New Books in Literary Studies

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the next-door neighbors began a crusade to push them out. The two brothers followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence. Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about proximity, care, and the line between human and animal. Illustrated with the author's own sketches, Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025) grapples not only with Reilly's place in her neighborhood, but with America's past and current political climate. Amie Souza Reilly is an American writer and artist from Milford, Connecticut. She holds an MA in Literature from Fordham University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches and is the Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this book the Kashmiri translation and the corresponding parts of Jarvis’s English version are presented on facing pages. The Kashmiri text is reproduced as a facsimile of the autograph prepared by Pandit Jagaddhar Zadoo, one of the two Kashmiri translators. The Kashmiri text in the present volume was written on modern paper in easily legible Devanagari characters by using only a few more additional diacritic symbols. This publication contains an introduction written by Surindar Nath Pandita, a grandson of Pandit Nityanand Shastri. The book can be regarded as a conjoined twin of the partial Sanskrit translation of Don Quijote published as volume III of the Pune Indological Series in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Dr. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Dr. Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists' prior expectations. The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming. Kristin Mahoney 's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti 's first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don't need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Isabella Andreini, Letters, ed. and trans. Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Iter Press of the University of Toronto, 2023. Winner of the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition (2024) from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender  Welcome! My guest is Professor Paola Da Santo, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia, who has some fascinating things to say about Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), an actress, poet, and playwright renowned for her literary and theatrical skill.   Acclaimed as "la divina Isabella," Andreini toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters (Iter Press, 2023) is a collection of epistles she wrote written in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini’s modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines—from surprising perspectives—pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the 1980s, readers and scholars alike have celebrated migrant literature for not only depicting migration, but for inspiring  reflections on class, race, gender, nations, and mobility. But, beyond  depicting migration, is it possible for migrant literature to be a force of movement itself? Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion calls upon the philosophy of movement and a counter-history of migration to invent a theory and method for analysing migrant literature. The text uncovers patterns of movement that migrant texts enact and create – in other words, a movement-oriented poetics. Poetics of the Migrant understands movement as the defining force of human history; and the migrant is the primary figure of cultural and political transformation. Migrant literature makes it possible to transform how we process and interpret social history through social motion. Perhaps, from here, we can imagine a different world: one where movement and migrancy are legible and thinkable. About Kevin Potter: Kevin Potter is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Vienna. His research and teaching primarily focus on Marxist theory, migrant literature, anarchist thought, dystopian fiction, and Palestine. His first book, Poetics of the Migrant was released in 2023 through Edinburgh University Press, and received honorable mention for the 2024 Hugh J. Silverman Prize from the Association for Philosophy and Literature. About Pavan Mano: Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/p...). He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation, interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore (https://manchesteruniversitypr...). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Most scholars are both haunted, even undone, by the task of writing papers for peers and traveling to strange campuses to deliver them. Yet we keep it up--we inflict it on our peers, we inflict it on ourselves. Why? To answer that question, Recall This Book assembled three (if you count John) scholars of Victorian literature asked to speak at the Spring 2025 Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference. Their discussion began with the idea that agreeing to give papers is an act of “externalized self-promising” and ranged across the reasons that floating ideas before our peers is terrifying, exhilarating and ultimately necessary. Kristin Mahoney 's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti 's first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don't need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession. Mentioned in the episode Theosophical Society in Chennai Annie Besant Jiddu Krishnamurthi in his early life was a not-quite-orphan child guru for Besant. Eric Williams, British Historians and the West Indies on hte grid theorizations of race by folks like Acton C L R James Adorno’s Minima Moralia provides Naser with an important reminder o the importance of “hating tradition properly.” H G Wells, The Time Machine and its modernist aftermath eg in the opening pages of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and in Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors and The Good Soldier, which is in its own peculiar way a time-travel novel. The three discuss Foucault’s notion of capillarity a form of productive constraint, which Nasser uses to characterize both early 20th century Orientalism, and the paradigms of post colonialism that replaced it, Paul Saint Amour’s chapter on Ford Madox Ford is in Tense Future. John Guillory on the distinctions between criticism and scholarship in Professing Criticism; the rhizomatic appeal of B-Side Books. The “hedgehog and the fox” as a distinction comes from a poem by Archilochus—and sparked Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of the same name. Pamela Fletcher the Victorian Painting of Modern Life Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature. I sat down with Dr. Oler to discuss the persistent anxiety about masculinity, the role of regional literature in American modernism, and the need for an expansive definition of the Midwest. We also talked about literary representation of futuristic equipment such as the cabbage transplanter. And for our scholar friends, Dr. Oler offers tips on how to secure texts that are not available in libraries or archives.  Andy Oler is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023) introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. Thinking with an Accent won the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2024 Rene Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection. Editors: Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of Unlocking Academia, host Raja Aderdor speaks with Dr. Basma A. S. Dajani, Professor of Arabic Language and Literature, in a sweeping conversation on Arab-Andalusian love poetry and the cultural, linguistic, and emotional legacies it continues to inspire. Rooted in her 1994 book The Arab Andalusian Love Poetry: A Study of the Interaction Between Place and Man Through Time (AU Cairo Press, 1994), Dr. Dajani traces the origins of her research back to a formative journey to Granada in the early 1990s, where she was deeply influenced by the stories of Alhambra, her father the historian Ahmad Sidqi Dajani, and conversations with philosopher Roger Garaudy and Salma Taji. Drawing on decades of scholarship, she discusses her study of classical Arabic manuscripts, including Massare’ alUshaaq by Ja’far alSarraj, and reflects on the intersections of poetry, gender, geography, and intercultural dialogue. Together, they explore the themes of longing, nostalgia, and nature in the poetry of Al-Andalus; the contributions of women poets like Wallada bint al-Mustakfi; the influence of the Andalusian landscape on literary expression; and the enduring resonance of courtship poetry across time and cultures. Dr. Dajani also discusses the pedagogical value of teaching Andalusian texts today, the urgency of preserving classical Arabic manuscripts, and her vision for future research to spotlight overlooked voices in the tradition. Lyrical, insightful, and deeply rooted in lived and literary history, this episode offers a rare blend of academic depth and poetic beauty. We are Clavis Aurea: a dynamic team constantly looking for ways to help academic publishing grow and to promote groundbreaking publications to scholars, students, and enthusiasts globally. Based in the renowned publishing city of Leiden, we eat, sleep, and breathe publishing! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies