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
Sam Slote et al., "Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses" (Oxford UP, 2022)
December 22, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourJames Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses (Oxford UP, 2022), with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary a...
Noémie Ndiaye, "Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)
December 21, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourScripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022) shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Af...
Anna Hogeland, "The Long Answer" (Riverhead Books, 2022)
December 21, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesToday I talked to Anna Hogeland about her new novel The Long Answer (Riverhead Books, 2022). Hogeland is a psychotherapist in private practice, with an MSW from Smith College School of Social Work and an MFA from UC Irvine. She lives in Vermont. Books Recommended: Lisa Marchiano, Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself Kayla Maiuri, Mother in the Dark Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College...
On Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot
December 20, 2022 09:00 - 33 minutesIn Paris in 1953, one of the strangest and most popular plays of the 20th century premiered, Waiting for Godot, written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Since the premier, people have been trying to figure out what this play means. It’s been interpreted in countless ways, with no definitive confirmation from Beckett one way or another. Waiting for Godot is famous as a play about nothing, but it has endured because it is in fact a play about life. For what is life but a sequential collectio...
Ariana Huberman. "Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production" (Academic Studies Press, 2022)
December 20, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAriana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the...
Tom McLeish, "The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art" (Oxford UP, 2021)
December 20, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesWhat human qualities are needed to make scientific discoveries, and which to make great art? Many would point to 'imagination' and 'creativity' in the second case but not the first. Tom McLeish's The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art (Oxford UP, 2021) challenges the assumption that doing science is in any sense less creative than art, music or fictional writing and poetry, and treads a historical and contemporary path through common territories of the creati...
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Chokepoint Capitalism is Strangling Creative Industries
December 19, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesMany of the creative industries look like an hourglass. On the one side, you have creators; on the other, the rest of us. In the middle, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow say there's often a 'chokepoint.' Corporate behemoths -- be they streaming apps, publishers, tech giants, or others -- put on the squeeze, exploiting their market power to extract rents, push down wages, and push up costs. But Cory and Rebecca have solutions to break the stranglehold, and in this episode of Darts and Letters ...
On William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
December 19, 2022 09:00 - 29 minutesWilliam Shakespeare is the greatest writer in history, and Hamlet is his greatest work. In Hamlet, Shakespeare gave us one of the first modern characters in literature. We are invited into the mind of Hamlet, to see how he thinks and acts in the face of love, grief, and revenge. It is a work of deep psychological complexity, and has inspired many writers to explore and reveal the inner lives of their characters. Part of what keeps Hamlet alive is its delicate balance of textured specificity a...
On Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote"
December 16, 2022 09:06 - 32 minutesDon Quixote was written by Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. He wrote it in two parts. Part one was published in 1605, and part two ten years later, in 1615. The story is centered around a middle aged guy named Alonso Quijano who is obsessed with stories of brave medieval knights—so obsessed that he decides to create a new persona for himself and live in a fictitious world of his own creation as Don Quixote. Don Quixote goes on all sorts of misguided adventures; fighting a windmill, joustin...
Off-Shore Aesthetics
December 16, 2022 09:00 - 20 minutesSritama Chatterjee talks about a model of literary criticism that she developed in the process of writing her new essay on shipbreaking in Bangladesh. It is a form of materialist understanding for texts, places, and geographies together, taking into account particular signifiers of a place and looking at correspondent literary responses. Sritama is a literary and cultural theorist of the Indian Ocean World, in the Literature program at the Dietrich School of Arts and sciences, University of P...
Books in Dark Times: A Discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 24 minutesKim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change. In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our ...
On Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time"
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesThe French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by life. But he was even more interested in how we perceive life. In 1908, when he was in his late 30s, he began to write a novel that explored themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time. This project consumed him until he died in 1922. By the end, his novel came out at more than 1.2 million words—that’s 3,000-4,000 pages depending on the edition. Much of the work was inspired directly from his life, sometimes memories of the past, and s...
Michael X. Wang, "Lost in the Long March" (Overlook Press, 2022)
December 15, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesIn 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao. While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangers That event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long Mar...
On Voltaire's "Candide"
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 27 minutesMany people made the European Enlightenment, but probably nobody better represents the movement’s spirit than the French writer and philosopher Voltaire. He was a man of letters and strong critic of the Catholic Church. In 1759 Voltaire published one of his best known works, Candide. In this satirical fable, Voltaire used current events of the day—like the 7 Years War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake—to explore larger philosophical questions, such as how there could be evil in a world created b...
