New Books in Literary Studies

Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a good yarn. The health of the community was at stake. Flowering Tales: Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan (Harvard University Press, 2020) is the first extensive literary study of this historical tale, which...

In Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify...

Consumption and the Literary Cookbook, edited by Roxanne Harde and Janet Wesselius (published 2021 by Routledge) examines the ways in which recipe authors and readers engage with one another through reading, cooking and eating the foods contained within the pages of Literary Cookbooks. The editors define literary cookbooks as novels and memoirs that include recipes, cookbooks that include narrativ...

The election of Barack Obama propelled the idea of a post-racial United States, or that the country had moved beyond race as a defining feature of social difference and beyond racism as an everyday reality.  Dr. Danielle Fuentes Morgan examines the ways in which African American comedians and cultural producers took aim at such claims through the lens of satire. In her book, Laughing to Keep from...

Ramsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progre...

Anecdote, Network, Gossip, Performance: Essays on the Shishuo xinyu (Harvard UP, 2021) is a study of the Shishuo xinyu, the most important anecdotal collection of medieval China—and arguably of the entire traditional era. In a set of interconnected essays, Jack W. Chen offers new readings of the Shishuo xinyu that draw upon social network analysis, performance studies, theories of ritual and mourn...

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this...

A scholarly and imaginative reconstruction of the voyage Daniel Defoe took from the pillory to literary immortality, The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2020) contends that Robinson Crusoe contains a secret satire, written against one person, that has gone undetected for 300 years. By locating Defoe's nemesis and discovering what he rep...

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a...

In Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11 (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), author Lindsay Thomas studies the relationship between fiction and U.S. national security — specifically, the instrumentalization of fiction in preparedness materials, in which fictional events are phrased not only as real, but as producing eligible information and ‘intelligence.’ Approachi...

What role did culture play in the British Empire? In Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire Caroline Ritter, an Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University, explores the importance of culture in maintaining Imperial domination, and then in supporting post-Imperial British influence. Using core case studies of key institutions- the British Council, the BBC, an...

Angkarn Kallayanapong (1926-2012) was arguably Thailand’s most famous poet of the modern period. His career spanned the era from the 1940s to the 1980s when Thai society was fundamentally transformed by rapid economic development and the process of globalization. His poetry is a testament to the massive disruption, dislocation, and alienation caused by these changes, and a lament for cultural loss...

Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult, 2019) is a fascinating tour through a wide range of narrative structures that are inspired by forms in the natural world. As Jane Alison writes, "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel--one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows...

Listen to this interview of Joan Turner, author of On Writtenness: The Cultural Politics of Academic Writing (Bloomsbury Academic 2018). We talk about writers, writing, writers writing, unwritten subtexts, and written text. Interviewer: "What do you see as the step which writing practitioners can take in the direction of their discipline-based colleagues, and what's the step that researchers can t...

In the seventeenth century, Japanese popular prose flourished as waves of newly literate readers gained access to the printed word. Commercial publishers released vast numbers of titles in response to readers’ hunger for books that promised them potent knowledge. However, traditional literary histories of this period position the writings of Ihara Saikaku at center stage, largely neglecting the br...

Picking up where most historians conclude, Chelsea Stieber explores the critical internal challenge to Haiti’s post-independence sovereignty: a civil war between monarchy and republic. What transpired was a war of swords and of pens, waged in newspapers and periodicals, in literature, broadsheets, and fliers.  In Haiti's Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republ...

Hoda El Shakry’s book The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (Fordham University Press, 2019) was awarded the ACLA’s 2018 Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award and the MLA’s 2020 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. It examines the influence of Qurʾanic textual, hermeneutical, and philosophical traditions on twentieth-century novels from the Maghreb (Tunisia...

How does revolution literature help to engage Mongolia’s nomadic population with the utopia of a “new society” promised by the Mongolian People’s Revolution Party? In Politics and Literature in Mongolia 1921-1948 (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), Simon Wickhamsmith explores the relationship between literature and politics in the period between the 1921 socialist revolution and the first Writers’...

Nineteenth-century Japanese literary discourse and narrative developed a striking preoccupation with ninjō—literally “human emotion,” but often used in reference to amorous feeling and erotic desire. For many writers and critics, fiction’s capacity to foster both licentiousness and didactic values stood out as a crucial source of ambivalence. Simultaneously capable of inspiring exemplary behavior...

Listen to this interview of Robert Samuels, author of Teaching Writing, Rhetoric, and Reason at the Globalizing University (Routledge, 2021). We talk about grammar, which is what everything really fits inside of. Mostly. Interviewer : "Clearly, the liberal globalist position will cause some pushback. What would you say to our listeners, what would you say to your readers to help them make that pus...

Medicine is most often understood through the metaphor of war. We encounter phrases such as “the war against the coronavirus,” “the front lines of the Ebola crisis,” “a new weapon against antibiotic resistance,” or “the immune system fights cancer” without considering their assumptions, implications, and history. But there is nothing natural about this language. It does not have to be, nor has it...

Hawraa Al Hassan’s Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968-2003 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) is unique because it both explores discourse concerning women and how women themselves used literature to create a site of resistance to the state. Al-Hassan’s work is also inclusive, as it joins a wider call to make literary studies...

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators, James Hadley and Nell Regan, note in A Gap in t...

The texts that are examined in this study move in and out of different languages or are multilingual in their origins. Texts and authors do not move randomly; rather, they follow routes shaped by the history of contact between different nations of the transpacific. As these texts move into and out of the Chinese language or become multilingual, they necessarily do not always remain Sinophone. The...

Bryce Traister has edited a collection of 13 original essays exploring the shifting landscape in the historiography of American Puritanism in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies (Cambridge UP, 2017). These essays explore how studies in American literature(s) can benefit from the shifting trends in 21st-century scholarship under the broad themes of post-secular, post-national, and post-...