New Books In Literary Studies

By 1935 William Faulkner was well established as an author of critically praised novels, yet the low volume of his sales forced him to seek work in Hollywood. As Carl Rollyson details in The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935-1962 (University of Virginia Press, 2020), this led to an itinerant life divided between Mississippi and Hollywood. Rollyson shows how his encounters with the politicized writers and European refugees who populated the film industry helped broaden his outlook, which was reflected in the injection of anti-fascist elements into his scripts and novels. By the end of the Second World War, Faulkner enjoyed a growing international status that culminated with receiving the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, which cemented his place at the forefront of American literature. Though a reluctant celebrity, Faulkner embraced his status by becoming an informal ambassador of American values abroad, while using his position as an unofficial spokesperson of the South to c

Ithamar Theodor's The Bhagavad-Gītā: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2020) is a systematic and comprehensive introduction to one of the most read texts in South Asia. The Bhagavad-gītā is at its core a religious text, a philosophical treatise and a literary work, which has occupied an authoritative position within Hinduism for the last millennium. This book brings together themes central to the study of the Gita, as it is popularly known -- such as the Bhagavad-gītā's structure, the history of its exegesis, its acceptance by different traditions within Hinduism, and its national and global relevance. It highlights the richness of the Gita's interpretations, examines its great interpretive flexibility and at the same time offers a conceptual structure based upon a traditional commentarial tradition. With contributions from major scholars across the world, this book will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of religious studies, especially Hinduism, Indian philosophy, Asian philosophy, Indian histo

In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence. In particular, Richardson investigates how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations of this influential and popular rivalry. Fans of Batman and The Joker will find this work engaging and applicable across a range of scholarly fields and popular interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Aristotle, the co-called father of rhetoric, supposedly conceptualized his theory of persuasion as a means of bringing meaning to rest. But what if there’s another story, one in which forgotten tropes such as alloiosis turn rhetoric toward the flux and difference? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) Drs. Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud about how our classical conceptions of stylistic language may be more open opening to otherness than stabilizing meaning. A Revolution in Tropes is a groundbreaking study of rhetoric and tropes. Theorizing new ways of seeing rhetoric and its relationship with democratic deliberation, Jane Sutton and Mari Lee Mifsud explore and display alloiōsis as a trope of difference, exception, and radical otherness. Their argument centers on Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric through particular tropes of similarity that sustained a vision of civic discourse but at the same time underutilized tropes of difference. When this vision is revolutionized, democratic delibera

The Icelandic mappae mundi were a series of maps produced in the late medieval period (c. 1225 - c. 1400) that bore witness to fundamental changes in the landscape of vernacular literary culture, scientific thinking and regional geopolitics. In The Mappae Mundi of Medieval Iceland (D.S. Brewer, 2020), Dale Kedwards explores the plethora of meanings that medieval Icelandic mapmakers invested into their works, from political statements about national origin, to diagrammatic expressions of cosmological theories. The mappae mundi provided a medium for medieval Icelanders to imagine their place in relation to the wider world, and even the physical universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Shyam Sharma, author of Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success (Routledge, 2020). We talk about international students and rhetoric, international students and confidence, international students and community-based programming, and vision. Interviewer : "Could you give an example for how teachers can foster agency among international students?" Shyam Sharma : "Let's say you walk into a class and you ask, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting.' If you say, 'How do people greet in a formal academic setting, in your local community' –– Just add that phrase at the end –– what happens is that the Chinese student versus the American student versus the Brazilian student get to share their ideas about how people (in English, of course), about how people greet each other formally. But by giving them a platform where their ideas can be brought in order to explore, that allows many of things, one being to set the terms of engagement w

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: disaster stories, finishing a book project, poetry, and what resilience is and isn’t. Our guest is: Jennifer Strube, a writer, educator, and licensed therapist who loves chronicling life's stories. After three master's degrees and a decade of teaching, she relocated west from New York City in search of open sky. An avid believer in the wild places, her work highlights the spaces that wake one up—the byroads of travel, the subtlety of everyday grace, and that impetuous ache called love. She is the author of the poetry book Wild Everything, discussed in this episode. Your

