New Books in Literary Studies

Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history. Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality. This book is free for download through open access. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives: Hunger in Eden (Routledge, 2024) presents an intricate exploration into the life and literary universe of Mohamed Choukri, a towering figure in 20th-century Moroccan literature. Known primarily for his groundbreaking autobiographical work “al-Khubz al-Ḥāfī” (For Bread Alone), Choukri’s literary influence extends well beyond this single work. Reading Mohamed Choukri’s Narratives seeks to cast a light on his broader body of work, examining the cultural, societal, and personal influences that shaped his unique storytelling style. Through a deep analysis of his narratives, this book aims to unfold how Choukri portrayed the harsh realities he and others encountered, giving voice to the marginalized individuals and communities in Morocco. In this episode, Jonas Elbousty guides us into the profound world of Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri. Together, we explore Choukri’s intimate portrayal of Tangier’s marginalized voices and the intricate process of translating his evocative prose into English. Elbousty sheds light on Choukri’s lesser-known works, revealing the enduring impact of his storytelling. This conversation offers a deep dive into the complexities of language, identity, and the transformative power of literature. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Narrating Irish Female Development, 1916-2018 (Edinburgh UP, 2024) studies narratives of Irish female and feminized development, arguing that these postmodern  narratives present Irish female maturation as disordered and often deliberately disorderly. The first full-length study of the Irish female  coming of age story, the book develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology, derived from the belated oedipalization of Joyce’s bildungsheld, to read these stories. This study argues that all Irish maturation stories are shaped by the uneven and belated maturation story  of the Irish republic itself, which took as its avatar the Irish woman,  whose citizenship in that republic was unrealized, as indeed was her citizenship in an Irish republic of letters. Dougherty takes the writing  of Irish women as seriously as other critics have taken Joyce’s work. Discusses texts by James Joyce, John McGahern, Hannah Lynch, Kate O’Brien, Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Dervla Murphy, Clare Boylan, Nuala O’Faolain, Eavan Boland, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Éilís ní Dhuibhne, Melatu Uche Okorie, and Soula Emmanuel Examines the form, narration, and content of fictional, non-fictional, and national narratives Develops a feminist psychoanalytic narratology Synthesizes historical, sociojuridical, feminist, post-colonial, and literary historical narratives of Irish development Jane Elizabeth Dougherty is Professor in the School of Literature, Writing and Digital Humanities and affiliate faculty in the School of Africana and Multicultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Who benefits and who loses when emotions are described in particular ways? How do metaphors such as "hold on" and "let go" affect people's emotional experiences? Banned Emotions: How Metaphors Can Shape What People Feel (Oxford UP, 2019), written by neuroscientist-turned-literary scholar Laura Otis, draws on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to challenge popular attempts to suppress certain emotions. This interdisciplinary book breaks taboos by exploring emotions in which people are said to "indulge" self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, grudge-bearing, bitterness, and spite. By focusing on metaphors for these emotions in classic novels, self-help books, and popular films, Banned Emotions exposes their cultural and religious roots. Examining works by Dante, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Forster, and Woolf in parallel with Bridesmaids, Fatal Attraction, and Who Moved My Cheese?, Banned Emotions traces pervasive patterns in the ways emotions are represented that can make people so ashamed of their feelings, they may stifle emotions they need to work through. The book argues that emotion regulation is a political as well as a biological issue, affecting not only which emotions can be expressed, but who can express them, when, and how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How does art engage with its social context? What does 'the politics of art' even mean? In his new book  Impossible Speech: The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2023), Christopher P. Hanscom takes on these questions in the context of contemporary Korean literature. Moving away from realist texts and realism, Impossible Speech instead focuses on four key figures: the migrant laborer, the witness of state violence, the refugee, and the socially excluded. Through each, the book probes the boundaries of what we think of as 'nonpolitical' art, showing how by calling on characters to address events and experiences that cannot be spoken about — in other words, by asking characters to speak impossibly — even art that might be considered nonsensical or absurd demands to be read as politically engaged.  Although this book uses examples drawn from modern Korean literature and film, Hanscom's contention that the politics of art lies in its ability to confront and challenge the boundaries of what is sayable is deeply relevant to art beyond East Asian Studies. Impossible Speech should, therefore, be of interest to those in Korean literature as well as those interested in literary theory, film studies, and speech studies more broadly.   Listeners with a keen interest in Korean literature should also check out Hanscom's earlier appearance on the New Books Network to talk about his first book,The Real Modern: Literary Modernism and the Crisis of Representation in Colonial Korea (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013). You can listen to that interview 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 Reading, Gender and Identity in Seventeenth-Century England (University of London Press, 2025), Hannah Jeans explores the reading habits of early modern women and the ways in which their reading became a site of identity formation and promotion. Jeans studies both contemporary prescriptions around women's reading, particularly their consumption of religious and romance texts, as well the actual activity of women. Additionally, Reading, Gender and Identity covers some less-well known genres with which women engaged, such as news media and scientific texts. Drawing on a range of sources, like annotations, inscriptions, commonplace books, and self-writing, Jeans presents a fascinating account of the broad range of readings that early modern women participated in, and the multifaceted identities they crafted from these activities. It is an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of reading, print and manuscript culture, self-fashioning, or gender in early modern England. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Satire is a funny, aggressive, and largely oppositional literature which is typically created by people who refuse to participate in a given regime’s perception of itself. Although satire has always been a primary literature of state affairs, and although it has always been used to intervene in ongoing discussions about political theory and practice, there has been no attempt to examine this fascinating and unusual literature across the full chronological horizon. In State of Ridicule: A History of Satire in English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2025), Dr. Dan Sperrin provides the first ever longue durée history of political satire in British literature. He traces satire’s many extended and discontinuous trajectories through time while also chronicling some of the most inflamed and challenging political contexts within which it has been written.Dr. Sperrin begins by describing the Roman foundations and substructures of British satire, paying particularly close attention to the core Roman canon: Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. He then proceeds chronologically, populating the branches of satire’s family tree with such figures as Chaucer, Jonson, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Dickens, as well as a whole series of writers who are now largely forgotten. Satire, Dr. Sperrin shows, can be a literature of explicit statements and overt provocation—but it can also be notoriously indirect, oblique, suggestive, and covert, complicated by an author’s anonymity or pseudonymity. Dr. Sperrin meticulously analyses the references to transient political events that may mystify the contemporary reader. He also presents vivid and intriguing pen portraits of the satirists themselves along the way. Dr. Sperrin argues that if satire is to be contended with and reflected upon in all its provocative complexity—and if it is to be seen as anything more than a literature of political vandalism—then we must explore the full depth and intrigue of its past. This book offers a new starting point for our intellectual and imaginative contact with an important and fascinating kind of literature. 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 an essay about her recent book Searches (Pantheon, 2025), a genre-bending chronicle of the deeply personal ways we use the internet and the uncanny ways it uses us, Vauhini Vara admits that several reviewers seemed to mistake her engagement with ChatGPT as an uncritical embrace of large language models. Enter Aarthi Vadde to talk with Vauhini about the power and the danger of digital tech and discuss to what it means to co-create with AI. Vauhini tells Aarthi and host Sarah Wasserman that at the heart of all her work is a desire to communicate—that “language,” as she says, “is the main tool we have to bridge the divide.” She explains that the motivation in Searches as in her journalism is to test out tools that promise new forms of communication—or even tools that promise to be able to communicate themselves. Amidst all her interest in new tech, Vauhini is first and foremost a writer: she and Aarthi discuss what it means to put ChatGPT on the printed page, what genre means in today’s media ecosystem, and whether generative AI will steal writers’ paychecks. Considering generative AI models as tools that “don’t have a perspective,” makes for an episode that diagnoses the future of writing with much less doomsaying than authors and critics often bring to the topic. And if all of this writing with robots sounds too “out there,” stay tuned for Vauhini’s down-to-earth answer to our signature question. Mentioned in this episode: Vauhini Vara, Searches (2025), The Immortal King Rao (2022), “My Decade in Google Searches” (2019) Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1580) Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (2023) Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), “According to Alice” (2023) Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Ghosts, Trolls, and Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends (Reaktion, 2025). This unique and enchanting book opens the door to a captivating world of Icelandic folk legends. The six chapters of this anthology are each based on a different setting: farm, wilderness, darkness, church, ocean and shore. It provides translated tales from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as introductions by the editor which place these often-supernatural happenings in the context of Icelandic society. The legends include stories of hidden people, trolls, ghosts, sea monsters and even polar bears, exploring themes of love, revenge and conflict. The book highlights the tension between Christianity and paganism, past and present, nature and humanity, and divides within society. Drawing from a wide variety of Icelandic sources, this book makes these colourful, entertaining, lively folk legends available to non-Icelandic speakers, many for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The cookbook genre is highly conventional with an orientation toward celebration and success. From glossy photographs to heartwarming stories and adjective-rich ingredient lists, the cookbook tradition primes readers for pleasure. Yet the overarching narrative of the region is often one of pain, loss, privation, exploitation, poverty, and suffering of various kinds. While some cookbook writers go to great lengths to avoid reminding readers of this painful past, others invoke that pain as a marker of southern authenticity. Still others use stories of southern suffering as an opportunity to make space for reconciliation, reparation, or apology for past wrongs. In Unpalatable: Stories of Pain and Pleasure in Southern Cookbooks (UP of Mississippi, 2025), author Carrie Helms Tippen attempts to understand the unique rhetorical situation of the southern cookbook as it negotiates a tension between the expectations of the genre and the prevailing metanarratives of the southern experience, one focused on pleasure and the other rooted in pain. Through an analysis of commercially published “southern” cookbooks from the 1990s to the present, Tippen examines the range of rhetorical purposes and strategies writers have employed, some of which undermine the reality of a painful past and cause harm or violence, and others which serve as tools for truth and reconciliation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies