New Books in Literary Studies
1,623 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books
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Episodes
Christopher S. Celenza, "The Italian Renaissance and the Origin of the Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
April 13, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesChristopher Celenza is one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Renaissance. His ambitious new book The Italian Renaissance and the Origin of the Humanities: An Intellectual History, 1400-1800 (Cambridge UP, 2021) focuses on the body of knowledge which we now call the humanities, charting its roots in the Italian Renaissance and exploring its development up to the Enlightenment. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the author shows how thinkers like Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano d...
John Miller, "The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter" (British LIbrary, 2022)
April 12, 2023 08:00 - 56 minutesThe Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value. The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For ...
Tina Post, "Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression" (NYU Press, 2023)
April 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourExplores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production. Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan: The Aesthetics of Black Inexpression (NYU Press, 2023) tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purpose...
Shakespeare's "As You Like It" Part 1: the Story
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesAs You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most beloved romantic comedies. It is also his most daring exploration of sex, gender, and identity. In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind flips the script of romantic convention and pursues the man she loves — while she is disguised as a man. In this course, you’ll learn the story of As You Like It, unpack the complex games it plays with gender and performance, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and li...
Matthew Mewhinney, "Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
April 10, 2023 08:00 - 57 minutesMatthew Mewhinney's Form and Feeling in Japanese Literati Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) explores how two early modern and two modern Japanese writers – Yosa Buson (1716–83), Ema Saikō (1787–1861), Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), and Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916) – experimented with the poetic artifice afforded by the East Asian literati (bunjin) tradition, a repertoire of Chinese and Japanese poetry and painting. Their experiments generated a poetics of irony that transformed the lineaments of l...
Marianna Kiyanovska, "The Voices of Babyn Yar" (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022)
April 09, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutesToday I talked to the translators of Marianna Kiyanovska's The Voices of Babyn Yar (HURI, 2022), Max Rosochinsky and Oksana Maksymchuk. With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordinary civilians going through unbearable events leading to the massacre at Kyiv’s Babyn Yar from a...
Bettina Judd, "Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
April 08, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutesFeeling is not “feelin”. Feelin, in African American Vernacular English, is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain, anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the meaning of the work. Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, 2022) discusses Black women’s creative production as feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect c...
Helen Small, "The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time" (Oxford UP, 2020)
April 07, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutesCynicism is usually seen as a provocative mode of dissent from conventional moral thought, casting doubt on the motives that guide right conduct. When critics today complain that it is ubiquitous but lacks the serious bite of classical Cynicism, they express concern that it can now only be corrosively negative. The Function of Cynicism at the Present Time (Oxford UP, 2020) takes a more balanced view. Re-evaluating the role of cynicism in literature, cultural criticism, and philosophy from 184...
5.1 We Have This-ness, Y’all!
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesSeason 5 of Novel Dialogue opens with an impassioned refresher course in literary theory brought to you by Ocean Vuong, poet and author of the bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Ocean talks with critic Amy E. Elkins and host Emily Hyde about browsing bookstore shelves and building his personal reading list of “life-giving weirdos.” They discuss genre and gender, antiquing and thrifting, fish sauce and photography, all the while integrating the insights of queer theory a...
The Gospel According to Dorothy (with Kathryn Wehr)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1941, Dorothy Sayers, Christian apologist, author of The Mind of the Maker, and even more famous for her Peter Whimsey mystery novels, wrote a cycle of plays on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It was produced by the BBC for the radio and was a great success, though Sayers got flak for it from all directions—from secular voices calling it religious propaganda, from conservative voices calling it blasphemy. She also broke an established prohibition against actors playing J...
Tony K. Stewart, "Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination" (U California Press, 2019)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesThere is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself ...
Hope Williard, "Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries" (ARC Humanities Press, 2022)
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesHope Williard's book Friendship in the Merovingian Kingdoms: Venantius Fortunatus and His Contemporaries (Arc Humanities Press, 2022) explores how one early medieval poet survived and thrived amidst the political turbulence of sixth century Gaul—with a little help from his friends. Born in northern Italy, Venantius Fortunatus made his career writing for and about members of the Merovingian elite. Although he is no longer dismissed as an opportunistic poetaster who wrote undistinguished flatte...
Sassan Tabatabai: Poetry, Observation, and Form
April 06, 2023 08:00 - 43 minutes"For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone" says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem "Firestones" the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together. Firestones I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast, a testimony to centuries of silt left on the shore, of sediment pressed into stone: sandstone, shale, tufa, travertine, jasper, flint. There was the stone that knew the sadness of the sea, that saved its secrets. It was pock-marked with holes and lay h...
Lost in Thought: A Conversation with Zena Hitz
April 05, 2023 14:13 - 45 minutesWhat are the "great books"? What makes them great? Is the cultivation of an intellectual life especially important to citizens of a democratic republic? Zena Hitz, Tutor at St. John's College, joins the show to discuss all this and more! You can buy Hitz's book Lost in Thought here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Patrick Bixby, "Nietzsche and Irish Modernism" (Manchester UP, 2022)
April 05, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourPatrick Bixby's book Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (Manchester UP, 2022) demonstrates how the ideas of the controversial German philosopher played a crucial role in the emergence and evolution of a distinctly Irish brand of modernist culture. Making an essential new contribution to the history of modernism, the book traces the circulation of these ideas through the writings of George Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, as well as through minor works of literature, magazine articles, ne...
Ross Clare, "Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity" (Liverpool UP, 2022)
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourAncient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity (Liverpool UP, 2022) by Dr. Ross Clare introduces and analyses the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary science fiction. By using up-to-date methods from classical reception theory, science-fiction analysis and fictional-world studies, the book will help furnish the reader's understanding of the ways in which the literature, culture, history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome are appropriated and represente...
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 3: the Language
April 03, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesMacbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 3, Professor Emma Smith offers ...
Elizabeth Marshall, "Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts" (Boydell & Brewer, 2022)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 35 minutesTwo perceptions about wolves are inherited from ancient and medieval European lupine motifs: the superstition that the wolf could steal a person's speech, and the perceived contiguous natures of wolves and human outlaws. In Wolves in Beowulf and Other Old English Texts (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), Elizabeth Marshall traces the history of these associations and the evidence to suggest that they were known to writers working in early medieval England. Marshall provides new, animal-centric readings...
Mike Jay, "Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind" (Yale UP, 2023)
April 02, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutesMike Jay's Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (Yale UP, 2023) is a provocative and original history of the scientists and writers, artists and philosophers who took drugs to explore the hidden regions of the mind. Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journ...
Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon, "After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
March 31, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourColleen Lye and Christopher Nealon's edited volume After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge UP, 2022) demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist...
Marie-Luise Theuerkauf, "Dindshenchas Érenn" (U College Cork, 2022)
March 29, 2023 08:00 - 52 minutesThe purpose of the present volume, Dindshenchas Érenn (U College Cork, 2022), is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dind...
Joyce Kinkead, "A Writing Studies Primer" (Broadview Press, 2022)
March 28, 2023 08:00 - 23 minutesDr. Joyce Kinkead, Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University discusses her recent book, A Writing Studies Primer (Broadview Press. 2022). A Carnegie Foundation/CASE US Professor of the Year, Professor Kinkead’s primary scholarly areas are in Writing Studies and Undergraduate Research. She has brought a tremendous amount of her expertise in undergraduate research, writing, and composition to the forefront of A Writing Studies Primer. Writing is omnipresent in our lives, yet w...
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 2: Characters and Questions
March 27, 2023 08:00 - 20 minutesMacbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. Part 2 addresses some of the central qu...
Kieron Pim, "Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth" (Granta Books, 2022)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourEndless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta Books, 2022) travels with Roth from his childhood in the town of Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to an unsettled life spent roaming Europe between the wars, including spells in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. His decline mirrored the collapse of civilized Europe: in his last peripatetic decade, he opposed Nazism in exile from Germany, his wife succumbed to schizophrenia and he died an alcoholic on the eve of WWII. Exploring th...
Jill Jarvis, "Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony" (Duke UP, 2021)
March 26, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), Jill Jarvis examines the crucial role that writers and artists have played in cultivating historical memory and nurturing political resistance in Algeria, showing how literature offers the unique ability to reckon with colonial violence and to render the experiences of those marginalized by the state. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st ce...
ACLA 2023
March 23, 2023 08:00 - 17 minutesThis episode of High Theory is based upon a conference paper Saronik and Kim wrote for the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in 2023. It departs from our usual conversational style, in that we take turns reading sections of the paper aloud. But we could all do with a dose of formality, right? The paper we read is titled, “How Will Critique Save the World?: Popular Theory and Public Humanities” and it talks about the method wars on Twitter, the cameo appearance of Baudrill...
Aaron Spencer Fogleman and Robert Hanserd, "Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936" (APS, 2022)
March 22, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesThe importance of published accounts by African slave ship survivors is well-known but not their existence in large numbers. Fogleman and Hanserd catalog nearly five hundred discrete accounts and more than 2,500 printings of them over four centuries in numerous Atlantic languages. Short biographies of each African, print histories of the complete or partial life story. Five Hundred African Voices: A Catalog of Published Accounts by Africans Enslaved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1586-1936...
Megan Swift, "Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
March 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourBased on sources from rare book libraries in Russia and around the world, Picturing the Page: Illustrated Children’s Literature and Reading under Lenin and Stalin (U Toronto Press, 2020) offers a vivid exploration of illustrated children’s literature and reading under Lenin and Stalin – a period when mass publishing for children and universal public education became available for the first time in Russia. By analyzing the illustrations in fairy tales, classic "adult" literature reformatted fo...
Shakespeare's "Macbeth" Part 1: the Story
March 20, 2023 08:00 - 21 minutesMacbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most concentrated and thrilling tragedies. Macbeth is a warrior lord living in medieval Scotland who starts the play by saving his king — only to then murder the king himself. In this course, you’ll learn Macbeth’s story, explore the complex morality and psychology of Macbeth and his accomplice, Lady Macbeth, and hear the play’s key speeches performed and analyzed by world-class Shakespearean actors and literary scholars. In Part 1, you’ll be guided through a d...
Arya Aryan, "The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton" (Cambridge Scholars, 2022)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 26 minutesArya Aryan's book The Postmodern Representation of Reality in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (Cambridge Scholars, 2022) explores the postmodernist representation of reality and argues that historiographic metafictional texts, such as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987), are hetero-referential in their creation of a heterocosm, as opposed to representational and anti-representational views of art. It argues that postmodernist historiographic metafiction is not simply self-referential, but hetero-ref...
Jessica Brantley, "Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 50 minutesToday’s guest is Jessica Brantley, Professor of English at Yale University. Professor Brantley is the author of the previous monograph, Reading in the Wilderness, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Exemplaria, and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Professor Brantley's new book is Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022. After giving a comprehensive survey o...
Nicholas Brown, "Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2019)
March 19, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourIn Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019), Nicholas Brown offers a fresh perspective on aesthetic autonomy and its political value, one of the great debates of the twentieth century. The monograph illustrates the viability of the modernist project in the era after postmodernism while offering one illuminating reading after another of contemporary examples in novels, photography, sculpture, popular music, TV, or movies. Brown defends art as a libera...
Magdalena J. Zaborowska, "James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile" (Duke UP, 2009)
March 18, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourBetween 1961 and 1971 James Baldwin spent extended periods of time in Turkey, where he worked on some of his most important books. In this first in-depth exploration of Baldwin’s “Turkish decade,” Magdalena J. Zaborowska reveals the significant role that Turkish locales, cultures, and friends played in Baldwin’s life and thought. Turkey was a nurturing space for the author, who by 1961 had spent nearly ten years in France and Western Europe and failed to reestablish permanent residency in the...
Roy Schwartz, "Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero" (McFarland, 2021)
March 18, 2023 04:00 - 1 hourSuperman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World Wa...
Rick de Villiers, "Eliot and Beckett's Low Modernism: Humility and Humiliation" (Edinburgh UP, 2021)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 31 minutesHumility and humiliation have an awkward, often unacknowledged intimacy. Humility may be a queenly, cardinal or monkish virtue, while humiliation points to an affective state at the extreme end of shame. Yet a shared etymology links the words to lowliness and, further down, to the earth. As this study suggests, like the terms in question, T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett share an imperfect likeness. Between them is a common interest in states of abjection, shame and suffering – and possible res...
Annie Pfeifer, "To the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 17, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesTo the Collector Belong the Spoils: Modernism and the Art of Appropriation (Cornell UP, 2023) rethinks collecting as an artistic, revolutionary, and appropriative modernist practice, which flourishes beyond institutions like museums or archives. Through a constellation of three author-collectors—Henry James, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Einstein—Annie Pfeifer examines the relationship between literary modernism and twentieth-century practices of collecting objects. From James's paper hoarding to...
Book Chat: "Human Glitches" (2020)
March 16, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination with the notion of "borders", including borders between humans and machines, men and women, norm...
Sarah Iles Johnston, "Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 15, 2023 09:00 - 27 minutesGripping tales that abound with fantastic characters and astonishing twists and turns, Greek myths confront what it means to be mortal in a world of powerful forces beyond human control. Little wonder that they continue to fascinate readers thousands of years after they were first told. Gods and Mortals: Ancient Greek Myths for Modern Readers (Princeton UP, 2023) is a major new telling of ancient Greek myths by one of the world's preeminent experts. In a fresh, vibrant, and compelling style t...
Laura Kolb, "Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 14, 2023 08:00 - 54 minutesIn Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts—including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest—which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit ...
Book Chat: Comics in Taiwan
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 42 minutesFor this installment, we had the pleasure of hosting Norbert Danysz, a PhD candidate at Université Lumière Lyon 2. We chatted about recent developments related to comics in Taiwan – the definition of “Taiwan comics”, their typology, and state promotion of this medium with the aim of building Taiwan’s soft power. To find out more about niche and mainstream comics, who reads them, how and for whom they are significant, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
The Wooden O and the Iron Throne: Game of Thrones and Shakespeare Part 3
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 38 minutesDive into the question of why audiences love Shakespeare’s plays and Game of Thrones so much, despite their depictions of prejudice and violence, and discuss the unique power of tragic art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of "The Catcher in the Rye"
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 33 minutesIn light of J.D. Salinger's recent passing and on reflection of his literary contributions, The New England Quarterly took a trip back to its December 1997 issue (70:4) and one of the journal's most popular articles. Pulitzer Prize-winner and NEQ editorial board member, Louis Menand interviews author Stephen J. Whitfield on his article "Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye." They discuss the impact of Salinger, the political and social climate during the tim...
Susan J. Stanfield, "Rewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture" (U Georgia Press, 2022)
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 2 hoursRewriting Citizenship: Women, Race, and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture (U Georgia Press, 2022) provides an interdisciplinary approach to antebellum citizenship. Interpreting citizenship, particularly how citizenship intersects with race and gender, is fundamental to understanding the era and directly challenges the idea of Jacksonian Democracy. Susan J. Stanfield uses an analysis of novels, domestic advice, essays, and poetry, as well as more traditional archival sources, to provide an unde...
Book Chat: Queering the Anthropocene in Taiwan Sci-Fi
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutesIn this episode, we have the pleasure to have Mr Chi Ta-wei, a renowned Taiwanese writer, talk about his acclaimed LGBTQ+ novel, The Membranes. Chi reviews this work which was published in the 90s and provides his reflection on how to re-read the novel in the context of the Anthropocene. We also chat about the influence of Japanese manga and anime on his Sci-fi world-creating and his view on contemporary speculative fiction. Chi further shares with us his thoughts on the next generation of Ta...
Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone, "Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 47 minutesWhat role do imaginary games have in story-telling? Why do fiction authors outline the rules of a game that the reader will never watch or play? Combining perspectives from philosophy, literature and game studies, Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play (Bloomsbury, 2023) provides the first in-depth investigation into the significance of games in fictional worlds. With examples from contemporary cinema and literature, from The Hunger Games to the science fiction of ...
Emily Steiner, "John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c. 1400" (Oxford UP, 2021)
March 11, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesWhat would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes...
Audrey Truschke, "The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule" (Columbia UP, 2021)
March 10, 2023 10:00 - 1 hourIn her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Histo...
Jessica Rosenberg, "Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest is Jessica Rosenberg, who is the author of a new book titled Botanical Poetics: Early Modern Plant Books and the Husbandry of Print (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022). An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Miami, Professor Rosenberg has contributed book chapters to Shakespeare and Hospitality and Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Literature and published articles on “The Poetics of Practical Address” in Philological Quarterly and “The Point of the Couplet” in ELH:...
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 45 minutesEver since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating st...
Book Chat: Oceanic Writing
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The interview covers the writer's view on the oceanic narrative formation in Taiwan, his perspective on non-human agency and Hokkien (Hoklo) language employment in literary writing, as well as his dedication in Pacific ocean conservation. The interviewed is conducted in Chinese and translated by Zhan Fe-fei in English, hence tailored to both English a...