New Books in Literary Studies

Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (Syracuse UP, 2019) vividly captures the experiences of prominent Indian intellectual and scholar Shibli Nu'mani (1857-1914) as he journeyed across the Ottoman Empire and Egypt in 1892. A professor of Arabic and Persian at the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College at Aligarh, Nu'mani took a six-month leave from teaching to travel to the Ottoman Empire in search of rare printed works and manuscripts to use as sources for a series of biographies on major figures in Islamic history. Along the way, he collected information on schools, curricula, publishers, and newspapers, presenting a unique portrait of imperial culture at a transformative moment in the history of the Middle East. Nu'mani records sketches and anecdotes that offer rare glimpses of intellectual networks, religious festivals, visual and literary culture, and everyday life in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. First published in 1894, the travelogue has since become a classic of Urdu travel writing and has been immensely influential in the intellectual and political history of South Asia. This translation by Gregory Maxwell Bruce, the first into English, includes contemporary reviews of the travelogue, letters written by the author during his travels, and serialized newspaper reports about the journey, and is deeply enriched for readers and students by the translator's copious multilingual glosses and annotations. Nu'mani's chronicle offers unique insight into broader processes of historical change in this part of the world while also providing a rare glimpse of intellectual engagement and exchange across the porous borders of empire.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I talked to John Thompson, Emeritus Professor, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, about his new book Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Polity, 2021). We discuss crowdfunding, audio books, distribution chains, social media, self-publishing, ebooks, Amazon, retail, and oh, also those things that are made of paper and glued together and have words printed in them.Interviewer: "One of the real eye-openers for me in the book was the distance, historically speaking, between readers and publishers. Now, as I think about it, and as I compare what a company like Amazon does to what traditional publishers do, well, I begin to notice that publishers are on the side of authors and content and that publishers have an obligation, even, on that side."John Thompson: "Yes, they have an obligation to authors. Publishers are good and professional at developing content. And if they're good publishers, they have a well thought-through and sophisticated marketing and publicity operation that helps to create visibility for books. But on this last point alone–––making books known to others–––the opportunity created by the digital revolution is not just that you make books visible by using traditional media like advertising in the newspaper, but that you are able to reach out directly to readers and consumers and make your books visible to them directly, in much the way that Amazon does when they send an email blast to an Amazon user that says, 'You might be interested in this book.' But why can't publishers do that themselves? Now, thanks to the digital revolution, the opportunity is created for publishers to develop relationships with readers, and to do so at scale. It simply wasn't possible, prior to the digital revolution and prior to the Internet. But now it is. And so that is a huge transformation that publishers are beginning to avail themselves of and which will, I think, continue to change the industry."Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations associated with this area of economy and society. It represents a crucial intervention to the literature on cultural production, as well as offering an important understanding of the impact of digital modes of distribution and production on creative industries. A rich and fascinating comparative ethnography, the book is essential reading across humanities and social sciences, as well as for anyone interested in understanding contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Between the world wars, a generation of Jewish leftist poets reached out to other embattled peoples of the earth--Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Spanish Republicans--in Yiddish verse. Songs in Dark Times examines the richly layered meanings of this project, grounded in Jewish collective trauma but embracing a global community of the oppressed.The long 1930s, Amelia M. Glaser proposes, gave rise to a genre of internationalist modernism in which tropes of national collective memory were rewritten as the shared experiences of many national groups. The utopian Jews of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (Harvard UP, 2020) effectively globalized the pogroms in a bold and sometimes fraught literary move that asserted continuity with anti-Arab violence and black lynching. As communists and fellow travelers, the writers also sought to integrate particular experiences of suffering into a borderless narrative of class struggle. Glaser resurrects their poems from the pages of forgotten Yiddish communist periodicals, particularly the New York-based Morgn Frayhayt (Morning Freedom) and the Soviet literary journal Royte Velt (Red World). Alongside compelling analysis, Glaser includes her own translations of ten poems previously unavailable in English, including Malka Lee's "God's Black Lamb," Moyshe Nadir's "Closer," and Esther Shumiatsher's "At the Border of China."These poets dreamed of a moment when "we" could mean "we workers" rather than "we Jews." Songs in Dark Times takes on the beauty and difficulty of that dream, in the minds of Yiddish writers who sought to heal the world by translating pain.Amelia Glaser is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she also directs the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and Jewish Studies, programs.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul: Mykola (Nik) Bazhan’s Early Experimental Poetry (Academic Studies Press, 2020) presents a collection of early works by Mykola Bazhan, one of the most enigmatic figures in Ukrainian literature of the twentieth century. The volume was prepared and edited by Oksana Rosenblum, Lev Fridman, and Anzhelika Khyzhnia. The name of Mykola Bazhan is probably quite new to English-language readers. Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul is an excellent introduction into both life and writing of the Ukrainian poet who participated in one of the most vibrant creative periods of Ukrainian literature—the 1920s—who survived the Stalinist regime, and who somehow managed to preserve the magic of his style and language while being a Soviet functionary. In this regard, the title is rather eloquent: Bazhan’s writing arises at the intersections of multiple inner struggles, compromises, and uncertainties. His language, which may appear cryptic, is some sort of manifestations of a soul that is tortured by doubts and that tries to win the war with itself. Bazhan’s language is hard to render: it gives freedom and, at the same time, it entraps readers and translators as it asks for minute dissections on the micro levels. From this perspective, the language is a tool of both survival and creativity. The poetry and prose pieces, which are included in this volume, are supplemented with critical essays and commentaries, which amplifies the accomplishments of the project. Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul provides further insights into both Ukrainian and Soviet literatures.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World by Jörg Matthias Determann (I.B. Tauris, 2020) argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centerd on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.Asad Dandia is a graduate student of Islamic Studies at Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In American Writers and World War I (Oxford University Press, 2020), David A. Rennie argues that authors' war writing continuously evolved in response to developments in their professional and personal lives. He examines texts by Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden, Thomas Boyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Laurence Stallings, and Ernest Hemingway.Recent research has focused on constituencies of identity--such as gender, race, and politics--registered in American Great War writing. Rather than being dominated by their perceived membership of such socio-political categories, this study argues that writers reacted to and represented the war in complex ways which were frequently linked to the exigencies of maintaining a career as a professional author. War writing was implicated in, and influenced by, wider cultural forces such as governmental censorship, the publishing business, advertising, and the Hollywood film industry.American Writers and World War I argues that even authors' hallmark "anti-war" works are in fact characterized by an awareness of the war's nuanced effects on society and individuals. By tracking authors' war writing throughout their entire careers--in well-known texts, autobiography, correspondence, and neglected works--this study contends that writers' reactions were multifaceted, and subject to change--in response to their developments as writers and individuals. This work also uncovers the hitherto unexplored importance of American cultural and literary precedents which offered writers means of assessing the war. Ultimately, the volume argues, American World War I writing was highly personal, complex, and idiosyncratic. 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, we are talking to writer and editor Chris Lehmann, an editor of The Baffler, a former managing editor of The New Republic and a former editor of In These Times. He was described by the TNR’s owner as someone, who “who was able to restore stability of The New Republic after a decade of incessant turmoil.” Chris is an author of political and cultural thought long-form journalism himself and the author of two books about money – Rich People Things: Real Life Secrets of the Predator Class (Haymarket, 2011) and The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville, 2017) – about the influence of Christianity on American capitalism. He is working on another book proposal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control--and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugly sisters, witches or wicked fairies in the fairy-tale.Carol Dyhouse's new book Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen (Oxford UP, 2021) is about the reshaping of women's lives, loves and dreams since 1950, the year in which Walt Disney's film Cinderella gave expression to popular ideas of romance, and at a time when marriage was a major determinant of female life chances and teenage girls dreamed of Mr Right and happy endings. It ends with the runaway success of Disney's Frozen, in 2013--a film with relevance to very different times. Along the way, it illuminates how women's expectations and emotional landscapes have shifted, asking bold questions about how women's lives have been transformed since 1950. How have women's changing life experiences been mirrored in new expectations about marriage, intimacy, and family life? How have new forms of independence through education and work, and greater control over childbearing, altered women's life ambitions? And were feminists right to believe that sexual equality would improve relationships between men and women?Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

From ships and novels to Mardi Gras, water, and television, how does the legacy of the Middle Passage, the leg of the Atlantic through which African people were trafficked as slaves, reverberate through the creations of writers and authors of the African diaspora? In this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee M. Pierce interviews Dr. Tara G. Green about her latest book on the Middle Passage, rebirth, trauma, water, social death, and resistance.In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song (Ohio State UP, 2018), Tara T. Green turns to twentieth- and recent twenty-first-century representations of the Middle Passage created by African-descended artists and writers. Examining how these writers and performers revised and reimagined the Middle Passage in their work, Green argues that they recognized it as a historical and geographical site of trauma as well as a symbol for a place of understanding and change. Their work represents the legacy African captives left for resisting “social death” (the idea that Black life does not matter), but it also highlights strong resistance to that social death (the idea that it does matter).Dr. Tara T. Green is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UNC Greensboro where she is also the Linda Arnold Carlisle Excellence Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies.Dr. Lee M. Pierce is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo and host of the RhetoricLee Speaking podcast. Connect on Gmail and social media @rhetoriclee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies