New Books in Literary Studies

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers,...

What happens when you come of age in mid-life? Why is so challenging to figure out your own past? Can you find the permission to be weird? (And can you be happy if you don’t?) Memoirist and English professor Hannah Pittard joins us to explore: If the personal is ever too personal. What is a collective memory. The imperfect way we perceive our own experiences. Taking risks in writing and in life. T...

Today’s guest is Wayne Deakin, whose new book, Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism, has just published by Palgrave Macmillan in summer 2023. Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism surveys the varied ways we have tried to make sense of literary texts, from the earliest Greek poetic theories of antiquity up to contemporary anti-critique polemics. Wayne Deakin is professor of English at Ch...

I am excited to welcome Eliot Borenstein to the podcast today to discuss his new monograph, Marvel Comics in the 1970s: The World Inside Your Head, published through Cornell University Press in 2023. Eliot is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. He has published a number of books: Soviet-Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism (Cornell University Press, 2023)...

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian t...

A cultural revolution in England, France, and the United States beginning during the time of the industrial and political revolutions helped usher in modernity. This cultural revolution worked alongside the better documented political and economic revolutions to usher in the modern era of continuous revolution. Focusing on the period between 1847 and 1937, Outrage: The Arts and the Creation of Mod...

Part 2 opens with a discussion of the history play genre and of how history shapes and constrains the plays’ protagonists. With Professor Stephen Foley, we then explore the complex character of Henry himself, asking why this figure has given rise to so many conflicting interpretations and how Henry’s unique political role should influence the way we judge him. Finally, we trace the arc of the play...

Today’s guest is Kevin Killeen whose new monograph, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable, has just been published by Stanford University Press. This monograph gathers together a range of early modern sources including the mystic Jacob Boehme, the poet and radical John Milton, the writer and royalist Margaret Cavendish, and the prophet Anna Tra...

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago, 2015) explores the relation between sodomy and motifs of vision and visibility in medieval culture through the categories of gender and sexuality as we understand them today. Although substantial energy has already been devoted to examining the textual evidence of sodomy in the Middle Ages, Robert Mills's aim here is to add a further visual...

From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captivate us so? What is the drive to be frightened, and why is it so perennially popular?  Why Horror Seduces (Oxford UP, 2017) addresses these questions through evolutiona...

Mateusz Świetlicki's book Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children's Historical Fiction: The Seeds of Memory (Routledge, 2023) is the first book monograph devoted to Anglophone Ukrainian Canadian children's historical fiction published between 1991 and 2021. It consists of five chapters offering cross-sectional and interdisciplinary readings of 41 books - novels, novellas, pictureboo...

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these...

A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean: A Collection of Stories Curated by Lela Sebbar (U California Press, 2023) brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to re...

Almost every student that will enroll in a college Shakespeare course can expect two things. Students will have to engage with the style and themes of texts that were composed over four hundred years old. And students will have to submit a piece of original writing that is well-organized, has a fresh argument, and cites early modern sources correctly. Rarely do these two tracks of the course infor...

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of globa...

Many early modern humanists would balk at the proposition that what they did amounted to housework. They were far more likely to reach for the heroic image of a farmer striving in the fields, as immortalized in the ancient Roman poet Virgil’s Georgics. But, as shown in Katie Kadue’s book Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago, 2021), the domestic pr...

Henry V is one of the most celebrated of Shakespeare’s history plays. In the 1590s, Shakespeare wrote a series of eight plays based on English chronicle history, telling the stories of civil wars and wars abroad, of the rise and fall of kings. Henry V was an English monarch who won great military victories in France in the early 1400s, and Shakespeare dramatizes his famous victory at Agincourt. In...

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living (Princeton UP, 2023) invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard--surveying l...

Feature films, television shows, homemade videos, tweets, blogs, and breaking news: digital media offer an always-accessible, apparently inexhaustible supply of entertainment and information. Although choices seems endless, public attention is not. How do digital media find the audiences they need in an era of infinite choice? In The Marketplace of Attention, James Webster explains how audiences t...

Tristan Tzara, one of the most important figures in the twentieth century's most famous avant-garde movements, was born Samuel Rosenstock (or Samueli Rosenștok) in a provincial Romanian town, on April 16 (or 17, or 14, or 28) in 1896. Tzara became Tzara twenty years later at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, when he and others (including Marcel Janco, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Arp) in...

Ada--a woman from Montreal living reluctantly in Michigan--vanishes from her bed one night while her husband Danny is asleep beside her, her young son, Gilles, in the next room. Desperate to locate Ada before Gilles understands what has happened, Danny begins a search. But the feds are already involved: across the country and around the world, mothers are vanishing from their homes. Where did Ada...

In Part 3, Professor Tiffany Stern offers close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches. You’ll discover the surprising biblical resonances in a speech by the foolish Bottom and see how the epilogue shifts the play from a story about magic to a magic spell placed on the audience itself. Speeches and Performers: Titania, 2.1, “Set your heart at rest: The Fairyland buys not the chil...

Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, oft...

Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book (Oxford UP, 2022) is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. Its starting point is the contemporary idea of 'the death of the book' implied by the replacement of physical books by digital media, with accompanying twenty-first-century...

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical...