New Books in Literary Studies

Volume 37 of Spenser Studies is a special issue on the theme of “Companionable Thinking: Spenser With.” As guest editors of this collection of essays, Namratha Rao (University of York), Joe Moshenska (University of Oxford), and David Hillman (King’s College, University of Cambridge) collect over two dozen essays which each “make a match” between Spenser’s work and a philosopher or theorist. For instance, Melissa Sanchez stages a conversation between Spenser and the trans theorist Julia Serrano; Patrick Aaron Harris reads Spenser’s Amoretti with Sianne Ngai’s theorization of cute poetics; and Joe Moshenska and Ayesha Ramachandran look at Spenser through Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “cannibal metaphysics.”Each essay, from Megan Bowman’s examination of “spectacular staring” in Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to Supriya Chaudhuri’s consideration of Donna Harraway, gestures toward new critical horizons for early modern studies to take up. Additionally, as the theorist’s work participates in “companionable thinking with” Spenser, the poetry of the Faerie Queene, Amoretti, and The Shepheardes Calender is shown to enrich contemporary discussions of literary theory.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all.500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer.Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The Great Mongol Shahnama” back at the center of a sprawling 14th-century Mongol empire.Robert Hillenbrand is an honorary professorial fellow in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh.In this interview, Robert and I talk about the Shahnama—and what makes the “Great Mongol Shahnama” unique—and how the Mongol empire gave this masterpiece’s illustrations recognizable Western and Chinese influences.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Great Mongol Shahnama. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When Tenzin Dickie was growing up in exile in India, she didn’t have access to works by Tibetan writers. Now, as an editor and translator, she is working to create and elevate the stories she wished she had had as a young writer. Her new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Vintage Books, 2023), offers a comprehensive introduction to modern Tibetan nonfiction, featuring essays from twenty-two Tibetan writers from around the world. Taken as a whole, the collection provides an intimate and powerful portrait of modern Tibetan life and what it means to live in exile.In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Dickie to discuss the history of the Tibetan essay, why she views exile as a kind of bardo, and how modern Tibetan writers are continually recreating the Tibetan nation.Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches (University of Wales Press, 2022) by Miranda Corcoran is a study in teenage witches in twentieth-century American popular culture. The teenage witch emerged in American fiction in the late twentieth century, quickly becoming a cultural touchstone. Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture reveals how novels, films, television, and comics about witchy women register shifting attitudes toward adolescent femininity. Drawing on Deleuzian, Foucauldian, and new materialist theories, Miranda Corcoran charts a new feminist history from 1940s bobbysoxer to today, untangling strands of embodiments, agency, and violence.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Part 3 features close-readings of some of the play’s most significant speeches, with Professor Stephen Foley. Through Henry’s private soliloquy, we trace his moments of insight and blindness. In the Chorus’s inspiring invitation to the audience to recreate the Battle of Agincourt in their minds, and in Henry’s stirring speech to his own troops before the battle, we see how Shakespeare’s words shape history, and how history is reshaped in the act of being remembered. Speeches and Performers: Chorus, Prologue, “O, for a Muse of fire …” (Anton Lesser) Henry V, Act 4, “What infinite heart’s ease …” (Ruth Page) Henry V, Act 4, “If we are marked to die … Saint Crispin’s Day.” (Paterson Joseph) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Caribbean American Narratives of Belonging (Ohio State University Press, 2023), Vivian Nun Halloran analyzes memoirs, picture books, comic books, young adult novels, musicals, and television shows through which Caribbean Americans recount and celebrate their contributions to contemporary politics, culture, and activism in the United States. The writers, civil servants, illustrators, performers, and entertainers whose work is discussed here show what it is like to fit in and be included within the body politic. From civic memoirs by Sonia Sotomayor and others, to West Side Story, Hamilton, and Into the Spider-Verse, these texts share a forward-looking perspective, distinct from the more nostalgic rhetoric of traditional diasporic texts that privilege connections to the islands of origin.There is no one way of being Caribbean. Diasporic communities exhibit a broad spectrum of ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and political qualities. Claiming a Caribbean American identity asks wider society to recognize and affirm hybridity in ways that challenge binaristic conceptions of race and nationality. Halloran provides a common language and critical framework to discuss the achievements of members of the Caribbean diaspora and their considerable cultural and political capital as evident in their contributions to literature and popular culture.Vivian Nun Halloran is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a scholar of Caribbean literature, food studies, ethnic American literature, postmodernism, and popular culture. She previously wrote The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora (Ohio State University Press, 2016) and Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum (University of Virginia Press, 2009).Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. His research interests lie at the intersection of Urban Geography, Social Exclusion, and Psychology. His dissertation research focuses on the link among negative psychosocial dispositions, exclusion, and under-development among marginalized communities in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. You can find him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Slavery, Surveillance and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature (Oxford UP, 2022) argues for the existence of deep, often unexamined, interconnections between genre and race by tracing how surveillance migrates from the literature of slavery to crime, gothic, and detective fiction. Attending to the long history of surveillance and policing of African Americans, the book challenges the traditional conception of surveillance as a top-down enterprise, equally addressing the tactics of sousveillance (watching from below) that enslaved people and their allies used to resist, escape, or merely survive racial subjugation.Examining the dialectic of racialized surveillance and sousveillance from fugitive slave narratives to fictional genres focused on crime and detection, the book shows how these genres share a thematic concern with the surveillance of racialized bodies and formal experimentation with ways of telling a story in which certain information is either rendered visible or kept hidden. Through close readings of understudied fugitive slave narratives published in the 1820s and 1830s, as well as texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, Ross analyzes the different ways white and black authors take up these issues in their writing--from calming white fears of enslaved rebellion to abolishing slavery--and demonstrates how literary representations ultimately destabilize any clear-cut opposition between watching from above and below. In so doing, the book demonstrates the importance of race to surveillance studies and claims a greater role for the impact of surveillance on literary expression in the US during the era of slavery.Kendall Dinniene is a PhD candidate in English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work, revealing the contours of citizenship and paths toward liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What happens when you come of age in mid-life? Why is so challenging to figure out your own past? Can you find the permission to be weird? (And can you be happy if you don’t?) Memoirist and English professor Hannah Pittard joins us to explore: If the personal is ever too personal. What is a collective memory. The imperfect way we perceive our own experiences. Taking risks in writing and in life. The memoir We Are Too Many. Today’s book is: We Are Too Many, a memoir about a marriage-ending affair between award-winning author Hannah Pittard’s husband and her best friend. An innovative and genre-bending look at a marriage and friendship gone wrong, Professor Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of conversations that are fast-paced, intimate, and reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. She takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with—from the depths of female rage to the ways we outgrow certain people. We Are Too Many examines the unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the possibilities in starting life over after a catastrophe.Our guest is: Professor Hannah Pittard, who is the author Visible Empire, Reunion, Listen to Me, The Fates Will Find Their Way, and the memoir We Are Too Many. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a historian.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd Story Genius, by Lisa Cron Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg Revise, by Pamela Haag Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott Academic Life episode with Professor Morgan Talty about Night of the Living Rez Academic Life episode with novelist Erica Bauermeister, who left academia Academic Life episode with Nancy Thayer, an English professor who left academia to write full time Academic Life episode on writing memoir with Dr. Rebekah Tausig Academic Life episode on Shoutin in the Fire with Dante Stewart Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from today’s experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Wayne Deakin, whose new book, Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism, has just published by Palgrave Macmillan in summer 2023. Modern Language, Philosophy, and Criticism surveys the varied ways we have tried to make sense of literary texts, from the earliest Greek poetic theories of antiquity up to contemporary anti-critique polemics.Wayne Deakin is professor of English at Chiang Mai University, and is the author of the 2015 book, Hegel and the English Romantic Tradition, also from Palgrave/Macmillan. Wayne’s scholarship has explored commodity fetishism in Thailand, the writings of Coleridge, George Bataille, and Wordsworth, and postcolonialism.John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

As tyrannical passions increasingly plague twenty-first-century politics, tales told in ancient Greek epics and tragedies provide a vital antidote. Democracy as a concept did not exist until the Greeks coined the term and tried the experiment, but the idea can be traced to stories that the ancient Greeks told and retold. From the eighth through the fifth centuries BCE, Homeric epics and Athenian tragedies exposed the tyrannical potential of individuals and groups large and small. These stories identified abuses of power as self-defeating. They initiated and fostered a movement away from despotism and toward broader forms of political participation.Following her highly praised book Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, the classicist Emily Katz Anhalt retells tales from key ancient Greek texts and proceeds to interpret the important message they hold for us today. As she reveals, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus's Oresteia, and Sophocles's Antigone encourage us—as they encouraged the ancient Greeks—to take responsibility for our own choices and their consequences. These stories emphasize the responsibilities that come with power (any power, whether derived from birth, wealth, personal talents, or numerical advantage), reminding us that the powerful and the powerless alike have obligations to each other. They assist us in restraining destructive passions and balancing tribal allegiances with civic responsibilities. They empower us to resist the tyrannical impulses not only of others but also in ourselves.In an era of political polarization, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny (Redwood Press, 2021) demonstrates that if we seek to eradicate tyranny in all its toxic forms, ancient Greek epics and tragedies can point the way.Emily Katz Anhalt is Professor of Classics at Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent book is Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths, which was selected as one of the Times Literary Supplement's Best Books of 2017.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies