New Books in Literary Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books

Arts
1901
Sianne Ngai, "Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic ...
Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories encountered in late capitalist daily life...
91 min
1902
K. Grenier and A. Mushal, "Cultures of Memory i...
The essays in this volume explore commemorative practices as they developed in the nineteenth century...
47 min
1903
John Locke, "Queen of the Gangsters: Stories by...
During the height of the 1930s gangster pulps, Harris wrote some of the roughest, toughest stories to be published in pulps such as Gangland Stories and Mobs...
64 min
1904
Joshua Kotin, "Utopias of One" (Princeton UP, 2...
In "utopias of one," the authors at one and the same time publish for an external audience, but sketch out modes of living and being that are in important ways both non-accessible and non-replicable....
63 min
1905
R. Rosenberg and R. Rubinstein, "Teaching Jewis...
In this interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it means to be “American”.
61 min
1906
Jessica Martell, "Farm to Form: Modernist Liter...
In Farm to Form, Martell contextualizes some familiar texts of British Literary Modernism, into a history that recognizes the role of food and agriculture...
73 min
1907
Martin Paul Eve, "Close Reading with Computers"...
Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead...
54 min
1908
Gregory A. Daddis, "Pulp Vietnam: War and Gende...
Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam...
54 min
1909
Donald Ostrowski, "Who Wrote That?: Authorship ...
Ostrowski offers a sustained reflection on what we can learn from comparison of authorship controversies...
70 min
1910
Karen E. H. Skinazi, "Women of Valor: Orthodox ...
Skinazi delves beyond this stereotype to identify a powerful tradition of feminist literary portrayals of Orthodox women, often created by Orthodox women themselves...
58 min
1911
Filippo Menozzi, "World Literature, Non-Synchro...
Menozzi offers to look at literature and literary processes through the prism of non-synchronism...
44 min
1912
Ken M. Penner, "The Lexham English Septuagint" ...
What is the Septuagint, and why does it matter?
34 min
1913
Laura Westengard, "Gothic Queer Culture: Margin...
Westengard examines the intersection of queerness and the gothic...
60 min
1914
Richard van Leeuwen, "The Thousand and One Nigh...
Leeuwen thoroughly examines an array of intricate ways in which the Thousand and One Nights shaped the developments of literatures across the world...
58 min
1915
John Barton, "A History of the Bible: The Story...
How did the Bible become the Bible? It's a long story....
59 min
1916
Arti Dhand, "Woman as Fire, Woman as Sage: Sexu...
The Hindu tradition has held conflicting views on womanhood from its earliest texts—holding women aloft as goddesses to be worshipped on the one hand and remaining deeply suspicious about women’s sexuality on the other...
38 min
1917
Lauren F. Klein, "An Archive of Taste: Race and...
Klein considers eating and early American aesthetics together, reframing the philosophical work of food and its meaning for the people who prepare, serve, and consume it...
48 min
1918
Guy Raffa, "Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented ...
Dante’s Bones is an academic mystery story, the “graveyard history” of Dante Alighieri, the master poet of what has come to be called The Divine Comedy. This book is about Dante’s literal remains and the where and how they’ve been kept...
72 min
1919
Valerie Wayne, "Women’s Labour and the History ...
Wayne reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books...
47 min
1920
Allison L. Rowland, "Zoetropes and the Politics...
The way that we talk about living beings can raise or lower their perceived value...
57 min
1921
Xiaoqiao Ling, "Feeling the Past in Seventeenth...
Ling offers readers a richly revealing window into sensory worlds at a particularly cataclysmic time, showing how Chinese literati dealt with the traumatic transition from the Ming to the Qing dynasty...
61 min
1922
K. Keeling and S. Pollard, "Table Lands: Food i...
Table Lands contributes to a growing body of scholarship in the subfield of literary food studies...
67 min
1923
Naomi Appleton, "Many Buddhas, One Buddha: A St...
Appleton introduces a significant section of the important early Indian Buddhist text known as the Avadānaśataka, or “One Hundred Stories”...
44 min
1924
Barry Witham, "From Red-Baiting to Blacklisting...
Witham traces Fried’s long career as a labor organizer and Communist Party militant, as well as the obsessive lengths the FBI went to in order to suppress his activism...
46 min
1925
Kim Adrian, "Dear Knausgaard: Karl Ove Knausgaa...
In 2009, a novel was released in Norway with a fairly simple premise; the author would simply write about himself, his life and his attempts to write...
65 min