New Books in Literary Studies

The life of a scholar is stressful. The best way to muddle through is with a stiff drink. Balancing teaching, research, and service more than merits a cocktail at the end of a long day. So, sit back, relax, and infuse some intoxicating humor into old-fashioned academia. A humorous handbook for surviving life in higher education, The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics (Indiana University Press, provides deserving scholars with a wide range of academic-themed drink recipes. Philipp Stelzel shares more than 50 recipes for all palates, including The Dissertation Committee (rum), The Faculty Meeting (rye), The Presidential Platitude (gin), and more. Offering cocktails for every academic occasion along with spirited, amusing commentary, The Faculty Lounge is the perfect gift for graduate students, tenure-track professors, and disillusioned administrators.Philipp Stelzel is a specialist in post-World War II German, West European, and transatlantic political and intellectual history. After earning his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Stelzel taught at Duke University and Boston College before coming to Duquesne in 2014. His first book first book, History after Hitler: a Transatlantic Enterprise (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians of modern Germany from the end of World War II to the 1980s.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Critics have long viewed translating Arabic literature into English as an ethically fraught process of mediating between two wholly incommensurable languages, cultures, and literary traditions. Today, Arabic literature is no longer “embargoed” from Anglophone cultural spaces, as Edward Said once famously claimed that it was. As Arabic literary works are translated into English in ever-greater numbers, what alternative model of translation ethics can account for this literature’s newfound readability in the hegemonic language of the world literary system?Anna Ziajka Stanton's book The Worlding of Arabic Literature: Language, Affect, and the Ethics of Translatability (Fordham UP, 2023) argues that an ethical translation of a work of Arabic literature is one that transmits the literariness of the source text by engaging new populations of readers via a range of embodied and sensory effects. The book proposes that when translation is conceived of not as an exchange of semantic content but as a process of converting the affective forms of one language into those of another, previously unrecognized modalities of worldliness open up to the source text.In dialogue with a rich corpus of Arabic aesthetic and linguistic theory as well as contemporary scholarship in affect theory, translation theory, postcolonial theory, and world literature studies, this book offers a timely and provocative investigation of how an important literary tradition enters the world literary system.Anna Ziajka Stanton is Caroline D. Eckhardt Early Career Professor of Comparative Literature and Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Philological Encounters, the Journal of World Literature, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Middle Eastern Literatures. Stanton is the translator of Hilal Chouman’s Limbo Beirut, which was longlisted for the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. She has been an editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature since 2014.Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Pregnancy in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Livia Arndal Woods traces the connections between literary treatments of pregnancy and the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth occurring over the nineteenth century. In the first book-length study of the topic, Woods uses the problem of pregnancy in the Victorian novel (in which pregnancy is treated modestly as a rule and only rarely as an embodied experience) to advocate for "somatic reading," a practice attuned to impressions of the body on the page and in our own messy lived experiences.Examining works by Emily Brontë, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and others, Woods considers instances of pregnancy tied to representations of immodesty, poverty, and medical diagnosis. These representations, Woods argues, should be understood in the arc of Anglo-American modernity and its aftershocks, connecting back to early modern witch trials and forward to the criminalization of women for pregnancy outcomes in twenty-first-century America. Ultimately, she makes the case that by clearing space for the personal and anecdotal in scholarship, somatic reading helps us analyze with uncertainty rather than against it and allows for relevant textual interpretation.Livia Arndal Woods earned her PhD in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). As a scholar, she focuses on Victorian literature and culture, women and gender studies, and the medical humanities. Dr. Woods is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Springfield.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing interests include books and reading in popular culture, the public history of women's fiction, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

While globalization is often credited with the eradication of 'traditional' constraints tied to gender and caste, in reality the opening up of the Indian economy in the 1990s has led to a decline in freedom for many female, Dalit, and lower class Indians. This book explores the contraction of what it means to be free in post-liberalization India, examining how global capitalism has exacerbated existing inequalities based on traditional femininities and masculinities, while also creating new hierarchies.Mukti Lakhi Mangharam's book Freedom Inc.: Gendered Capitalism in New Indian Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) argues that post-1990s literature and culture frequently represents and reinforces the equation of free-market capitalism with individual freedom within the new 'idea of India.' However, many texts often also challenge this logic by pointing to more expansive horizons of autonomy for the gendered self. Through readings of texts as diverse as Dalit women's life-writing, pop fiction, realist novels, self-help, regional film, and Netflix TV shows, Mukti Mangharam investigates how notions like 'free trade,' 'entrepreneurship,' and 'self-help' are experienced, embodied, and challenged by disadvantaged peoples, and by women differently than men. In the process, Freedom Inc. explores how different literary forms illuminate alternative and buried pathways to fuller freedoms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Tempest, one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote, draws on themes and stories that fascinated him throughout his career while also taking his art form to unexpected new places. Set in the course of a single day on a magical island, the play focuses on a magician named Prospero who plots to punish the enemies who exiled him to the island 12 years ago — including his own brother. But will Prospero ultimately follow the route of the revenger like Hamlet? Will the warring brothers make peace, as in As You Like It? Or, as in Twelfth Night, will tempest and shipwreck set the characters on new pathways they didn’t predict? In this course, you’ll learn the story of The Tempest, hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars, and see how Shakespeare recreated old stories in the context of New World exploration and exploitation. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a detailed account of the story with commentary by Laurie Maguire, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. You’ll learn how the play reflects contemporary European encounters with Africa, North America, and Latin America (what Europeans called the “New World”), especially through the figure of Caliban: an earlier inhabitant of the island who is made Prospero’s slave. This summary is told using the language of the play itself, placing key quotations in context to help you understand where these lines come from and what they mean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Lost Princess: Women Writers and the History of Classic Fairy Tales (Reaktion, 2023), Dr. Anne Duggan presents a recovery of the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales.People often associate fairy tales with Disney films, and with the male authors from whom Disney often drew inspiration – notably Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In these portrayals the princess is a passive, compliant figure. By contrast, The Lost Princess shows that classic fairy tales such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Beauty and the Beast’ have a much richer, more complex history than Disney’s saccharine depictions. Dr. Duggan recovers the voices of women writers such as Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier and Charlotte-Rose de La Force, who penned popular tales about ogre-killing, pregnant, cross-dressing, dynamic heroines who saved the day. This new history will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about the lost, plucky heroines of historic fairy tales.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused 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

In this episode of High Theory, Matthew Kirschenbaum talks about txt, or text. Not texting, or textbooks, but text as a form of data that is feeding large language models. Will the world end in fire, flood, or text?In the full interview, Matthew recommended Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail (Macmillan, 2019) as an excellent example of writing about the end of the internet, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (Knopf, 2014) as a positive example of a post-internet apocalypse. In the episode he references a paper by Beder et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (March 2021): 610–623. And several apocalyptic scenarios, including the dead internet theory and the gray goo hypothesis.Matthew Kirschenbaum is Distinguished University Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. His books include Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard UP 2016) and Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). With Kari Kraus, he co-founded and co-directs BookLab, a makerspace, studio, library, and press devoted to what is surely our discipline's most iconic artifact, the codex book. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter (or X?) as @mkirschenbaum for more.Because we are hoping to encourage the text apocalypse, we made today’s image using generative AI. Specifically Saronik made it using the prompt “Text” in Canva’s AI interface. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions.In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action.Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these remarkable texts to light and contextualizing them among Russian, Turkish, and Ukrainian representations of Crimea from 1783, Rory Finnin provides an innovative cultural history of the Black Sea region. He reveals how a "poetics of solidarity" promoted empathy and support for an oppressed people through complex provocations of guilt rather than shame.Forging new roads between Slavic studies and Middle Eastern studies, Blood of Others is a compelling and timely exploration of the ideas and identities coursing between Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – three countries determining the fate of a volatile and geopolitically pivotal part of our world.Matthew D. Pauly is an associate professor at Michigan State University. His focus is Russia and Eastern Europe. @MatthewDPauly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy: From Muslim Spain to Post-Colonial Italy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Andrea Celli explores the complex ways in which Dante’s Comedy could be considered ‘Mediterranean,’ ranging widely from Orientalist scholarship to prison wall graffiti in Palermo. He presents both a history of criticism that explores the 20th-century debates around Dante and Islam as well as a novel approach to interrogating Mediterranean possibilities in the reception and appropriation of Dante’s poem. Celli’s Mediterranean Dante is neither given over to the ‘clash of civilizations’ model nor to the idealized notion of a cultural melting pot, but instead to a nuanced perspective that moves beyond traditional binaries and paradigms. In a medieval mode, he draws attention to the possible use of Islamic sources in the punishment of Muhammad in Inferno 28 and explores affinities between Ibn Hazm’s 11th-century Andalusian work Ring of the Dove and Dante’s Vita Nuova. With an orientation to reception, he dwells at length on the 17th-century drawings and grafitti on the prison walls of the Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri in Palermo that see a blending of high and low culture and connect Dante to broader Mediterranean culture in early modern Sicily. Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy breaks new ground in assembling such materials and critical perspectives; it urges us to both read the Comedy through the heuristic tool of the Mediterranean and to read the field of Mediterranean studies through Dante.Akash Kumar is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature through the lens of Mediterranean and global culture, from the history of science to the origins of popular phenomena such as the game of chess. Recent work on a global Dante has appeared in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester UP, 2022), MLN (2022), and the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020). Akash also serves as Editor of Dante Notes, the digital publication of the Dante Society of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that—as Linda Hutcheon has put it—both “enshrine and question” history are also an important area of study. By bringing narratology and psychological theory to bear on a range of graphic narratives, Kate Polak seeks to question how the form utilizes point of view and the gutter as ethical tools that shape the reader’s empathetic reactions to the content.This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics.Dr. Kate Polak is a writer, artist, performer, and scholar specializing in comics, poetry, 21st century women writers, and the literatures of genocide. She is an instructor and research associate in the English Department at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches writing and literature, focusing on poetry, the representation of violence, and graphic narrative. Her book, Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, was nominated for an Eisner Award.Elizabeth Allyn Woock an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic with an interdisciplinary background in history and popular literature. Her specialization falls within the study of comic books and graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies