New Books in Literary Studies

Interviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books

Arts
1976
Tobias Boes, "Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Po...
Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted...
87 min
1977
Gonzalo Lamana, "How 'Indians' Think: Colonial ...
Lamana carefully investigates the writings of Indigenous intellectuals of the Andean region during Spanish colonialism...
46 min
1978
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Sisters and Rebels: A Str...
Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine Lumpkin reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation’s attention to issues of region, race, and labor.
37 min
1979
Ingrid Horrocks, "Women Wanderers and the Writi...
Ingrid Horrocks talks about the way women travelers, specifically women wanderers, are represented in late-eighteenth century literature, particularly in the work of women writers...
31 min
1980
Great Books: Jared Stark on Virginia Woolf's "T...
“On or around December 1910, human character changed.”
40 min
1981
Barbara Spackman, "Accidental Orientalists: Mod...
Spackman’s riveting study identifies a strand of what it calls “Accidental Orientalism” in narratives by Italians who found themselves in Ottoman Egypt and Anatolia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
45 min
1982
Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon, "Night and...
Fort gives readers a chance to dive into the world of early 20th century Uzbek literature and understand the complex social problems of late Russian imperial Turkestan...
44 min
1983
David N. Gottlieb, "Second Slayings: The Bindin...
Gottlieb explores the decisive - and, until now, under-appreciated - influence exerted on Jewish memory by the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac narrative in the Book of Genesis...
63 min
1984
Great Books: Ava Chin on Kingston's "The Woman ...
What stories should we remember, and which ones are we forced to forget?
43 min
1985
Simon Brodbeck, "Krishna's Lineage: The Harivam...
While typically circulating as a separate text, The Harivamsha forms the final part of the Mahabharata storyline...
45 min
1986
Emilia Nielsen, "Disrupting Breast Cancer Narra...
Nielsen argues that the happy stories of breast cancer survivors are so common that any other types of narrative almost require an apology...
21 min
1987
Claire Chambers, “Making Sense of Contemporary ...
Chambers outlines Muslim cultural production during this period through a literary analysis of the senses, especially those beyond the visual...
44 min
1988
Eleanor Parker, "Dragon Lords: The History and ...
For all of their prominence in the popular imagination today, the historical record of the Viking presence in England is limited...
19 min
1989
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter...
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at?
54 min
1990
John L. Brooke, "'There Is a North': Fugitive S...
Inspired by brave fugitives who escaped slavery and the cultural craze that was "Uncle Tom’s Cabin," the North rose up to battle slavery, ultimately waging the bloody Civil War.
64 min
1991
Claudia Moscovici, "Holocaust Memories: A Surve...
As Holocaust survivors pass away, their legacy of suffering, tenacity and courage could be forgotten. It is up to each generation to commemorate the victims...
28 min
1992
Kerry Driscoll, "Mark Twain among the Indians a...
Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life...
94 min
1993
Caroline Weber, “Proust’s Duchess” (Knopf, 2019)
Weber has done the painstaking research to find out who were the real-life people on whom Proust modeled some of the most memorable characters...
69 min
1994
Richard F. Thomas, "Why Bob Dylan Matters" (Dey...
When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, a debate raged...
64 min
1995
Ann K. McClellan, "Sherlock’s World: Fan Fictio...
McClellan explores fan fiction inspired by one of the most-watch BBC series in history...
66 min
1996
Lian Xi, "Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Li...
In 1960, a poet and journalist named Lin Zhao was arrested by the Communist Party of China and sent to prison for re-education...
75 min
1997
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev, "The Epistolary Art of Cat...
Rubin-Detlev evaluates the place that Catherine sought to occupy in the intellectual and cultural landscape of her time...
56 min
1998
Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, "Holding Onto Nothi...
Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing...
23 min
1999
Mark Alizart, "Dogs" (Polity, 2019)
Alizart offers us a surprising new portrait of the dog as thinker―a thinker who may perhaps know the true secret of our humanity...
44 min
2000
Liz Gloyn, "Tracking Classical Monsters in Popu...
What is it about ancient monsters that popular culture still finds so enthralling?
65 min