Philip Nanton, "Riff: The Shake Keane Story" (Papillote Press, 2022)
December 14, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesPhilip Nanton's new book Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2022) follows the life and work of Shake Keane, the peripatetic and creative poet and musician from St. Vincent. Keane was an influential figure in the 1960s London jazz scene, worked briefly for the government on his home island, and moved to New York where he built lasting relationships, all the while creating an extensive discography and numerous publications. Nanton's considerations of Keane's contributions to freeform...
On Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude"
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutesIn 1967, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez published his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of that book, he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a story about life, death, endings, and beginnings. It is a novel that invites its readers to think about their own past, and accept the complex and mysterious forces that have shaped them. It calls into question our relationship to nostalgia, and the role memory plays in shaping our futu...
Michelle R. Boyd, "Becoming the Writer You Already Are" (Sage, 2022)
December 13, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesBecoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the ...
On James Joyce's "Ulysses"
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 33 minutesPerhaps more than any other book, Ulysses has the reputation of being difficult—it is dense, allusive, and often hard to follow. But Joyce wasn’t trying to be challenging for its own sake, or because he sadistically wanted to punish future students assigned his book. Quite the contrary. With Ulysses, Joyce wanted to explore and convey what it is to be alive. And just like his book, life is difficult and confusing, but also thrilling and joyful. Catherine Flynn is Associate Professor, Affiliat...
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
December 12, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a ...
Mitzi Szereto, "The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes and Mysteries" (Mango, 2022)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesCrimes are meant to be solved. But what happens when they’re not? For the individuals involved—from the victims and their families to police investigators—this is the most frustrating part of all. For them there’s no resolution, no justice, no tidy boxes in which to pack away all the bits and pieces of a puzzle that finally links together. Instead, they are only left with questions that may never get answered. In The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries (Mango Publishing, ...
Marco Codebò, "Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital" (Ohio State UP, 2020)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesIn Novels of Displacement: Fiction in the Age of Global Capital (Ohio State UP, 2020), Marco Codebò assesses the state of fiction in our time, an age defined by the combined hegemony of global capital and software. Codebò argues that present-day displacement originates in the dualism of power that pervades our polarized society and in the sweeping deterritorialization that is affecting people, objects, and signs. As the ties between subjectivity and territory break, being in the world means b...
Leigh T. I. Penman, "The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism: The Early Modern Origins of the Intellectual Ideal" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThe Lost History of Cosmopolitanism: The Early Modern Origins of the Intellectual Ideal (Bloomsbury, 2020) challenges our most basic assumptions about the history of an ideal at the heart of modernity. Beginning in antiquity and continuing through to today, Leigh T.I. Penman examines how European thinkers have understood words like 'kosmopolites', 'cosmopolite', 'cosmopolitan' and its cognates. The debates over their meanings show that there has never been a single, stable cosmopolitan concep...
Brian Daldorph, "Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
December 11, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesBrian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at the jail for the foreseeable future was mid-March 2020, right before the COVID-19 lockdown; the virus is taking a heavy toll in confined communities like nursing homes and prisons. Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail (UP of Kansas, 2021) is Daldorph’s record of teaching at the jail for the...
Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă, "Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires" (Cornell UP, 2022)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesThe episode features Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatca, co-authors of an extraordinary, field-shifting new book – Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell University Press, 2022). Dr. Boatca is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where she teaches and publishes widely on world-systems analysis, decolonial perspectives on global inequalities, gender and citizenship in modernity/coloniality, and the geopolitics of knowledge in Eastern Europe, L...
Matthew Thaler, "No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
December 10, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourVisions of utopia – some hopeful, others fearful – have become increasingly prevalent in recent times. In No Other Planet: Utopian Visions for a Climate-changed World (Cambridge UP, 2021), Mathias Thaler examines expressions of the utopian imagination, with a focus on the pressing challenge of how to inhabit a climate-changed world. Forms of social dreaming are tracked across two domains: political theory and speculative fiction. The analysis aims to both uncover the key utopian and dystopian...
Chrysta Bilton, "Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings" (Little, Brown, 2022)
December 09, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesChrysta Bilton is an American writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Her first book, the memoir Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, was published in July 2022 by Little, Brown in the US and Octopus in the UK. Chrysta's work has appeared in The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Newsweek. Normal Family was listed among Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and named a 'best' or 'must-read' book of Summer 2022 by Amazon, The Los Angeles Times,Vanit...
Maria Heim, "Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India" (Princeton UP, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesWords for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton UP, 2022) is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury”—a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems—this collection features 177 jewel-like entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers have variously referred to as emotions, passions, sentiments, moods, affects, and dispositions. These entries ...
On Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway"
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesIn the early 20th century, Europe and North America were undergoing a radical transformation. Scientific, technological, and political changes disrupted many traditional forms of life. The growth of cities opened up new freedoms and opportunities and scientists like Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach were developing new theories about how we perceive the world and construct reality. These cultural changes gave birth to a form of art that reflected the new sensibilities of this era—modernism. The mo...
Autumn Womack, "The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
December 08, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourAutumn Womack is a professor of English and of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her new book, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), addresses scholars and readers interested in literary studies, visual culture, and transformative justice in modern America. The book also transcends these areas to speak to readers in science & technology studies, in history of technology, or broadly interested in scie...
On "1001 Nights"
December 06, 2022 09:00 - 31 minutesHumans love stories. And no collection of stories is more beloved worldwide than the Middle Eastern folk tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. The original collection only contained about 40 stories. It was compiled into a manuscript sometime between the 8th century and the 14th century during the Islamic Golden Age. The stories were made popular in the West by the French translator Antoine Galland who got a hold of this original manuscript in the 1690s. Galland began translating and pu...
Jonathan Escoffery, "If I Survive You" (MCD, 2022)
December 06, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesJonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, If I Survive You, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and an Indie National Bestseller. If I Survive You was long-listed for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and elsewhere, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award. Jonathan has taught creative writing and seminars on the writer’s life at Stanford University, the University of Minnesot...
Yochai Ataria, "Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
December 05, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesPrimo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik: The Map and the Territory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complete opposites: Levi level-headed and self-aware, Ka-Tzetnik caught up in repeating the traumatic pa...
On James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time"
December 05, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesThe writer and activist James Baldwin grew up in a majority white America that saw white American lives as standard and universal, and Black American lives as different and particular. But in his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin showed that his life as a Black man in America was universally human. Josef Sorett is the Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is also chair of the Department of Religion and directs the Center on Afri...
Jennifer Smith, "Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-De-Siècle Spain" (Vanderbilt UP, 2021)
December 03, 2022 09:00 - 30 minutesWomen, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-De-Siècle Spain (Vanderbilt UP, 2021) argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the ...
On Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesThe Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered character who pushes against cultural norms and fully embraces her complexity. She’s crabby, difficult, and gets depressed. But she’s also smart and passionate. And she claims the right to love and be loved because she is all these things—fully human. Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia Uni...
Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega, "Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan" (Gaudy Boy, 2022)
December 02, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesA man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union. The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Rus...
Meg Howrey, "They're Going to Love You" (Doubleday Books, 2022)
December 02, 2022 05:00 - 46 minutesMeg Howrey is the author of the novels They're Going to Love You, The Cranes Dance, and Blind Sight. She is also the coauthor, writing under the pen-name Magnus Flyte, of the New York Times Bestseller City of Dark Magic and City of Lost Dreams. Her non-fiction has appeared in Vogue and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Meg was a professional dancer who performed with the Joffrey Ballet and City Ballet of Los Angeles, among others. She made her theatrical de...
Hiron Ennes, "Leech" (Tordotcom, 2022)
December 01, 2022 09:00 - 44 minutes“Soft sci-fi, gothic body horror” is how Hiron Ennes describes their debut novel, Leech (Tordotcom, 2022). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Set in an isolated winter chateau, the novel weaves a surreal and atmospheric tale of a doctor who is part of a hivemind parasite, a twisted baron’s family, and a newcomer that threatens to destroy any perceived sense of order. Leech is an exploration of bodily autonomy, trauma, and a desperation to dig up the oppressive structures of the past. It ...
On Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy"
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesWhen he was in his late 30s, the Italian poet Dante Alighieri got himself into some serious political trouble and was exiled from his beloved Florence. While in exile, he wrote one of the world’s greatest literary works, the Divine Comedy. In the story, Dante, the main character, must pass through the nine circles of Hell, climb Mount Purgatory, and ascend to Heaven to reach salvation. Along the way he meets all sorts of characters including the Roman poet Virgil, various politicians of his t...
Stephanie LeMenager and Teresa Shewry, "Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
November 30, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesBringing together 100 essential critical articles across 4 volumes, Literature and the Environment: Critical and Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2021) is a comprehensive collection of the most important academic writings on ecocriticism and literature's engagement with environmental crisis. With texts by key scholars, creative writers and activists, the articles in these four volumes follow the development and history of environmental criticism, as well as interdisciplinary conversations with co...
Ursula Villarreal-Moura, "Math for the Self-Crippling" (Gold Line Press, 2022)
November 28, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesUrsula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (forthcoming with Celadon Books). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, Midnight Breakfast, Washington Square, Story, Bennington Revie...
Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, "Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage" (Northwestern UP, 2022)
November 28, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesIn a pathbreaking new book, today’s guest, Jennifer Eun-Jung Row, asks how delay and haste in early modern French theater subverts the temporality of heteronormative politics and sexuality. Professor Row is the author of Queer Velocities: Time, Sex, and Biopower on the Early Modern Stage, published by Northwestern University Press in 2022. A Professor of French at the University of Minnesota, Professor Row serves as the co-chair of the Arts and Design and Humanities Imagine for the project "D...
On George Orwell's "1984"
November 28, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesIn 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years following WWII and the beginning of The Cold War. It was a tense time, full of uncertainty and the spectre of Soviet communism loomed. In 1984, Orwell introduced all kinds of terms to describe the dystopian society of his novel, such as “thought police”, “memory hole”, “big brother”, and “unperson.” And in his view, Orwell wasn’t attempting to describ...
Kate Christine Moore Koppy, "Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them" (Lexington, 2021)
November 25, 2022 09:00 - 32 minutesIn the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization. In Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them (Lexington Books, 2021), Kate Christina Moore Koppy argues that the increasing popularity and presence of fairy tales within American culture is both indicative of and contributing to this shift. By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fai...
On George Eliot's "Middlemarch"
November 25, 2022 09:00 - 38 minutesBy the time we reach middle age, our lives have taken certain paths. Sometimes these paths are close to what we imagined in our youth. But more often, they’re dramatically different. We come to realize that there are larger, invisible forces that tend to have just as much a say, or more, in how our lives go as we do. In her 1871 novel Middlemarch, the English writer George Eliot explored this experience of ‘middleness’—a time halfway between what has already happened, and what has yet to happ...
Tara T. Green, "Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 25, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesBorn in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to her abusive ex-husband, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first book-length look at this major figure in Black women's history, covering her life from the ...
Carolyne Larrington, "All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones" (Bloomsbury, 2021)
November 24, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour“All men must die”: or “Valar Morghulis,” as the traditional Essos greeting is rendered in High Valyrian. And die they do – in prodigious numbers; in imaginatively varied and gruesome ways; and often in terror within the viciously unpredictable world that is HBO's sensational evocation of Game of Thrones. As acclaimed medievalist Professor Carolyne Larrington writes in All Men Must Die: Power and Passion in Game of Thrones (Bloomsbury, 2021), the stories George R.R. Martin brings to life are ...
On "The Mahābhārata"
November 23, 2022 09:10 - 42 minutesWhen it comes to epic poetry, there’s a strong case to be made that the Ancient Indian story the Mahābhārata is the most epic. Clocking in at around 100,000 verses, the Mahābhārata is roughly seven times The Iliad and The Odyssey combined. This foundational Hindu text tells the story of a war between two sets of cousins who are fighting over who gets to rule their kingdom. The text is said to contain the universe, but it is best to leave it unfinished. Bad things are said to befall those who ...
Gary Kates, "The Books that Made the European Enlightenment: A History in 12 Case Studies" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 23, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Books that Made the European Enlightenment: A History in 12 Case Studies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Gary Kates looks at the multifaceted significance of bestsellers from the time. Kates explores a crucial innovation of the age: the rise of the 'erudite blockbuster', which for the first time in European history, helped to popularize political theory among a significant portion of the society. Gary Kates is H. Russell Smith Foundation Chair in the Social Sciences and Professor of Hist...
On Matteo Maria Boiardo's "Orlando Innamorato"
November 21, 2022 09:07 - 27 minutesThe Italian Renaissance was an era of rebirth in the arts, sciences, engineering, anatomy, and architecture. But also for literature. One of the most influential works from this period was Matteo Maria Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando innamorato. While read by the literate upper classes, Boiardo’s incredible story of knights-errant, adventure, justice, chivalry, and true love became popular among the public through puppet theatre in Sicily. Boiardo combined genres to create a beloved work of art t...