New Books in Literary Studies

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, Furnace Creek (Eyewear Publishing, 2021) teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues--racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle--that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris--all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure Dr. John Gillis explores the conservation, construction, and context of an early medieval psalter discovered by chance in a bog at Faddan More, Co. Tipperary in July 2006. The different facets of this find are discussed in-depth, along with the pre-existing and newly created methods, tools, and ideas from different disciplines used to reveal its secrets. Gillis shines a light on this incredibly significant manuscript – named one of the National Museum of Ireland’s top ten treasures - that represents the first insular manuscript to be discovered in the past 200 years and the first from a wetland environment. The Faddan More Psalter: The Discovery and Conservation of a Medieval Treasure was published by Wordwell and National Museum of Ireland in 2022.John Gillis is Chief Manuscript Conservator in the Library Preservation and Conservation Department in Trinity College Dublin. In 1988 he established and worked as Head of Conservation in the Delmas Conservation Bindery at Archbishop Marsh’s Library, Dublin. John has been teaching book conservation techniques and theory in Italy for over 20 years. His major achievement to date has been the conservation of the Fadden More Psalter at the National Museum of Ireland Conservation Department over a four-and-a-half year period, for which he won the Heritage Council of Ireland Conservation Award in 2010.Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is an editorial assistant for the Church Archaeology journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Climate Lyricism (Duke University Press, 2022), Min Hyoung Song models a climate change-centered reading practice that helps us better understand and respond to climate change by moving from forms of everyday denial to everyday attention and shared agency.Tune in to this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies to hear Min talk about how this project of reading for climate lyricism emerged out of his work as an Asian Americanist; the importance of the humanities in cultivating practices of everyday attention that are critical to understanding and acting on climate change; staying with bad feelings in order to move from practices of everyday denial to everyday attention; how reading with everyday attention to climate can model a way of living with everyday attention to climate, as well; the properties of climate change that make it so difficult to write about using plot or narrative; what writers might do to bring attention to and illuminate ways of living in and through climate crisis; how climate change is connected to other contemporary forms of violent dispossession and social inequities; and, in the midst of all this, how you and I might live during these difficult times.Min Hyoung Song is Professor of English at Boston College.Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Torsa Ghosal talks about Cognitive Cultural Studies, a field that entails methodologies that situate the human mind in historical and cultural contexts, sometimes working against models of the mind proceeding from the Cognitive Sciences. This includes inquiries into how narratives mediate knowledge about cognition, the subject of her new book Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First Century Narrative, from The Ohio State University Press.Torsa Ghosal is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the California State University, Sacramento. Her experimental novella, Open Couplets, was published by Yoda Press, India. Her shorter works of fiction as well as essays on literature and culture appear in magazines like Literary Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, Necessary Fiction, Catapult, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. You can find more details about her work at her website and follow her on Twitter @TorsaG.Image: © 2021 Saronik BosuMusic used in promotional material: ‘Waves’ by Michael Korbin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Conversations with LeAnne Howe (UP of Mississippi, 2022) is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award-winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association's first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013).Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe's poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, "'An American in New York' LeAnne Howe" (2019) and "Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe" (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019's Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe's newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln's hallucination of a "Savage Indian" during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century. 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 episode of New Books in Literary Studies, John Yargo spoke with Mahshid Mayar about how children’s puzzles and schoolbooks at the turn of the 20th century helped shape U.S. political relations with the world. Professor Mayar is an assistant professor of American Studies at Bielefeld University and research associate at the English Department, Amherst College. Mahshid has just published Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, with the University of North Carolina Press. Citizens and Rulers of the World recovers how American children at the turn of the 20th century navigated knowledge about world geography in the shadow of the rapidly expanding American empire.John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guest is Whitney Trettien whose book Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork was published through the University of Minnesota Press in 2022. Trettien is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, and researches the history of the book spanning print and digital technologies. Cut/Copy/Paste explores makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. The book is complemented with a wide array of resources on early modern publishing available on the book’s webpage hosted by the University of Minnesota Press.John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

José Rivera's Lovesong (Imperfect) (Broadway Play Publishing, 2021) follows a passionate love triangle in an unusual situation: the US government has outlawed death, trees grow lights instead of leaves, and lovers sword fight as a form of flirtation. This play is a wildly theatrical, lyrical, surreal, and at times very dark work that will delight fans of Rivera's previous plays like Marisol and References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot, as well as new readers. In this conversation we discuss being inspired by Tennessee Williams, Rivera's research process for his screenplay The Motorcycle Diaries, and why he really wants to write a horror movie.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today’s guests are Meredith Farmer and Jonathan D.S. Schroeder, the co-editors of a bracing new collection of essays about the figure of Ahab in Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Meredith is the Assistant Teaching Professor of Core Literature at Wake Forest University. Her book Melville’s Leaks: Science, Materialism, and the Reconstitution of Persons is under contract at Northwestern University Press. Jonathan is the Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Brandeis University. His articles have been published in American Literature, American Literary History, and the Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies. His book Prisoners of Loss: An Atlantic History of Nostalgia, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Their new collection of essays is titled Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn (U Minnesota Press, 2021), published with the University of Minnesota Press. The collection includes contributions from a range of scholars from Christopher Castiglia, Samuel Otter, Steve Mentz, Jonathan Lamb, and Bonnie Honig, among others.John Yargo recently received his PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Matt Poland talks about the meaning of archives, the nature of their construction, the physical environments that archives engender, and their emancipatory possibilities. Besides his own work on the archives of George Eliot, he talks about The Baltimore Uprising Archive Project, The Teaching Archive by Rachel Buurma and Laura Hefferman, Stirrings in the Archives by Wolfgang Ernst, No Archive Will Restore You by Julietta Singh, and Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain.Matt is finishing his PhD in English at the University of Washington. His dissertation is titled “The Global Remediation of George Eliot and Charles Dickens: Books, Newspapers, Archives.” Matt’s recent publications include “Uncovering the Contingencies of Archives” in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online. His article “Middlemarch in Melbourne” is forthcoming in the Middlemarch 150th anniversaryissue of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.Image: Hilma af Klint, Grupp III, nr 5. De storafigurmålningarna, Nyckeln tillhittillsvarande arbete, 1907Olja på duk150 × 118 cmHAK042© Stiftelsen hilma af Klints VerkMusic used in promotional material: ‘Lighthouse’ by King Capisce Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies