New Books in Literary Studies

The Great Gatsby is often called the great American novel. Emblematic of an entire era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic tale of illicit desire, grand illusions, and lost dreams is rendered in a lyrical prose that revives a vanished world of glittering parties and vibrant jazz, where money and deceit walk hand in hand. Rich in humor, sharply observant of status and class, the book tells the story of Jay Gatsby's efforts to keep his faith - in money, in love, in all the promises of America - amid the chaos and conflict of life on Long Island's Gold Coast during the Roaring Twenties. The Cambridge Centennial Edition of The Great Gatsby (Cambridge UP, 2025) presents the established version of the text in a collector's volume replete with social, cultural, and historical context, and numerous illustrations. The authoritative introduction examines persistent myths about Fitzgerald, his greatest work, and the age he embodies, while offering fresh ways of reading this iconic work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sociologists have had surprisingly little to say about poetry as a topic while sometimes also making grandiose claims that sociology is/should be like poetry. These are the prompts which begin Andrew Smith’s Class and the Uses of Poetry: Symbolic Enclosures (2024, Palgrave Macmillan). Drawing upon discussions with working class readers of poetry, and interviews with unpublished poets, Smith draws our attention to the ways in which poetry has been enclosed, or fenced off, from working class readers. Influenced by, though offering some criticisms, of, Bourdieu’s approach to the sociology of culture, he shows us how readers become aware of this enclosure but nevertheless engage in collective understanding of the poems they are presented with. In doing do, Smith reminds us of the need to emphasise the aesthetic elements of poetry, and culture more generally, including its creative and expressive affordances. A reader of his book realises that a critical sociology of poetry needs to attest not just to the symbolic capital in who is seen as ‘legitimate’ readers and producers of poetry but also how those shut off from it lose out on the uses of poetry.Our discussion covers what led Smith to pursue this work, how sociology has, and might in future confront poetry, his experiences of running these reading groups and suggests why, perhaps, we should also perhaps reject the ‘society of the segue way’ and savour some of the finitude which poetry might offer.Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan), along with other texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How has a writer known principally for his contained domestic novels come to represent the most dynamic elements of world literature? In Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), Chris Holmes expands our understanding of how world literature engages with the most pressing crises of the 20th and 21st centuries by examining Ishiguro's fascination with characters who are profoundly constrained in their ability to understand global systems to which they are subject. Rather than following the established pattern of so-called global novels, which crisscross the planet exhibiting a knowing cosmopolitanism, Ishiguro's fictional engagement with the world comes principally in the form of characters who are cut off from the global systems that abuse them.By examining the ways in which Ishiguro foregrounds the in-process thinking of those who fail to comprehend their place in the flow of politics, culture, and ideas, Holmes positions Ishiguro as the great chronicler of everyday lives, and as such, prepares a mode of reading world literature that questions the assumptions for how we live and think with others when each of us is deeply limited.Chris Holmes is Associate Professor and Chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College. He is the host of the literary interview podcast, Burned by Books, and he is host and co-producer on Novel Dialogue, the podcast of the Society of Novel Studies, both of which are New Books Network partners. His most recent essays appear in NOVEL, MFS, Critique, and Public Books.Caroline Levine is David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author most recently of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis, and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West (Texas Tech University Press, 2024) by Dr. Ryan Tan Wander provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West.Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.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

Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study (Routledge, 2025) considers Samuel Beckett's fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009-2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett's Trilogy, Mercier and Camier, Footfalls and Not I, and those of a range of post-crash Irish novels including Beatlebone, Hawthorn and Child, Room, and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, this book establishes Beckett's continuing influence on Irish fiction. With particular reference to these newer authors' treatment of scarcity, trauma, indeterminism, gender and sexuality, and confinement in the context of major societal changes and traumas in Irish society since 2009, topics include the imposition of austerity, collapse of faith in institutions, and the increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Andrew’s debut novel Last Resort was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. You can hear our interview about that amazing literary hoax on burned by books at the website or anywhere you find your podcasts. His second novel The Vegan was published in July 2023. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons.Recommended Books: Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine Marilyn Robinson, Reading Genesis Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Whether watching Studio Ghibli adaptations of British children's books, visiting Harry Potter sites in Britain or eating at Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurants in Tokyo, the Japanese have a close and multifaceted relationship with British children's literature. In British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses (Bloomsbury, 2023), Catherine Butler considers its many manifestations in print, on the screen, in tourist locations and throughout Japanese popular culture. Taking stock of the influence of literary works such as Gulliver's Travels, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Tom's Midnight Garden, and the Harry Potter series, this lively account draws on literary criticism, translation, film and tourist studies to explore how British children's books have been selected, translated, understood, adapted and reworked into Japanese commercial, touristic and imaginative culture. Using theoretically informed case studies this book will consider both individual texts and their wider cultural contexts, translations and adaptations (such as the numerous adaptations of British children's books by Studio Ghibli and others), the dissemination of distinctive tropes such as magical schools into Japanese children's literature and popular culture, and the ways in which British children's books and their settings have become part of way that Japanese people understand Britain itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Oil workers are often typecast as rough: embodying the toxic masculinity, racism, consumerist excess, and willful ignorance of the extractive industries and petrostates they work for. But their poetry troubles these assumptions, revealing the fear, confusion, betrayal, and indignation hidden beneath tough personas.The Rough Poets: Reading Oil-Worker Poetry (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024) by Dr. Melanie Dennis Unrau presents poetry by workers in the Canadian oil and gas industry, collecting and closely reading texts published between 1938 and 2019: S.C. Ells’s Northland Trails, Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk, Dymphny Dronyk’s Contrary Infatuations, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease, Naden Parkin’s A Relationship with Truth, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, and Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time. These writers are uniquely positioned, Melanie Dennis Unrau argues, both as petropoets who write poetry about oil and as theorists of petropoetics with unique knowledge about how to make and unmake worlds that depend on fossil fuels. Their ambivalent, playful, crude, and honest petropoetry shows that oil workers grieve the environmental and social impacts of their work, worry about climate change and the futures of their communities, and desire jobs and ways of life that are good, safe, and just.How does it feel to be a worker in the oil and gas industry in a climate emergency, facing an energy transition that threatens your way of life? Unrau takes up this question with the respect, care, and imagination necessary to be an environmentalist reader in solidarity with oil workers. 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

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023) explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness.Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies.By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.Robin Visser is professor and associate chair of the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Cities Surround the Countryside: Urban Aesthetics in Postsocialist China (2010).Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceaușescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Müller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain.The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance (Camden House, 2023) is an in-depth investigation of Müller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Müller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies