New Books in Literary Studies

Kalpavigyan—science fiction written to excite Bengali speakers about science, as well as to persuade them to evolve beyond the limitations of religion, caste, and class—became popular in the early years of the twentieth century. Translated into English for the first time, in The Inhumans and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024) you'll discover The Inhumans (1935), Hemendrakumar Roy's satirical novella...

The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author (PostHill Press, 2024) by Rebecca Rego Barry is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before...

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State (Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, T...

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives (Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journal The Yellow Book. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom. Decadent Women is an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and litera...

Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. In The Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture...

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s ori...

Sven Birkerts is the co-editor of AGNI magazine, an essayist, and a literary critic perhaps best known for his book The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (FSG, 2006), about the impact of the internet and “electronic culture” in general. He’s taught at Bennington College, Harvard University, and elsewhere. What is MFA culture, and how has the rise of writing programs in ac...

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's Gulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading (Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical informatio...

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the...

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters (Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the concept of ‘literary sovereignty’, the book argues that political sovereignty in colonial India went hand i...

When celebrated American novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor died at the age of thirty-nine in 1964, she left behind an unfinished third novel titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? Scholarly experts uncovered and studied the material, deeming it unpublishable. It stayed that way for more than fifty years. Until now. For the past ten-plus years, award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson ha...

The marvellous, a key concept in literary debates at the turn of the seventeenth century, involved sensory and perspectival transformation, a rhetoric built on the unexpected, contradictory, and thought-provoking. The composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) created a new practice in which the expressive materials of music and poetry were placed in concert. This innovative new study of Monteverdi's...

In this episode of High Theory, Jonathan Kramnick talks about Close Reading. Contrary to the name, it is less a form of slow or focused reading than an immersive practice of writing. The classic methodology of New Criticism has become, in Kramnick’s estimation, the shared foundation of literary studies in the university. Our conversation was inspired by Jonathan’s new book, Criticism and Truth: On...

Lee Gutkind is the founder of the literary magazine, Creative Nonfiction. He’s edited or authored over 30 books during his time on the faculty of, first, the University of Pittsburgh and, more recently, Arizona State University. His latest book is The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction (Yale UP, 2024). This...

The use of disability as a metaphor is ubiquitous in popular culture – nowhere more so than in the myths, stereotypes and tropes around blindness. To be 'blind' has never referred solely to the inability to see. Instead blindness has been used as shorthand for, among other things, a lack of understanding, immorality, closeness to death, special insight or second sight. Although these 'meanings' at...

The ideal of ‘conversation’ recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice central to ethics, democratic politics, and thinking itself. Interweaving readings of fiction and philosophy in a ‘conversational’ style inspired by Stanley Cavell, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023) clarifies this lofty yet vague ideal, while developing a revitalizing model for interd...

Sir Stanley Wells is one of the world's greatest authorities on William Shakespeare. Here he brings a lifetime of learning and reflection to bear on some of the most tantalising questions about the poet and dramatist that there are. How did he think, feel, and work? What were his relationships like? What did he believe about death? What made him laugh? This freshly thought and immensely engaging s...

Michael Johnston's The Middle English Book: Scribes and Readers, 1350-1500 (Oxford UP, 2023) addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the re...

In the first half of the twentieth century, Black hemispheric culture grappled with the legacies of colonialism, U.S. empire, and Jim Crow. As writers and performers sought to convey the terror and the beauty of Black life under oppressive conditions, they increasingly turned to the labor, movement, speech, sound, and ritual of everyday “folk.” Many critics have perceived these representations of...

Today I talked to Mara Josi about her new book Rome, 16 October 1943: History, Memory, Literature (Legenda, 2023). Rome. Saturday 16 October 1943. This is where and when the largest single round-up and deportation of Jews from Italy happened. 1259 people were arrested by the German occupiers and gathered in a temporary detention centre for two days. They were eventually deported to Auschwitz-Birke...

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This...

What is the relationship between aesthetic presentation of thought and scientific conceptions of cognition? Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2021) answers this question by offering incisive commentary on a range of contemporary fictions that combine language, maps, photographs, and other images to portray thought. Situatin...

Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But "dictator novels" do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. As this genre has developed and cohered, it has acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and g...

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit...

In this episode of High Theory, Matt Seybold tells us about Criticism, the glue that holds the bricks of culture together. Cultural critics are a necessary component of the intellectual ecosystem, who have the power to analyze both the material conditions and the myths that make up our world. Matt is the host of the American Vandal Podcast at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. In...