New Books In Literary Studies

There is in certain circles a widely held belief that the only proper kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge. This belief often runs parallel to the notion that legitimate knowledge is obtained when a scientist follows a rigorous investigative procedure called the 'scientific method'.  In Do the Humanities Create Knowledge? (Cambridge UP, 2023), Chris Haufe challenges this idea. He shows that what we know about the so-called scientific method rests fundamentally on the use of finely tuned human judgments directed toward certain questions about the natural world. He suggests that this dependence on judgment in fact reveals deep affinities between scientific knowledge and another, equally important, sort of comprehension: that of humanistic creative endeavour. His wide-ranging and stimulating new book uncovers the unexpected unity underlying all our efforts – whether scientific or arts-based – to understand human experience. In so doing, it makes a vital contribution to broader conversation about the value o

The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’s The Last Man and her Journal of Sorrow, both of which were written side by side in the mid-1820s. Hunt’s writing of The First Last Man reflects Shelley’s own approach to writing, which integrates her own experiences into her imagined universes to explore humanity and our thinking. Thus, The First Last Man is a pivotal analysis of Shelley’s iconic work of plague fiction or pandemic novels and Hunt researched and wrote the book during our contemporary experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. While Shelley’s Frankenstein 

Game worlds differ from traditional fictional worlds. While literary and cinematic worlds are written to host character arcs and plots, game worlds need to be designed to host game mechanics. While Princess Leia, Mad Max and Daenerys Targaryen may leave their marks on their fictional worlds, it is YOU, the player, who will carve your personal experience into the digital firmament of every game world you inhabit. In Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds (Narrative, 2024), games industry veteran Edwin McRae will guide you through the evergreen principles of player-centric game world design. How do you create game-based environments and cultures that resonate with reality? This senior narrative designer will share a range of field-tested techniques that will help you design instead of derive. How do you organise all that lore? This is a common pain point for world builders and Edwin will offer tools and tactics that keep game bibles scoped, searchable and sensible

‘The result is that, at the present time, the world is at an impasse.’ In 1956, Aimé Césaire pronounced the world to be at an impasse while renouncing his allegiance to the French Communist Party. In Jesse McCarthy’s The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (U Chicago Press, 2024), this foreclosure of ideological avenues, this loss of belief in the prevailing modes of political praxis restricts and overdetermines the scope of writing and possibilities of culture during the Cold War. Although this story of Cold War disillusionment may sound familiar to readers of Mark Grief’s The Age of the Crisis of Man (2015) and Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism (2016), McCarthy argues that black writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Édouard Glissant, Paule Marshall, and Gwendolyn Brooks variously dissented from these delimitations in the name of alternate, unappeasable, quiet and disquieting bids for freedom. Across detailed chapters spanning from 1945 to 1965, the year in which Malcom X was assassina

In The Radical Isaac: I. L. Peretz and the Rise of Jewish Socialism (SUNY Press, 2023), Adi Mahalel presents Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) in a new radical light we've never seen him in before. Conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2011/12 Occupy Wall Street movement and social protests in Israel/Palestine, and against the backdrop of the Bernie Sander's campaigns in the United States, Mahalel revisits the radical period of the 1890s and recasts Peretz as an "organic intellectual" (Antonio Gramsci) of the Eastern European Jewish working class complementing the political work of the incipient socialist, diaspora nationalist movement of the Jewish Labor Bund. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz in Yiddish and Hebrew and following a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, this study traces Peretz's radicalism from its inception through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history. It shows how this writ

Rebuilding Story Worlds: The Obscure Cities by Schuiten and Peeters (Rutgers UP, 2020) examines The Obscure Cities, one of the few comics series to achieve massive popularity while remaining highly experimental in form and content. Set in a parallel world, full of architecturally distinctive city-states, The Obscure Cities also represents one of the most impressive pieces of world-building in any form of literature. Rebuilding Story Worlds offers the first full-length study of this seminal series, exploring both the artistic traditions from which it emerges and the innovative ways it plays with genre, gender, and urban space. Comics scholar Jan Baetens examines how Schuiten’s work as an architectural designer informs the series’ concerns with the preservation of historic buildings. He also includes an original interview with Peeters, which reveals how poststructuralist critical theory influenced their construction of a rhizomatic fictional world, one which has made space for fan contributions through the Alta

Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a novelist, Omar was a journalist, and his experiencing reporting on (among other subjects) the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement profoundly shapes his fiction. His first novel, American War (Vintage, 2018), follows the protagonist’s radicalization against the backdrop of afossil fuel-motivated civil war. His second, What Strange Paradise (Vintage, 2022), is a haunting retelling of Peter Pan focused on a young Syrian refugee. But as Omar and Min’s dialogue reveals, literary criticism doesn’t always get the politics of political fiction right. Their conversation moves from the preoccupation with “literal prophecy” which plagues the reception of speculative fiction in general and climate fiction in particular to the multifaceted appeal of the fantastical in writing migration stories. They discuss Omar’s interest not in extrapolation, but

In this interview, Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins discusses his most recent book Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester UP, 2022). Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature explores the intertextual connections between early modern English and modern Irish literature. Characterizing the relationship as 'dismemorial', the book explores how ghosts, bodies, and the land are sites of literary connection through which modern/contemporary Ireland draws on Shakespeare's England. Dr. Nicholas Taylor-Collins is Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His reasearch focuses on Shakespeare and modern and contemporary Irish literature. Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Xuanzang (600/602–664) was one of the most accomplished and consequential monks in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Celebrated for his sixteen-year pilgrimage from China to India, his transmission and translation of hundreds of Buddhist texts, and his training of a generation of masters in China, Korea, and Japan, Xuanzang’s life and legacy are the stuff of legend. In the centuries after his death, stories of his epic adventures and extraordinary accomplishments circulated in texts, images, songs, and plays. These mythic accounts recast the erudite pilgrim, translator, and court cleric as a magical monk who traveled not between China and India but between heaven and earth. Beset by bloodthirsty demons, this deified version of Xuanzang navigates the perilous paths of the netherworld to reach a pure land in the west. His purpose is to acquire a cache of sacred scriptures with the power to safeguard the living and deliver the dead. Along the way, he is guided and protected by a mischievous monkey, a lazy pig,

