New Books in Literary Studies

Fans of Sherlock Holmes will delight to investigate Victorian England, a world where crimes large and small abound and where dark corners and well-lit drawing rooms alike hide villainy. In The Game Is Afoot: The Enduring World of Sherlock Holmes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), Jeremy Black traces how Holmes and his milieu evolved in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books and how Holmes continues to resonate today. Black explores the context of Doyle's ideas and stories and why they struck such a chord with readers in London, and ultimately the world. He portrays a complex man with eclectic interests, from soccer to spiritualism, from cricket to divorce law reform. Standing twice for Parliament, Doyle was a committed meritocrat whose political experiences and values were expressed through his writings. Reading the Holmes stories through the lens of Doyle's multifaceted career, Black throws fresh light on the values expressed in them and how Holmes would have been perceived at the time. He traces the imperial strand in the Holmes stories and Doyle's treatment of America and Europe. Drawing on a masterful knowledge both of Doyle's era and his writings, this entertaining and wide-ranging book uses the Holmes stories to bring Victorian England to vibrant life, a world where crimes large and small abound and where dark corners and well-lit drawing rooms alike hide villainy. Holmes was a hero and an inspiration for many a character who redefined the idea of detection and the detective, a private man of great public importance. Here is his story.Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The original production of Fiddler on the Roof won nine Tony awards, held the record for the longest-running Broadway musical, and was adapted into a hit movie. But the musical itself was an adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye Stories. Aleichem aimed to create a high literature for Yiddish-speaking readers, but his influence spread much further, to a new country, a new language, and a new medium. Harvard Professor Saul Noam Zaritt discusses the stories behind the musical. Saul Noam Zaritt is an Assistant Professor of Yiddish Studies at Harvard University. He is a founding editor of In geveb, an open-access digital journal of Yiddish studies. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In or, on being the other woman (Duke UP, 2022), Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression.Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Julia May Jonas is a writer, director, and the founder of theater company Nellie Tinder. She has taught at Skidmore College and NYU and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir (Simon & Schuster, 2022) is her first novel.Books Recommended in this Episode: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In the Dark Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall Elisa Albert, Human Blues Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Zora Neale Hurston was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, but her novels didn’t conform to the style of her contemporaries. As a result, her work was almost lost—until the writer Alice Walker found her unmarked grave in 1974. Now, Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is on high school reading lists across the US. Dartmouth professor and poet Joshua Bennett discusses the novel’s longstanding impact and what it can teach us about cancel culture. Joshua Bennett is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Sobbing School. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. You can hear the full interview with Professor Bennett on the Lyceum app. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

With the pressing work of decolonising our reading lists gaining traction in UK higher educational contexts, Decolonising the Conrad Canon (Liverpool UP, 2022) shows how those author-Gods most associated with the colonial literary canon can also be retooled through decolonial, queer, feminist readings. This book finds pockets of powerful anti-colonial resistance and queer dissonance in Joseph Conrad's lesser-known works - breathing spaces from the colonial rhetoric that dominates his novels - and traces the female characters who voice them off the page and into their transmedia (digital/illustrative/cinematic) afterlives. From Immada and Edith's queer gaze in The Rescue and the periodical illustrations that accompanied its initial serialization, to Aïssa's sustained critique of imperialism in An Outcast of the Islands and her portrayal on mass-market paperback book covers, to the structural female bonds of Almayer's Folly and Nina's embodiment in Chantal Akerman's adaptation La Folie Almayer, this book centres Conrad's female characters as viable, meaning-making citizens of the canon. Through this intervention, Decolonising the Conrad Canon proposes an innovative model for teaching, reading and studying not just Joseph Conrad's work but the colonial literary canon more broadly.Dr. Alice Kelly is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels -- The Last White Man, Exit West, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Moth Smoke -- and a book of essays, Discontent and Its Civilizations. His writing has been translated into forty languages, featured on bestseller lists, and adapted for the cinema. Born in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.Mohsin Recommends: Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A literary and cultural milestone, Spoon River Anthology captured an idea of the rural Midwest that became a bedrock myth of life in small-town America. Jason Stacy places the book within the atmosphere of its time and follows its progress as the poetry took root and thrived. Published by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town (U Illinois Press, 2021) won praise from modernists while becoming an ongoing touchstone for American popular culture. Stacy charts the ways readers embraced, debated, and reshaped Masters’s work in literary controversies and culture war skirmishes; in films and other media that over time saw the small town as idyllic then conflicted then surreal; and as the source of three archetypes—populist, elite, and exile—that endure across the landscape of American culture in the twenty-first century.A wide-ranging reconsideration of a literary landmark, Spoon River America tells the story of how a Midwesterner's poetry helped change a nation's conception of itself.Jason Stacy is a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. He is the author of Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman’s Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840–1855 and editor of Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition.Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podbean.com/ and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this engaging discussion, Harvard professor Elisa New, an expert on Walt Whitman and the creator of Poetry in America, delves into the rich tapestry of Whitman's life and work. She explores his Brooklyn roots, the bold ambitions behind Leaves of Grass, and the critical reception of his provocative poetry. New highlights Whitman's unique style that celebrates urban diversity, his vision of a porous self, and the embodiment of democratic ideals. She also connects Whitman’s legacy to contemporary artists and his influence on movements like hip hop.

How can a library change the world? How can an art library change the art school or the gallery? Or even an art practice? In Shelf Documents: Art Library as Practice (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, 2021), artists, writers, curators, teachers, and librarians reflect on how they can use the beloved library as a source of inspiration or a field of action.In thinking about diversity in collections, the publication proposes art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion. shelf documents is rooted in a collaborative book acquisition project, initiated by the artist Heide Hinrichs at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, in which her group integrated over 200 new titles in art libraries as a way to fill gaps, to amplify voices, and seek out the self-initiated or the overlooked.Heide Hinrichs, Elizabeth Haines, and Jo-ey Tang speak to Pierre d’Alancaisez about working with institutions, working slowly, and working together to interfere with the permanence of libraries.Heide Hinrichs is an artist who works with found and existing materials. For the first Kathmandu Triennale, she developed the project On Some of the Birds of Nepal. In 2018, she published Silent Sisters/Stille Schwestern, an unauthorised German translation of Theresa Hak Kyng Cha’s novel Dictee.Elizabeth Haines is a historian and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her interdisciplinary interest in the materiality of knowledge productions draws on her education in fine arts.Jo-ey Tang is an artist, curator, and writer. He was previously the director of exhibitions at the Beeler Galery at Columbus College of Art & Design and is currently the director of Kadist, San Francisco.The list of books involved in the project is available at second-shelf.org.Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies