New Books in Literary Studies

As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen....

Gulliver's Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver's adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnmhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him...

In  Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) , analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore...

While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn’head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author wasn’t only America’s greatest humorist, but also one of its most subtle political thinkers. But what was the political philosophy of the elusive and ironic Mark Twain for his new democratic America? To...

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating the country’s still-flourishing and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and stone built cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland had...

Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026) María Angélica Thumala Olave , a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science , explores people’s relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyo...

Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini The study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by emphasi...

What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine? In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Su...

This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network . In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production , published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-fou...

A groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between Federico García Lorca and American poet Philip Cummings and its impact on the poems in Lorca's landmark collection, Poet in New York . In August 1929, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left New York City to spend ten days with his friend and lover Philip Cummings at a lakeside cottage in northern Vermont. Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet...

Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archive...

Baudelaire's Objects (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation. Charles Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that...

The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture (Cornell UP, 2026) explores impolite modes of expression—satire, crude humor, and rudeness—as a critical lens for both aesthetic innovation and sociopolitical critique. In the Arab world—from Cairo's Tahrir Square and the thoroughfares of Beirut to war-torn Gaza—political demands have been framed by satirical cartoons and gra...

We the Platform : How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless wr...

The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of lu...

Lauren Delapenha speaks to Emily Everett about her poems “Supermarketing” and “If You Are Learning English,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. Lauren also discusses her process and revision methods, her time at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, and how balancing both teaching and writing challenges her. Lauren is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creat...

After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maineʼs inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written rev...

The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 196...

The young James Joyce (1882–1941) was forged in the smithy of Irish political controversies, and he took into his European exile a depth of political insight unrivalled among his fellow modernists. In this biography of Joyce in his youth and early exile  James Joyce: A Political Life (Princeton UP, 2026), acclaimed Irish historian and biographer Frank Callanan reveals a Joyce who is markedly mo...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There―and in many other communities in the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central America―Black people repurposed and regenerated what had been a place of enslavement into a site for imagining alt...

Writer Naomi Kanakia has spent her adult life reading the so-called “great books,” those classic works of literature which are–depending who you ask–either deeply unfashionable, or a time-honored testament to human accomplishment. With What’s So Great About the Great Books : Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (Princeton UP, 2026) Kanakia, a devoted lay reader,...

Today’s guest, Caro Pirri, is the author of Colonial Failure and Theatrical Form in Early Modern England: Stages of Unsettlement (Oxford University Press, 2025). This book explores how early modern colonial travel writing informed the London theater’s spatial and placemaking conventions. It suggests that what the stage found most compelling about narratives of colonial settlement was their failure...

Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) examines how autobiographical writing reflects the psychological and cultural afterlives of the British Empire. Rather than treating decolonization as a completed historical moment, Emma Parker shows how empire continues to haunt personal memory, identity, and ideas of home. Through close read...

Empire, Race, and Print Culture in the Black Pacific (Cambridge University Press, 2026) is an Element which centers the 'Black Pacific' as a generative site for comparative and intersectional methodologies and transnational frameworks for thinking about racial formations, post-national literary forms, and cultural histories. At the end of the nineteenth century, US overseas expansion into the Paci...

For centuries, many of the world’s most influential thinkers relied on helpers who performed tasks such as taking dictation, correcting, indexing, composing, and endless copying. In the Scholar’s Workshop: Hidden Histories of Collaboration and Authorship (Princeton UP, 2026) introduces readers to these unsung scribes, assistants, and collaborators, showing how the scholarly enterprise is rarely as...