New Books in Literary Studies

Romance Fandom in 21st-Century Pakistan: Reading the Regency (Bloomsbury, 2024) offers the first major study of English-speaking romance fandom in South Asia, providing a new reader-centric model that engages with romance readers as genre experts.Here, she investigates the popular Anglophone romance reading community in Pakistan and develops a model for analysing genre romance novels through the lens of the readers' perspective and preferences. Using focus-group interviews and close textual analysis, her book explores where and how readers access books of their choice, and explains why the detailed descriptions of dresses, food and spaces in historical romance novels of the Regency era exemplify good taste for this distinctive readership. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, and fan studies, this book considers the reception of Anglophone romance fiction by reading communities of colour.About the author: Javaria Farooqui is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Studies at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Pakistan. Dr. Farooqui’s research interests fall across multiple disciplines and topic areas in the humanities and social sciences, including fan studies, book history, women’s writing and histories, digital humanities, language acquisition, popular romance studies, and reader response studies. She has published research that explores the reception and materiality of texts, the ramifications of colonization and its aftermath on a nation’s literary culture, gender-based violence, and the problematic reception of Anglophone movies in Pakistan.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the “historical” Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely lived, the biographical legends that grew up around him in Tibet, and the works attributed to him in Indic and Tibetan text collections; a consideration of the various guises in which Saraha appears in his writings (as poet, social and religious critic, radical gnostic thinker, and more); an overview of Saraha’s poetic and religious legacy in South Asia and beyond; and complete or partial translations, from Tibetan, of over two dozen works attributed to Saraha. These include nearly all his spiritual songs, from his well-known Dohā Trilogy to obscure but important expositions of mahāmudrā, as well as several previously untranslated works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mine Is The Golden Tongue: The Hebrew Sonnets Of Immanuel Of Rome (Centro Primo Levi, 2023) contains the first known sonnets written in Hebrew. Their author is Immanuel of Rome, an intensely studied yet little-known 14th-century poet, who adapted the quantitative meter of Arabic and Hebrew poetry from al-Andalous to the syllabic meter of romance poetry. These poems are part of Immanuel’s most studied book, Maḥbarot, a collection of poetic tales conceived between satire and allegory, which combine the Arabic maqama with the stilnovistic poetic form immortalized by Dante. Widely published during its author’s lifetime and in the following centuries, the Maḥbarot as a whole has never been translated into any language.Immanuel lived in the Papal city during a period of great turmoil between the communal experience and the Papal exile to Avignon. He moved with ease in the Roman Jewish and non-Jewish worlds that were actively involved in translation. Writing in a milieu where Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, Greek, and the vernaculars were concurrent languages, Immanuel left us brilliant verses in Hebrew and vernacular. He was an admired biblical commentator whose references spanned from the Talmud and Maimonides to Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless page-folders or outright thieves? Perhaps you have even wished harm on those who have damaged your books, but would you threaten them with hellfire, hanging or the plague?Book Curses (Bodleian, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Baker contains a collection of some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, from fearsome threats discovered emblazoned on stone monuments from the ancient Near East, to elaborate manuscript maledictions and chilling warnings scribbled in printed books. Book curses are entertaining writings in themselves, but they also offer a tantalising insight into how passionately texts and books have been valued by their owners and readers over the centuries. Here you will find an engaging introduction to the history and development of the book curse and perhaps some inspiration to pen a few of your own.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Political Theorist B.J. (Bernard J.) Dobski has a new book focusing on Mark Twain’s final published novel, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc. As Dobski notes in his work and in our conversation, this is one of the more obscure texts by Twain, but Twain considered it his best work. Dobski’s book is a close reading of Twain’s Joan of Arc and an analysis of how this particular work, focusing on Joan of Arc’s life through the narration of Sieur Louis De Conte (Joan’s childhood friend and her secretary during her military undertakings), is part of Twain’s larger efforts to understand the turn towards modernity, and all that entails. Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity is part of series at Palgrave/MacMillan focusing on recovering political philosophy, and this book fits into that series particularly well.Mark Twain had a lifelong fascination with Joan of Arc. Twain’s Joan serves, in the novel, as a kind of path out of the Middle Ages, and, in this way, is being positioned as a Machiavellian “princess”— embodying a political science more effectively than can the Church at the time. Dobski’s interpretation explores the ways in which Joan of Arc, according to Twain, refounded and reformed France, taking many of Machiavelli’s teachings into account. Another dimension of Twain’s Joan of Arc is seen in context of the “historical maid” Joan of Arc and how both renderings are positioning a woman serving in a man’s role. Dobski explains the controversy over Joan’s attire—wearing men’s clothing as a woman, which was one of the charges brought against her—and how these laws were designed to foreground the Church’s teaching on modesty and decency and a means to regulate sexual ethics. This also reflects the maleness of Christ, which is not incidental to preserving the moral teachings that are rooted in the distinction between the sexes. But Joan is very much a woman in a man’s world, and her success in the man’s world challenges the Church’s basis for these distinctions between female and male. Many of these entanglements are the focus of Twain’s novel, and thus of Dobski’s analysis of Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc.Ultimately, Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity digs into overarching and universal concerns, including the theological-philosophical conundrum, the claim of divine right by monarchs, and how to live a good life. B.J. Dobski skillfully follows Twain’s curvy path through Joan of Arc’s life and reputation to unpack Twain’s own thinking about these perennial questions.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—a period of vast economic change—recognized that the global trade in alcohol and tobacco promised a brighter financial future for England, even as overindulgence at home posed serious moral pitfalls.Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660-1751 (Bucknell University Press, 2024) by Dr. Dayne Riley is an engaging and original study that explores how literary satirists represented these consumables—and related anxieties about the changing nature of Britishness—in their work. Dr. Riley traces the satirical treatment of wine, beer, ale, gin, pipe tobacco, and snuff from the beginning of Charles II’s reign, through the boom in tobacco’s popularity, to the end of the Gin Craze in libertine poems and plays, anonymous verse, ballad operas, and the satire of canonical writers such as Gay, Pope, and Swift. Focusing on social concerns about class, race, and gender, Consuming Anxieties examines how satirists championed Britain’s economic strength on the world stage while critiquing the effects of consumable luxuries on the British body and consciousness. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This week on Madison’s Notes, we sit down with philosopher and author Charles Taylor to discuss his latest work, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap Press, 2024) . Taylor dives into the profound role of poetry in reconnecting us to a sense of wonder and meaning in a world often characterized by disillusionment. Drawing on his vast expertise in philosophy, Taylor explores how poetry serves as a bridge between the mundane and the transcendent, offering a counterpoint to the rational, scientific worldview that dominates modern life. This conversation offers a deep dive into the power of language, imagination, and the poetic tradition in addressing the spiritual and existential challenges of our time. Join us for a reflective exploration of how poetry can restore enchantment in an age of disenchantment.Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.Contributions to and/or sponsorship of any speaker does not constitute departmental or institutional endorsement of the specific program, speakers or views presented. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when “urban” and “rural” indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson’s anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election year—centuries or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities —similarly polyglot and cosmopolitan—resist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the “hospitality” cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a literary reflection that argues for coastal cities as a distinct region that scrambles time, resisting the “post” in postindustrial and the “neo” in neoliberalism. Jennie Lightweis-Goff offers a cultural exploration bound by American literature, especially life-writing by the enslaved, as well as compelling reassessments of works by canonical writers such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Hector St. John de Crevecoeur.Lightweis-Goff reveals how the preserved yet fragile landscapes of these cities are haunted—not simply by the ghost tours that are signature stops for travelers in their historic districts—but by the echoes of slavery in their economies and built environments.Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a scholar, lyric essayist, and, most essentially, a New Orleans flâneur. She is the author of two scholarly books, Blood at the Root and Captive City. Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region.Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the reformed community; one that served to preserve and protect their religious tradition while also expanding its reach among the more fragmented and localized elites of the period.Rewriting Buddhism is available for free open-access download at uclpress.com/buddhism.Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, kingship and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Shakespeare Unlearned: Pedantry, Nonsense, and the Philology of Stupidity (Oxford UP, 2024) dances along the borderline of sense and nonsense in early modern texts, revealing overlooked opportunities for understanding and shared community in words and ideas that might in the past have been considered too silly to matter much for serious scholarship. Each chapter pursues a self-knowing, gently ironic study of the lexicon and scripting of words and acts related to what has been called 'stupidity' in work by Shakespeare and other authors. Each centers significant, often comic situations that emerge -- on stage, in print, and in the critical and editorial tradition pertaining to the period -- when rigorous scholars and teachers meet language, characters, or plotlines that exceed, and at times entirely undermine, the goals and premises of scholarly rigor. Each suggests that a framing of putative 'stupidity' pursued through lexicography, editorial glossing, literary criticism, and pedagogical practice can help us put Shakespeare and semantically obscure historical literature more generally to new communal ends. Words such as 'baffle' in Twelfth Night or 'twangling' and 'jingling' in The Tempest, and characters such as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Holofernes the pedant, might in the past have been considered unworthy of critical attention -- too light or obvious to matter much for our understanding of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Adam Zucker's meditation on the limits of learnedness and the opportunities presented by a philology of stupidity argues otherwise.Adam Zucker is a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on Shakespeare and other 16th and 17th Century authors. In addition to Shakespeare Unlearned (Oxford University Press, 2024), he is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of essay collections Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater (Routledge, 2015); and Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Adam lives in Northampton, MA with his family, where he plays loud twangling instruments in the bands Outro, Bring It to Bear, The Young Old, and The Father Figures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies