New Books In Literary Studies

What does it mean for a novel to think globally? And can a global novel concerned with the macro movements of capital and labor still exist in the form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak ab

It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of recent superhero movies. Yet transmedial adaptations are part of an evolution that can be traced to the turn of the last century, when comic strips such as “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Felix the Cat” were animated for the silver screen. Along with Barry Keith Grant, Scott Henderson (Dean and Head, Trent University Durham GTA) compiled a rich group of essays that represent diverse academic fields, including technoculture, film studies, theater, feminist studies, popular culture, and queer studies. Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame (University of Texas Press, 2019) presents more than a dozen perspectives on this rich history and the effects of such adaptations. 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 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024), renowned biographer Dr. Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb. Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era's literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb's field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb's impact was profound. Her life and

You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here. Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think abo

The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture (Cornell UP, 2023) tells the story of a character type that was developed in early modern Britain to discredit radical prophets during an era that witnessed the dismantling of the Church of England's traditional means for punishing heresy. As William Cook Miller shows, the caricature of fanaticism, here called the Enthusiast began as propaganda against religious dissenters, especially working-class upstarts, but was adopted by a range of writers as a literary vehicle for exploring profound problems of spirit, soul, and body and as a persona for the ironic expression of their own prophetic illuminations. Taking shape through the public and private writings of some of the most insightful authors of seventeenth-century Britain-Henry More, John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mary Astell, and Jonathan Swift, among others-the Enthusiast appeared in various guises and literary modes. By attending to this literary being and its anima

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely. This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction. When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 20

Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023). New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artefacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious study spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. Iran's history and culture remained a constant source of inspiration across different generations and artistic movements, from the 'Oriental' poems of Victor Hugo to those of Anna de Noailles and Théophile Gautier's strategic citation of Persian poetry to his daughter J

There is an academic cottage industry on the "Jewish Freud," aiming to detect Jewish influences on Freud, his own feelings about being Jewish, and suppressed traces of Jewishness in his thought.  In Translating the Jewish Freud: Psychoanalysis in Hebrew and Yiddish (Stanford University Press, 2024), Naomi Seidman takes a different approach, turning her gaze not on Freud but rather on those who seek out his concealed Jewishness. What is it that propels the scholarly aim to show Freud in a Jewish light? Naomi Seidman explores attempts to "touch" Freud (and other famous Jews) through Jewish languages, seeking out his Hebrew name or evidence that he knew some Yiddish. Tracing a history of this drive to bring Freud into Jewish range, Seidman also charts Freud's responses to (and jokes about) this desire. More specifically, she reads the reception and translation of Freud in Hebrew and Yiddish as instances of the desire to touch, feel, "rescue," and connect with the famous Professor from Vienna. Interviewee: Naomi

Academic writing isn’t known for its clarity. While graduate students might see reading and writing turgid academic prose as a badge of honor—a sign of membership in an exclusive community of experts—many readers are left feeling utterly defeated.  In his latest book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter (Princeton University Press, 2024), Fordham University Professor Leonard Cassuto prompts us to think more about the reader. For Cassuto, the key to better academic prose is to anticipate and respect the needs of the reader. Throughout the volume, Cassuto offers a range of advice on how to structure arguments, use metaphor, and integrate narrative. He also provides a thoughtful reflection on the value of academic knowledge for the broader public and how to square a rules-based approach to teaching writing with the inevitable evolution of language. This book will be of interest to graduate students, writing instructors, editors, and anyone who wants to learn how to make their writing clearer and more sympathet

How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance?  In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), Austen scholar Dr. Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime—as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels—Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance. Dr. Brodey argues that Austen's surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writer's own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austen's fiercely independent and deeply humanistic ideals led her to develop a style of ending all her own. Writing in a culture that set a monetary value on success in marriage and equated matrimony with happiness, Austen qu

Konrad Bercovici's The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years With the Legends Who Lunch (SUNY Press, 2024) is a previously unpublished manuscript exploring the rich history of a New York City landmark. Located in New York's theatre district, the Algonquin Hotel became an artistic hub for the city and a landmark in America's cultural life. It was a meeting place and home away from home for such luminaries as famed wits/authors Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker; Broadway and Hollywood stars, including Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Laughton; popular raconteurs like Robert Benchley; and New York City mayors Jimmy Walker and Fiorello LaGuardia. Observing it all was celebrated author and journalist Konrad Bercovici. Born in Romania, Bercovici settled in New York, where he became known for reporting on its rich cultural life. While digging through an inherited trunk of family papers, his granddaughter, Mirana Comstock, discovered this previously unpublished manuscript on Bercovici's years at the Algonquin Round Table

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature: Gender and Power in Louise O'Neill's Young Adult Fiction (Routledge, 2022) addresses the role of YA Irish literature in responding and contributing to some the most controversial and contemporary issues in today's modern society: gender, and conflicting views of power, sexism, and consent.  This volume provides an original, innovative, and necessary examination of how "rape culture" and the intersections between feminism and power have become increasingly relevant to Irish society in the years since Irish author Louise O'Neill's novels for young adults Only Ever Yours and Asking for It were published. In consideration of the socio-political context in Ireland and broader Western culture from which O'Neill's works were written, and taking into account a selection of Irish, American, Australian and British YA texts that address similar issues in different contexts, this text highlights the contradictions in O'Neill's works and illuminates their potential to function as a

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024), introduced by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17. Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett's work has anticipated ev

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility (Brill, 2019) is the first book-length study that examines the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian Nakba in modern Hebrew literature. Through a rigorous reading of canonical Hebrew literary texts, the author addresses the general failure of Hebrew literature to take responsibility for the Nakba. The book illustrates how the language of modern Hebrew poetry and fiction reflects symptoms of Israeli national violence, in which the literary language produces a picture of Palestine as an arena where the violent clash between the perpetrators and the victims takes place. In doing so, the author develops a new and critical paradigm for reflecting on the moral responsibility of literature and the ethics of reading. The book includes close readings of the works of Avot Yeshurun, S. Yizhar, Nathan Alterman, Yehuda Amichai, Yitzhak Laor, and Amos Oz, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show

From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. In Space, Place, and Bestsellers: Moving Books (Cambridge University Press Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series, 2024), Lisa Fletcher and Elizabeth Leane examine the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this book offers a new model for st

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde's teachings on "the creative power of difference" may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde's understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation. Possibly the focus on Lorde's quotable essays, to the neglect of her complex poems, has led us to ignore her deep engagement with the natural world, the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. For her, ecological images are not simply metaphors but rather literal guides to how to be of earth on earth, and how to survive--to live the ethics that a Black feminist lesbian warrior poetics demands. In Survival

In Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Zrinka Stahuljak challenges scholars in both mediaeval and translation studies to rethink how ideas and texts circulated in the mediaeval world. Whereas many view translators as mere conduits of authorial intention, Dr. Stahuljak proposes a new perspective rooted in a term from journalism: the fixer. With this language, Dr. Stahuljak captures the diverse, active roles mediaeval translators and interpreters played as mediators of entire cultures—insider informants, local guides, knowledge brokers, art distributors, and political players. Fixers offers nothing less than a new history of literature, art, translation, and social exchange from the perspective not of the author or state but of the fixer. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualit

Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024) is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"--making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is no

At the beginning of the twentieth century, for many English men and women of Welsh origin the idea of being in some part 'Welsh' reaffirmed their own understanding of what it meant to 'be British'. Wales in England, 1914-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Wendy Ugolini is the first cultural history of this English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - and explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the two world wars. In so doing, and making use of individual English Welsh case studies from the worlds of politics, art, literature, and soldiering, the book provides a wholly new perspective on the social, cultural, and military history of Britain at war. It shows English-Welsh duality to have been an important strand of pluralistic Britishness in wartime, and that this diasporic construction of Welshness held a wide urban appeal with significant implications for military enlistment, cultural production, and commemorati