New Books in Literary Studies

Ian Almond is Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar, and author of six books, including Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds, published in 2011 by Harvard University Press and The Thought of Nirad C. Chaudhuri: Islam, Empire and Loss published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. His work has been translated into thi...

The account of the exodus of Israel out of Egypt led by Moses has shaped the theology and community identity of both Jewish people and Christians across the centuries, blossoming further in later scriptures and religious writings, as well as in art and music. Join us as we speak with Joshua Coutts about the book, Let My People Go: The Reception of Exodus Motifs in Jewish and Christian Literature,...

The Cloud of Longing: A New Translation and Eco-Aesthetic Study of Kalidasa's Meghaduta (Oxford UP, 2021) is a translation and full-length study of the great Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa's famed Meghadūta (literally: "The Cloud Messenger") with a focus on its interfacing of nature, feeling, figurative language, and mythic memory. While the Meghadūta has been translated a number of times, the last "almos...

In Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project -- not as linear, bound and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-...

Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke UP, 2021), Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely celebrated as Japan's greatest modern novelist, exploited the contradictions and ambiguities that haunted this new system....

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature,...

The 2015 #WakingTheFeminists Campaign for gender equality in Irish theatre highlighted the marginalization of women in this industry and led to several significant initiatives that interrogated existing theater practices and pushed for inclusion and representation. Inspired by this movement, three academics, David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase, joined forces to co-edit a two-volume col...

Leonard Cohen's troubled relationship with God is here mapped onto his troubled relationships with sex and politics. Analysing Covenantal theology and its place in Cohen's work, Marcia Pally's From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen (Bloomsbury, 2021) is the first to trace a consistent theology across sixty years of Cohen's writing, drawing on his J...

The late 1970s to the mid-1980s, a period commonly referred to as the post-Mao cultural thaw, was a key transitional phase in the evolution of Chinese science fiction. This period served as a bridge between science-popularization science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s and New Wave Chinese science fiction from the 1990s into the twenty-first century. Chinese Science Fiction during the Post-Mao Cult...

Gill has been s a volunteer librarian at Claremont Primary School in Cape Town South Africa since 2010. Through her initiative she has been able to give several hundred children aged 6-14 from largely disadvantaged backgrounds access to books and advice about reading. She believes that this has been life changing for a significant number of her readers – as well as giving her life profound value....

Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (U Minnesota Press, 202...

A conversation with booksellers from three of the most dynamic, exciting, and community-oriented independent bookstores in the country. Lisa Swayze of Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY), Michelle Malonzo of Changing Hands Bookstore (Tempe, AZ), and Alena Jones of Seminary Co-op Bookstores (Chicago, IL) join me and my special co-host, professor Kasia Bartoszynska for a roundup of their favorite book...

Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet's work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theo...

Gloria Maité Hernández's Savoring God: Comparative Theopoetics (Oxford UP, 2021) compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentarie...

Most of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was b...

In To Make Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship (Duke UP 2021), Elizabeth McHenry locates a hidden chapter in the history of Black literature at the turn of the twentieth century, revising concepts of Black authorship and offering a fresh account of the development of "Negro literature" focused on the never published, the barely read, and the unconventional...

Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth centur...

Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge UP, 2020) by Andrew Piper tackles the problem of generalization with respect to text-based evidence in the field of literary studies. When working with texts, how can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations to more general beliefs about the world? The onset of computational methods has highlighted ma...

In Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism: A Literary History, 1945–2008 (Cambridge UP, 2021), Bryan M. Santin examines over a half-century of intersection between American fiction and postwar conservatism. He traces the shifting racial politics of movement conservatism to argue that contemporary perceptions of literary form and aesthetic value are intrinsically connected to...

The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Kate Rigby's book Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation (Bloomsbury, 2020) rediscovers the importance of the European Ro...

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children's drawings--the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library: A Rich and Fragile History (Basic Books, 2021), historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwe...

In this episode, I interview Shaoling Ma, professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS about her new book, The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). In this fascinating book, Ma grapples with theoretical and historical questions of media and mediation in the late Qing. Calling on a diverse set of sources, including diplomatic records, science fiction novels, moder...

“The good life” and “the American Dream “remain powerful animating principles in popular culture, politics, and also our individual psyches. I spoke with Professor Dora Zhang at the University of California at Berkeley who teaches a course on “the good life,” using mostly literary rather than philosophical texts. From Sophokles’s Antigone (441 B.C.) to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2020); from Gustave...

In Humanist Reason: A History, an Argument, a Plan (Columbia UP, 2021), Eric Hayot develops the concept of “humanist reason” to understand the nature and purpose of humanist intellectual work and lays out a serious of principles that undergird this core idea. Rather than appealing to familiar ethical or moral rationales for the importance of the humanities, Humanist Reason lays out a new vision th...

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a revered classic today fifty five years after it was first published in 1967. Today I talked to Alvaro Santana Acuña a sociologist and historian who describes the ingredients that went into manufacturing the success of this book. In Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic (Columbia UP, 2020), Alvaro Santana-Acuña...