canon, and undermine the stereotype of the immigrant Jewish experience. A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink t

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jessica Martell about her new book, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, published in 2020 by University of Nevada Press for their Cultural Ecologies of Food series. In Farm to Form, Martell contextualizes some familiar texts of British Literary Modernism, into a history that recognizes the role of food and agriculture not just in the social fabric that these writers were living in and often writing against but also the role that these industries played in determining how writers experimented with literary forms. Food isn’t just in the content of the novels analyzed, but as Martell argues, responses to food systems are reflected in the experiments in form that are a hallmark of literary modernism. If the Modernist era is “a spectacle of lived unevenness,” food (its presence and absence) is particularly good at exposing unevenness and inequity. Martell’s historicizing makes clear that the average British subject was mo

Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead. The first monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear on a single novel in a sustained fashion, it focuses on the award-winning and genre-bending Cloud Atlas (2004). Published in two very different versions worldwide without anyone taking much notice, David Mitchell's novel is ideal fodder for a textual-genetic publishing history, reflections on micro-tectonic shifts in language by authors who move between genres, and explorations of how we imagine people wrote in bygone eras. Though Close Reading with Computers (Stanford University Press, 2019) focuses on but one novel, it has a crucial exemplary function: author Martin Paul Eve demonstrates a set of methods and provides open-source software tools that others can use in their own literary-critical practices. In this way, the project serves

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'norm

dWho Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Northern Illinois University Press) is Harvard historian Donald Ostrowski’s sustained reflection on what we can learn from comparison of authorship controversies. Ostrowski covers nine different cases of disputed authorship, from the Shakespeare canon, to the letters between the Russian Prince Kurbskii and Ivan IV, to the ancient Hebrew Pentateuch. This book lays out evidence from all points of view in an even-handed way, and in doing so, Ostrowski is able to define a number of general principles that ought to animate all scholarship that attempts to answer the question: “Who wrote that?”. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Media portrayals of Orthodox Jewish women frequently depict powerless, silent individuals who are at best naive to live an Orthodox lifestyle, and who are at worst, coerced into it. In Women of Valor: Orthodox Jewish Troll Fighters, Crime Writers, and Rock Stars in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Karen E. H. Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves. She examines Orthodox women as they appear in memoirs, comics, novels, and movies, and speaks with the authors, filmmakers, and musicians who create these representations. Throughout the work, Skinazi threads lines from the poem “Eshes Chayil,” the Biblical description of an Orthodox “Woman of Valor.” This proverb unites Orthodoxy and feminism in a complex relationship, where Orthodox women continuously question, challenge, and negotiate Orthodox and feminist values. Ultimately, these women create paths t

In World Literature, Non-Synchronism, and the Politics of Time (Palgrave Macmillan) Filippo Menozzi offers to look at literature and literary processes through the prism of non-synchronism. The book details the notion that Menozzi finds accurate and relevant not only for the analysis of current cultural and political developments, but also for the consideration of the past. Non-synchronism is suggested to subvert the boundaries of time and space that are united and organized through chronologies, imposing and supporting canonical structures. Menozzi asserts that a non-synchronism approach to how we read has political repercussions that can shape the way we navigate the network of political and economic systems. To demonstrate how the non-synchronism approach helps re-arrange different times, Menozzi draws attention to fiction from Africa and South Asia and focuses on how the change of the temporal perspective can activate textual layers, providing space for the intersection of the local and the global. Filipp

On this episode of New Books in Christian Studies, we welcome Ken M. Penner, Professor of Religious Studies at St Francis Xavier University. After a career that has combined biblical studies and digital humanities, Ken has edited the second edition of The Lexham English Septuagint (Lexham Press, 2020), a fresh and historically specific translation into English of the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible. But what is the Septuagint, and why does it matter? How was it used in the writings that comprise the New Testament, and in which religious traditions does it continue to be used today? Join us to find out more. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of An introduction to John Owen(Crossway, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press), Laura Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic. Westengard’s scope is broad enough to encompass Lady Gaga’s meat dress, lesbian pulp fiction, Dracula, queer literature, and sadomasochistic performance art. What brings these diverse cultural objects together is the way they re-appropriate tropes of the gothic that have been used to marginalize queer and gender-variant people throughout history. If mainstream culture depicts queer people as predatory, monstrous, and threatening, the artists analyzed in Gothic Queer Culture find beauty and meaning in gothic tropes: in the crypt-like undergrounds of lesbian bars, the vampiric performance art of Ron Athey, and in the Frankensteinian practice of juxtaposing conflicting genres in the same text. The gothic then becomes a way to process trauma and rewrite the often-conservative genre of the gothic as something proudly queer, unse

John Barton is no stranger to Holy Scripture. Having spent much of his academic career as a chaplain and professor of theology at the University of Oxford, his latest book is an attempt to shed light on one of the world’s most influential texts – the Bible. In A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book (Viking, 2019), John demonstrates that the Bible, while often thought of as monolithic, is anything but. He paints a vivid picture of the historical backdrop against which the books of the Bible were written, injecting a dose of depth and character to the stories, psalms, prophecies, and letters it comprises. He then turns to how the book was compiled, assembled, and disseminated before finally discussing the plethora of interpretations of the Bible, and its place in the world we live in today. Joshua Tham is an undergraduate reading History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include economic history, sociolinguistics, and the "linguistic

In the impressive volume of The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction (Brill), Richard van Leeuwen thoroughly examines an array of intricate ways in which the Thousand and One Nights shaped the developments of literatures across the world. This is a pioneering work in terms of approaching the ancient text not only as a source of inspiration for literary discoveries, but also as a carrier of literary memories and cultural experiences that are collected from a number of geographical locations. Cultural explorations intertwine with political implications which are coded in the texts that are shaped and inherently modified by delicate influences of the Thousand and One Nights. Van Leeuwen gathers references to the Thousand and One Nights from the diversity of literary texts and arranges them to demonstrate the vitality and the fluidity of the text that travels from culture to culture, from text to text, and from one time space to another, from imagination to imagination. In this respect, van Leeuw

There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) reveals how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive. Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it. She tells the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enli

The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s sexuality on the other. In Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexual Ideology in the Mahabharata (SUNY Press, 2008), Arti Dhand examines the religious premises upon which Hindu ideas of sexuality and women are constructed. The work focuses on the great Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, a text that not only reflects the cogitations of a momentous period in Hindu history, but also was critical in shaping the future of Hinduism. Dhand proposes that the epic’s understanding of womanhood cannot be isolated from the broader religious questions that were debated at the time, and that the formation of a sexual ideology is one element in crafting a coherent religious framework for Hinduism. Today we speak with Arti Dhand on her teaching, her research on the Hindu epics and her exciting new podcast on the Mahābhārata! For information on

On this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Guy Raffa, Associate Professor of Italian Studies at UT Austin, about his new book, Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy (Harvard University Press, 2020). Dante’s Bones is an academic mystery story, the “graveyard history” of Dante Alighieri, the master poet of what has come to be called The Divine Comedy. This book is about Dante’s literal remains and the where and how they’ve been kept. But in tracing that story, Guy Raffa tells a much broader tale about what Dante comes to mean over the past 700 years. Interview topics include thieving Franciscans, Lord Byron, Mussolini, and Longfellow, as we consider Dante the father of Italy and the Italian language, Dante the liberator, and Dante the secular saint. Discussion covers the author’s personal digital accompaniment to the Comedy, Danteworlds. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone

Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (Bloomsbury, 2020) reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making,

The way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value. On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Allison L. Rowland (s) about zoetropes and zoerhetorics or ways of talking about living beings that promote (#blacklivesmatter) or demote (“collateral damage”) lives and groups of lives. Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood (Ohio State University Press, 2020)looks at a variety of these zoerhetorics and the zoetropes or rhetorical devices those discourses contain, and how they build on the necropolitical concept that we are constantly parsing populations into worthy lives, subhuman lives, and lives sentenced to death. Through a series of case studies, including microbial life (at the American Gut Project), fetal life (at the National Memorial for the Unborn), and vital human life (at two of the nation’s premier fitness centers)—and in conversation with cutting-edge theories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability—this book brings to light the dis

As much of the world’s population is currently discovering, living through a historical cataclysm is a more common fact of human existence than one might think. Perhaps one reason why this is easily forgotten is the fact that it is hard to make the empathetic leap between oneself and other people from other times and cultures. For this and many other reasons, Xiaoqiao Ling’s Feeling the Past in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard University Asia Center) offers readers a richly revealing window into sensory worlds at a particularly cataclysmic time, showing how Chinese literati dealt with the traumatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, and the Manchu conquest of the Han world which brought this about. Exploring writing in numerous genres from plays to memoirs and erotic novels, and translating extensively from these captivating works, Ling demonstrates the striking level of embodied intimacy that these men professed as they wrestled with commitments to community, family and selfhood in their own era

In this this interview, Carrie Tippen talks Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard about their new book, Table Lands: Food in Children's Literature, published June 2020 by University of Mississippi Press. Table Lands contributes to a growing body of scholarship in the subfield of literary food studies, which combines the methods of literary analysis with the interdisciplinary theories of food, culture, and identity. Keeling and Pollard explain that they were first interested in food in children’s literature as symbols or metaphors, but in Table Lands, they have complicated their understanding of these moments as important cultural work. The didactic nature of children’s literature makes the genre a unique window into processes of cultural and identity creation as children learn manners, morals, food taboos, and appropriate behavior through the rewards and punishments doled out to fictional characters. Arranged roughly chronologically, the chapters explore food as a cultural signifier in familiar texts for children l

Naomi Appleton's new book Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A Study and Translation of Avadānaśataka 1-40 (Equinox Publishing, 2020) introduces a significant section of the important early Indian Buddhist text known as the Avadānaśataka, or “One Hundred Stories”, and explores some of its perspectives on buddhahood. This text, composed in Sanskrit and dating to perhaps the third to fifth centuries of the Common Era, is affiliated with the Sarvāstivāda or Mūlasarvāstivāda, and thus provides important evidence of the ideas and literatures of lost non-Mahāyāna schools of Indian Buddhism. The text is a rich literary composition, in mixed prose and verse, and includes some elaborate devotional passages that illuminate early Indian perspectives on the Buddha and on the role of avadāna texts. The book introduces the first four chapters of the Avadānaśataka through key themes of these stories, such as predictions and vows, preparations for buddhahood, the relationship between Śākyamuni and other buddhas, and the relationship

From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting: The Labor Plays of Manny Fried (SIU Press 2020) collects three plays by Manny Fried alongside a thorough explanation of his work and life by theatre scholar Barry Witham. Witham traces Fried’s long career as a labor organizer and Communist Party militant, as well as the obsessive lengths the FBI went to in order to suppress his activism. Fried is unique among American playwrights in his intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the labor movement, and this knowledge is fully evident in the plays. Issues of red-baiting, deindustrialization, and religious bigotry take center stage in his work, which carries the radical tradition of Clifford Odets and the Federal Theatre Project into the long decline of labor beginning in the 1960s and continuing to this day. From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of theatre and the labor movement. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA p