New Books in Literary Studies

Lena Henningsen’s Cultural Revolution Manuscripts: Unofficial Entertainment Fiction from 1970s China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) is a study of shouchaoben, or hand-written fiction, that entertained Chinese readers throughout the “long 1970s,” a period spanning the Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath in the late 70s and early 1980s. These manuscripts, copies of otherwise unavailable, often foreign, fiction and poetry, as well as original novels and poems, were “texts in motion.” They circulated throughout China together with their copiers and readers, youth sent-down during the Cultural Revolution, and often followed characters who were likewise moving, spies and scientists traveling within and beyond China. Moreover, the text itself was just as unstable as its readers and characters were mobile: frequent copying resulted in the proliferation of multiple versions of any given narrative, thus troubling the clear-cut distinction between readers and authors. Henningsen’s careful survey of shouchaoben and related book forms, including “internal publications,” sketches out a lively and cosmopolitan reading culture. In the book, she shows that despite assumptions of cultural insularity and uniformity, paying attention to “reading acts” during the Cultural Revolution period shows that the “long 1970s” are not an abrupt, anomalous rupture in Chinese literary history, but a period that can be more fruitfully described in terms of continuities. Please join me for a conversation with Lena Henningsen in exploring the rich archive of shouchaoben. Make sure to also visit ReadChina, to learn more about Henningsen's European Research Council grant funded research on Reading Acts in China and discover the resources her team has compiled here.Julia Keblinska is a member of the Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Song & Dance Man is an established classic, available again for Dylan fans and scholars alike on the 50th Anniversary of the original edition. The work in these three volumes has been called “Monumental, endlessly illuminating.” (Rolling Stone) “Probably the greatest book about the work of a single popular musician ever to have been published.” (London Review Bookshop) and "The definitive critical work." (Evening Standard).Author Michael Gray is recognized as a world authority on the work and career of Bob Dylan; he was the first to consider Dylan’s writing as worthy of treatment as serious art. As author K G Miles said: “People forget that the road to the Nobel Prize was very long, took many years, and began with that book; it began with Michael Gray.”Song & Dance Man is unique in its scope, integrating biographical, literary and musical contexts into a powerful scrutiny of Dylan as songwriter and performer.This first volume contains the foundational and timeless analysis that made this book a classic - looking at how Dylan's writing and performance set in the folk and literary traditions and how it compared to other efforts to write rock and pop songs. It deeply inspects and discusses Dylan's use of language, both his early bursts of complexity and his later move towards simplicity.Included is a special review of the song 'Lay Down Your Weary Tune' which Gray finds particularly effective and impressive, and an over 100-page chapter detailed Dylan's fascination with and use of the pre-war blues.Michael Gray is a critic, writer, public speaker & broadcaster recognised as a world authority on the work of Bob Dylan, and as an expert on rock’n’roll history. He also has a special interest in pre-war blues, and in travel.Song & Dance Man on Twitter.Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan 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

Steven Swarbrick talks about poetic engagement with nature in the work of early modern poets ​​Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Here language is influenced not by the manifest and the conscious, but the unconscious or void, as understood in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. This work is the basis for his hope for a reorganization of thought in contemporary ecocriticism around a politics of degrowth instead of additive policies that serve to greenwash capitalist economies.Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. His research interests include early modern literature, contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the environmental humanities, and sexuality and film studies. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and co-author, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, under contract). He is currently working on two books: Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists and Destituent Ecology: Libidinal Politics for the Environmental Left.Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Letters and the Law: Legal and Literary Culture in Late Imperial Russia (Northwestern UP, 2022) explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II's judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the common, cross‑cultural critique of lawyerly unscrupulousness and greed or as an expression of Russian hostility toward Western legalism, seen as antithetical to traditional Russian values. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict in terms of the two professions' competition for cultural authority.Anna Schur combines historical research and literary analysis to argue that the first generations of Russian trial lawyers shaped their professional identity with an eye to the celebrated figure of the writer and that they considered their own activities to be a form of verbal art. A fuller understanding of writers' antipathy to the law, Schur contends, must take into account this overlooked cultural backdrop. Laced with the better‑known critique of the lawyer's legalistic proclivities and lack of moral principle are the writer's reactions to a whole network of explicit and implicit claims of similarity between the two professions' goals, methods, and missions that were central to the lawyer's professional ideal. Viewed in this light, writers' critiques of the law and lawyers emerge as a concerted effort at protecting literature's exclusive cultural status in the context of modernization and the rapidly expanding public sphere.The study draws upon a mix of well-known and rarely studied nineteenth-century authors and texts—with particular attention paid to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin—and on a wide range of nonliterary sources, including courtroom speeches, guides to forensic oratory, legal treatises, and specialized press.Anna Schur is a professor of English at Keene State College in New Hampshire. She is the author of Wages of Evil: Dostoevsky and Punishment (Northwestern University Press).Yelizaveta Raykhlina is a historian of Russia and Eurasia and holds a PhD from Georgetown University. She is a faculty member at New York University. To learn more, visit her website or follow her 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

Part 2 addresses the play's central questions about comedy, tragedy, and passion by examining its language and plot motifs. Professor Tiffany Stern will guide you through the play’s sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, but always honest exploration of love — where it comes from and why it doesn’t always make sense. You’ll also discover how A Midsummer Night’s Dream reflects the way that Shakespeare’s own company performed his plays, and why that knowledge can help you become a better reader of Shakespeare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Robert Coover spoke at the Institute in the spring of 2006. Coover is the author of over a dozen postmodern novels, including The Public Burning and Pinochio in Venice. He was one of the early supporters of electronic fiction, which he defended in “The End of Books,” a 1992 New York Times essay. Coover established Brown University’s MFA program in Digital Language Arts, and teaches courses on experimental narrative and literary hypermedia. 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 interview Mary M. McGlynn, Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, discusses her new book Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2022).While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity. Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.Colleen English is a scholar of Irish and Romantic literature based at Loyola University Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Scholarly Seminar at the Newberry Library. 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

Despite initiatives to 'diversify' the publishing sector, there has been almost no transformation to the historic racial inequality that defines the field. White Literary Taste Production in Contemporary Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that contemporary book culture is structured by practice that operates according to a White taste logic.By applying the notion of this logic to an analysis of both traditional and new media tastemaking practices, Alexandra Dane examines the influence of Whiteness on the cultural practice, and how the long-standing racial inequities that characterize Anglophone book publishing are supported by systems, institutions and platforms. These themes are explored through two distinct but interrelated case studies-women's literary prizes and anti-racist reading lists on Instagram-which demonstrate the dominance of Whiteness, and in particular White feminism, in the contemporary literary discourse.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity: Transatlantic Sound, Technology, and Literature (Fordham University Press, 2023) reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Dr. Brett Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies.Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to telecommunications, to mechanical sound reproducibility. In his poetry the Surrealists found an ancestor and inspiration. His literary and scientific works prove startling and relevant to predicaments of technological media in his own time and ours. For nearly twenty years Nina de Villard presided over a supremely daring intellectual salon. There, she welcomed manifold literary, artistic, and musical luminaries into a veritable crucible of the artistic avant-garde and precursor to the famous Chat Noir cabaret. Together, these two forgotten but pivotal figures, Cros and Villard, help reframe our thinking on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, icons of urban modernity who can now be seen and heard in a kaleidophonic light, one that offers a compelling new perspective on modern mediascapes.In elaborating this transatlantic phenomenon, Kaleidophonic Modernity illuminates the prehistory of the phonograph as it intersects with the aesthetics of sound reproducibility, Franco-American literary exchange, Poe’s aesthetic and intellectual legacy, the sounds of modern cities and technologies, and the genealogy of audiovisual experimentation found in such movements as Dada, Futurism, and the sound art of today.Annie deSaussure, holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University and is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Languages and Literary Studies at Lafayette College. Her work focuses on minority regional languages, literatures, and cultures in contemporary France, radio, sound studies, and podcasting. Her most recent article on feminist discourses of motherhood in French podcasting is forthcoming in the 2023 special issue, “Podcasting Disruptive Voices,” of CFC Intersections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, and Other Stories, and The Tusk That Did the Damage. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, and have been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk that Did the Damage was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tania lives in Washing D.C. where she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.Recommended Books: Hua Hsu, Stay True Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea *A video of a period expert playing Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is available hereChris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract 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