During the first half of the twentieth century, a group of collectors and creators dedicated themselves to documenting the history of African American life. At a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history, these bibliophiles, scrapbookers, and librarians created an enduring set of African diasporic archives. In building these institutions and amassing abundant archival material, they also reshaped Black public culture, animating inquiry into the nature and meaning of Black history. In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History (Columbia UP, 2024), Laura E. Helton tells the stories of these Black collectors, traveling from the parlors of the urban north to HBCU reading rooms and branch libraries in the Jim Crow south. Helton chronicles the work of six key figures: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick.

In the second volume of The Weight of Words Series, In Fielding's Wake (St. Augustine's Press, 2022), Jeremy Black continues his efforts to present and preserve Britain's literary genius. Its intelligence and enduring influence is in large part reliant on the underlining conservatism that has motivated authors such as Agatha Christie (Black's earlier subject) and Henry Fielding alike. Fielding's epic comic novel, Tom Jones, is unforgettable for many reasons, but the author must be credited with an aptitude for documenting contemporary cultural history and his contribution to a new species of writing. Black's treatment of Fielding draws to the fore a man who was of his time but not confined to it. "Philosophy in practice encompassed his stance as a man of action as well as a reflective writer of genius." Fielding is shown to provide across the breadth of his work extensive and invaluable commentary on issues as diverse as law and order, marriage, women, and the interplay of urban and rural life. Black, an hist

This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process: Reading de Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost (Oxford UP, 2023) explore

James Shapiro spoke at the Institute in 2014 about Shakespeare in America, the anthology he edited for the Library of America. He is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Professor Shapiro is the author of many books on Shakespeare, including Shakespeare in a Divided America, which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction. In addition, he is the author of Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991); Shakespeare and the Jews (1996); Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most Famous Passion Play (2000); 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), which was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize for the best non-fiction book published in Britain; and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010). His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books. He is currently Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New Yo

What are the histories, constraints, and possibilities of language in relation to bodies, origins, land, colonialism, gender, war, displacement, desire, and migration? Moving across genres, memories, belongings, and borders, River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (Trace Press, 2023) invites readers to consider translation as a form of ethical and political love—one that requires attentive regard of an other and a making and unmaking of self. “River in an Ocean, as the title implies, blurs borders between self and others, between translators and their subjects, inscribing the process of translation…on the page.” – Ibrahim Fawzy, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal.  In this episode, Ibrahim and Nuzhat Abbas discuss translation as “decolonial feminist work” and the process of editing this volume, which includes essays by poets, writers, and translators.  Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and academic based in Egypt. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, and disability

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Routledge, 2024) investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.  By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy, Associate Professor of Literature at Harvey Mudd College, argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied

How to Love in Sanskrit (HarperCollins, 2024) is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers. How do you brew a love potion? Turn someone crimson with a compliment? How do you make love? How do you quarrel and make up? Nurse a broken heart? And how do you let go? There's something for everyone in this brilliantly translated ancient guide to love for modern readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sumanth Prabhaker is the editor-in-chief of Orion and the founding editor of Madra Press. He earned an MFA in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he was an editor for the journal Ecotone. Founded in 1982, Orion has evolved as a magazine over the years from the quieter, reverential environmental sensitivity that continues to distinguish it into also a wider awareness of global injustices that especially impact the Global South. In this episode, three essays were discussed that under his leadership, Sumanth Prabhaker nurtured into existence over a span that sometimes stretched into years. First among them is “How the Lark Got Her Crest” by Marianne Jay Erhardt from the Summer 2023 issue. It works from the slightest of bases, the few lines of Aesop’s fable about a lark, into a rather profound piece about how one might bury one’s father “in your head’ like the lark does. Language and honoring one’s parent becomes the grounding in this case. Second up, “The Other Bibles” by Katri

Karen Sullivan of Bard College talks to Jana Byars about her recent book, Eleanor of Aquitaine, As It Was Said: Truth and Tales about the Medieval Queen (U Chicago Press, 2023). A reparative reading of stories about medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Much of what we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France and then Queen of England, we know from recorded rumor--gossip often qualified by the curious phrase "It was said" or the love songs, ballads, and romances that gossip inspired.  While we can mine these stories for evidence about the historical Eleanor, Karen Sullivan invites us to consider, instead, what even the most fantastical of these tales reveal about this queen and about life as a twelfth-century noblewoman. This book paints a fresh portrait of a singular medieval queen and the women who shared her world. The conversation gets into the idea of how we know what we know, and what we can possibly know about a woman this famous.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices S

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines (Duke UP, 2023), Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colon

In this episode of High Theory, Rasheed Tazudeen tells us about the inhuman. The inhuman offers a way of moving beyond the legacies of humanism and across categories and scales of being. Thinking with the inhuman world, from spools of thread to microplastics, helps us try and think otherwise about the complex assemblages that shape our lives. If you want to learn more, check out Rasheed’s new book, Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds (Cornell UP, 2024). The book explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman being—including soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itself—through languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. Rasheed asks how (meta)modernist aesthetics might help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction. Rasheed T