The Yellow Kid was a ubiquitous figure at the end of the nineteenth century. Originally created by Richard F. Outcault, the Kid first appeared as a character in the comic strip Hogan’s Alley. He was an immensely popular figure, and quickly migrated to other comic strips, as well as appearing on merchandise and various consumer products. As one of the first popular serial characters, the Yellow Kid was emblematic of an emerging consumer culture. In Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid (Ohio State UP, 2019), Christina Meyer uses the mobility of the Yellow Kid as a prism through which to explore a range of issues surrounding serialisation, cultural production and consumption, and authorship. Meyer’s book is an insightful, rigorously researched account of turn-of-the-century popular culture and the role of comic strips in that development of that culture. Christina Meyer is Visiting Professor of American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universi

Listen to this interview of Helen Sword, author of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012). We talk about bad writing, but a lot more about how to make it good. There's even a dog. Interviewer : "What is it that keeps most students and then, too, many early-career academics away from making the effort to write well?" Helen Sword : "Writing is seen as this utilitarian thing. You've got to learn it. It's got lots of rules. If you get things wrong, somebody's going to put red ink on there or red tracked changes or whatever. There's a lot of emotional baggage tied up with the hard work of writing well, and yet when I interviewed successful academic writers, what I heard over and over again, was about the pleasures that they take in the hard work of the craft. And that's where, for me, I link the pleasures of writing well back to stylish academic writing, to the craft of writing well. Those two things have got to go hand in hand to be a long-term sustainable kind of enterprise." Learn more about your ad choice

The life and works of William Faulkner have generated numerous biographical studies exploring how Faulkner understood southern history, race, his relationship to art, and his place in the canons of American and world literature. However, some details on Faulkner’s life collected by his early biographers never made it into published form or, when they did, appeared in marginalized stories and cryptic references. The biographical record of William Faulkner’s life has yet to come to terms with the life-long friendships he maintained with gay men, the extent to which he immersed himself into gay communities in Greenwich Village and New Orleans, and how profoundly this part of his life influenced his “apocryphal” creation of Yoknapatawpha County. Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (U Mississippi Press, 2019) explores the intimate friendships Faulkner maintained with gay men, among them Ben Wasson, William Spratling, and Hubert Creekmore, and places his fiction into establish

Vadim Shneyder's new book, Russia's Capitalist Realism: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov (Northwestern, 2020) examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia's industrial revolution. During Russia's first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. Prepare yourself for an innovative perspective on Anna Karenina, The Idiot and other 19th-century Russian classics. Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or

In Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together divers cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Which realisms are being invoked under the category of “Neorealism” as it was plied and applied in the mid-20th Century? What were the aims of these realisms? What did they accomplish? Each of Italian Neorealism’s four chapters sketches answers to these questions by approaching a corpus that interweaves some very well-known texts from Italian Neorealism (Rome, Open City, Bicycle Thieves, La terra trema, etc.) with texts that have enjoyed scantier critical attention (like films from the period that have not widely circulated, for example) or which hail from extra-cinematic and even extra-Italian contexts. The result is an eminently readable study whose broad embrace does not sa

Listen to this interview of Jo Mackiewicz, author of Writing Center Talk over Time: A Mixed-Method Study (Routledge 2018). We talk about talk, tutor talk, student talk, spoken written-language, and Wisconsin. interviewer : "Now, this is pretty much something that a writing center is aiming for, isn't it? I mean, you don't want that––just as in the classroom with the teacher––you don't want that the writing tutor is doing all of the talking, do you?" Jo Mackiewicz : "Oh, yeah. One of the biggest goals of the writing center tutor is to try to get the student to talk. Because there's a great tendency for students to backchannel, to show they're understanding––and of course, that's their role and it makes sense that they would do that. But what a tutor wants to try to do, in the best case, is to get them to start talking, to try to start putting words together themselves, to try to reshape their words, to try to orally shape the words that would go in their papers." Daniel Shea, heads Scholarly Communications, a

In Graphic Indigeneity: Comics in the Americas and Australasia (UP of Mississippi, 2020), Frederick Luis Aldama brings together comics scholars Joshua T. Anderson, Chad A. Barbour, Susan Bernardin, Mike Borkent, Jeremy M. Carnes, Philip Cass, Jordan Clapper, James J. Donahue, Dennin Ellis, Jessica Fontaine, Jonathan Ford, Lee Francis IV, Enrique García, Javier García Liendo, Brenna Clarke Gray, Brian Montes, Arij Ouweneel, Kevin Patrick, Candida Rifkind, Jessica Rutherford, and Jorge Santos to present a comprehensive collection examining Indigenous comic book artists and the history of representations of Indigenous peoples throughout comic book history. This collection highlights the representations and misrepresentations of Indigenous subjects and experiences in comics throughout the Americas and Australasia. In addition, it looked at the work of Indigenous comic artists highlighting texts such as Daniel Parada’s Zotz, Puerto Rican comics Turey el Taíno and La Borinqueña, and Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics

Muhammad's Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage by Michael Muhammad Knight (UNC Press, 2020) joins the emerging subfield of literature in Islamic Studies exploring embodiment and materiality as concepts for making sense of the spatial and temporal developments of Muslim subjectivities. Knight’s monograph is the first to delve into these themes as it concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s body and its functions, relationships, representations, symbolism, and postmortem contestations within Islamic literature. Knight analyzes Sunni hadith and sira texts from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE to understand how conceptions of the Prophet’s body—from its physical features to its metaphysical qualities—shaped constructions of masculinity, authority, and power for the Prophet’s Companions as well as for those who followed in the centuries after them. By foregrounding his analysis in the Islamic concept of baraka—a kind of beneficent force of divine origin—and drawing from contemporary theoretical i

In Writing Across the Color Line: U.S. Print Culture and the Rise of Ethnic Literature, 1877-1920 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), Lucas A. Dietrich investigates how ethnic literatures took shape in the U.S. context and how writers of color intervened in the “mainstream” writing. Interestingly, this intervention was framed through specific genres and techniques, including satire and parody towards the mainstream narratives. The book brings our attention to the most prominent ethnic writings of the second half of the nineteenth century while taking into consideration the negotiations in which both the writers and the publishers participated. What is compelling about this research is the dialogical approach that Dietrich undertakes to explore the ways in which the ethnic writers were, in fact, accepted into what could be described as the dominant mainstream writing of white writers. Writing Across the Color Line contains rich materials which demonstrate not only how the writers of color established di

An in-depth look at Elie Wiesel’s writings, from his earliest works to his final novels. Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was one of the most important literary voices to emerge from the Holocaust. The Nazis took the lives of most of his family, destroyed the community in which he was raised, and subjected him to ghettoization, imprisonment in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and a death march. It is remarkable not only that Wiesel survived and found a way to write about his experiences, but that he did so with elegance and profundity. His novels grapple with questions of tradition, memory, trauma, madness, atrocity, and faith. The Struggle for Understanding examines Wiesel’s literary, religious, and cultural roots and the indelible impact of the Holocaust on his storytelling. Grouped in sections on Hasidic origins, the role of the Other, theology and tradition, and later works, the chapters cover the entire span of Wiesel’s career. Books analyzed include the novels Dawn, The Forgotten, The Gates of the Forest, The Town Beyo

What if the Haitian Revolution, perhaps the only “successful” Black revolution in history, weren’t over? On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Jeremy Matthew Glick (h/h) about how and why the Haitian Revolution, which was the only slave rebellion to achieve state sovereignty, remains an inspired site of investigation for artists and activist-intellectuals in the African Diaspora. In The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (NYU Press, 2016), Dr. Glick examines twentieth-century performances engaging the revolution as laboratories for political thinking. Asking readers to consider the revolution less a fixed event than an ongoing and open-ended history resonating across the work of Atlantic world intellectuals, Glick argues that these writers use the Haitian Revolution as a watershed to chart their own radical political paths, animating, enriching, and framing their artistic and scholarly projects. Spanning the disciplines

Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020) explores how texts—literary and visual—help us engage with the space that goes beyond the limits of visible geographical borders and legal regulations. By drawing attention to the loci that produce borderline experiences (detention camps, consulates, international waters), Matthew Hart guides his readers through experiences that ask to reconsider the ways in which geographical places and the implications they produce are perceived. The repercussions of the extraterritorial experiences may include transitional modes for constructing and re-discovering one’s identity. This opens up a broader dimension with which Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction engages. With his book, Hart offers an acute intervention into how a text functions in a globalized community, which entails the reconsideration of how literature and art respond to the twenty-first-century transcultural shifts that are often m

The image of the US as leading a good war to establish liberal democracy and move towards racial equality dominate the discourses of the Cold War. In her work, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2020), Christine Hong attempts to debunk the idea of good war and warfare-welfare state that allowed women and racial minorities to participate in national politics by showing how the US government was able to launch total war that blurred the boundaries of home and abroad through the “principle of indistinction.” The supposed blurring of colorline through military desegregation and multilateral, multi-racial alliances hid fortification of the US empire as necropolitical war target broadened through indistinction of civilian, women, and children as possible enemies. The US counterinsurgency eroded democratizing, decolonizing movements abroad based on color lines, and rhetorical racial equality at home was accompanied by i