New Books in Literary Studies

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagonists, crises, triumphs, and tragedies. His fictions...

Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behin...

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have prod...

The New England Review bills itself as a “snapshot of the literary moment,” which for my guest Elizabeth Kadetsky means great writing, of course, but also work that’s relevant to today and showcases a writer able to get out of her or his own head by getting out into the world at large. Fittingly, this episode jumps in locale from Greece to India to Sudan and, finally, to New York City. In every ca...

Neil Bernstein's The Complete Works of Claudian (Routledge, 2022) offers a modern, accurate, and accessible translation of Claudian's work, published in English for the first time since 1922, and accompanied by detailed notes and a comprehensive glossary. Claudian (active 395-404 CE) was the last of the great classical Latin poets. His best-known work, The Rape of Proserpina, continues to inspire...

Why do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Dr. Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a universally recognized component of narrative art and a means to register the sensation of time. In The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 202...

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford UP, 2023) is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of...

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature (Stanford UP, 2022) insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tr...

Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin are English professors at Brigham Young University. Madden’s latest book is Disparates (U Nebraska Press, 2020) and Franklin’s is The Writer's Hustle: A Professional Guide to the Creativity, Discipline, Humility, and Grit Every Writer Needs to Flourish (Bloomsbury, 2022). They serve as co-editors-in-chief of Fourth Genre. Two guest voices in this episode means twic...

Epic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors' wives: Penelope, isolated but resourceful as she awaits the return of Odysseus after his lengthy absence; the war widow Andromache, enslaved and displa...

Holly A. Baggett's Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review (Northern Illinois UP, 2023) is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914. Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebel...

East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2023) examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genre...

Matthew Rubery's book Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (Stanford UP, 2022) explores the influence neurodivergence has on the ways individuals read. This alternative history of reading is one of the few books which tells the stories of "atypical" readers and the impact had on their lives by neurological conditions affecting their ability to make sense of the printed word: from dysle...

George Floyd's death on May 25th 2020 marked a watershed in reactions to anti-Black racism in the United States and elsewhere. Intense demonstrations around the world followed. Within literary studies, the demonstrations accelerated the scrutiny of the literary curriculum, the need to diversify the curriculum, and the need to incorporate more Black writers.  Decolonizing the English Literary Curri...

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figure...

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--ha...

As per William Shakespeare, ‘all the world’s a stage’. But what if the human soul was a stage too? What if the stage of the world and the stage of the soul coincided? And what if the soul was also the main character of the play?  These questions are at the core of Eugenio Refini's book Staging the Soul: Allegorical Drama as Spiritual Practice in Baroque Italy (Legenda, 2022), which explores pedago...

Derek Askey is an associate editor on staff at The Sun magazine, located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. What qualifies as a Sun essay? As noted by my guest, odds are that means an essay that’s intimate, even raw, with an author who dares to leave a lot of themselves on the page. In Derek Askey’ case, he’s often drawn to an essay with a mix of moods and writing that “looks you in the eye.” Of the...

How do fiction and research intersect? In The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2023), Beth Driscoll, an Associate Professor in Publishing, Communications and Arts Management at the University of Melbourne and Claire Squires a Professor in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling, reflect on Blaire Squiscoll’s The Frankfurt Kabuff, by bringing together a c...

Richard Hoffman is the creative nonfiction editor at Solstice and is the author of seven books, including two memoirs and four books of poetry. He’s won a Massachusetts Book Award for his poetry and is an Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College. Over the 16 years that Richard Hoffman has been involved with Solstice, he’s happily seen it evolve to be ever more conscious of including more di...

William Meiners is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. He created Sport Literate as a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago in 1995. By day, he works as a reporter for the Gratiot County Herald, a family-owned weekly newspaper, and by night, he teaches academic writing courses at Mid Michigan College For the 25th anniversary of Sport Literate, Bill and his coll...

Dayna Tororici is the co-editor of n + 1 magazine, located in New York City. She’s been on staff for the past 10 years, following her studies at Brown University. She’s also a new mother. n + 1 positions itself as combining a fine sense for how literature is composed through the use of voice, and an eye for detail and an ear for rhythm, in addition to wanting to address the current political and c...

John Gower’s "Confessio Amantis" ("The Lover’s Confession") is one of the most important English works of the fourteenth century. Within its frame of the lovesick lover’s confession are well over a hundred stories, mainly derived from classical mythology, the Bible, and history which exemplify the Middle Ages. Echoing the octosyllabic line of the original, The Lover's Confession: A Translation of...

Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic (LSU Press, 2023) by Dr. Cassander L. Smith examines the means through which people of African descent embodied tenets of respectability as a coping strategy to navigate enslavement and racial oppression in the early Black Atlantic world. The term “respectability politics” refers to the way members of a minoritized population adopt the customs and...

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are probably history’s most famous folklorists. Their collection of folk tales – the Children’s and Household Tales – is one of the world’s most translated literary works. Living in a time of upheaval and war, the Grimm brothers were also passionate German nationalists. They insisted that Germans must reject alien regimes and only accept rulers who spoke their language and...