New Books in Literary Studies

What can Shakespeare tell us about territory, and what can territory tell us about Shakespeare? In Shakespearean Territories (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and author of the Progressive Geographies blog, explores both of these questions, drawing on his earlier work theorising territory, as well as an extensive discussion of numerous works of Shakespeare. The book considers a range of subjects associated with the concept of territory, from the geo-politics of King Lear, the idea of sovereignty in King John, and power in Richard II, to questions of the body in Coriolanus, and ideas of calculation and measurement in The Merchant of Venice. Alongside Shakespeare’s relevance for understanding territory, territory offers a framework for alternative readings of Macbeth and Hamlet, and draws attention to often neglected or even completely ignored parts of Henry V. Fascinating and wide ranging, at the intersection of geography and English literature, the book is essential reading across the humanities and social sciences.Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Living in an age awash with information can sometimes obscure its extraordinary fragility. Indeed, as Richard Ovenden demonstrates in Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2020), the burning of books and the looting of archives has long been a tool for controlling access to information and the power that it offers. Many rulers throughout history have deliberately targeted libraries and archives for plundering and destruction, knowing that doing so limits the ability of their victims to benefit from the knowledge therein. Ordinary individuals have often engaged in similar actions on a smaller scale in an attempt to control public perceptions of themselves and how they will be remembered. Ovenden shows how these efforts highlight the role that libraries and archives have long served in society, both as repositories of information and as institutions that work to ensure that knowledge and the power that comes from it is available to everyone and not just the few who seek to limit it for their own benefit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) contributes new methods for the study and interpretation of material religion found within literary landscapes. The poets of Hindu devotion are known for their intimate celebration of deities, and while verses over a thousand years old are still treasured, translated, and performed, little attention has been paid to the evocative sensorial worlds referenced by these literary compositions. This book offers a material interpretation of an understudied poem that defined an entire genre of South Asian literature -Tirukkovaiyar-the 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. The poetry of Tamil South India invites travel across real and imagined geography, naming royal patrons, ancient temple towns, and natural landscapes. Leah Elizabeth Comeau locates the materiality of devotion to Shiva in a world unique to the South Indian vernacular and yet captivating to audiences across time, place, and tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz once again immerses us into the world of ballet and Akim Volynsky with his book And Then Came Dance: The Women Who Led Volynsky to Ballet's Magic Kingdom (Oxford UP, 2019). In this interview, Rabinowitz discusses his path to this book which is a lovely addition to his first book on Volynsky  as well as some sage advice in publishing manuscripts.  Presenting for the first time Akim Volynsky's (1861-1926) pre-balletic writings on Leonardo da Vinci, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome, And Then Came Dance provides new insight into the origins of Volynsky's life-altering journey to become Russia's foremost ballet critic. A man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation that crossed over into the personal and libidinal, Volynsky looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred high priest of classical dance, George Balanchine. With an undeniable proclivity toward ballet's female component, Volynsky's dance writings, illuminated by examples of his earlier gendered criticism, invite speculation on how truly ground-breaking and forward-looking this critic is. 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 with Jack Zipes about a life in Folklore Studies, about some of his many publications, and about publishing fairy tales. Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Minnesota and has previously held professorships at New York University, the University of Munich, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. In 1997 he founded a storytelling and creative drama program, Neighborhood Bridges, in collaboration with the Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis that is still thriving in the elementary schools of the Twin Cities and in other cities of the United States. Most recently, in 2018, he founded a small publishing house called Little Mole and Honey Bear with the motto to unbury talented and neglected writers and illustrators of fairy-tale books from the interwar years 1919-1940 before he himself is buried.Rachel Hopkin PhD is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Edward Wilson-Lee's book A Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library (Scribner, 2018) details the life of Hernando Colón as he sailed with his father, Christopher Columbus, on Columbus’s final voyage to the New World, which was a journey of disaster, bloody mutiny, and shipwreck. After Columbus’s death in 1506, eighteen-year-old Hernando sought to continue—and surpass—his father’s campaign to explore the boundaries of the known world by building a library to collect everything ever printed. Colon’s library was a vast holding organized by summaries and catalogues—which was really the very first database for exploring a diversity of written matter. Hernando traveled extensively and obsessively amassed his collection based on the groundbreaking conviction that a library of universal knowledge should include “all books, in all languages and on all subjects,” even material often dismissed. The loss of part of his collection to another maritime disaster in 1522 set off the final scramble to complete this sublime project, and such was a race against time in realizing a vision of near-impossible perfection.Dr. Edward Wilson-Lee teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, and medieval literature for University of Cambridge’s Sidney Sussex College.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Can a subject be sovereign in a hegemony? Can creativity be reined in by forces of empire?The Audacious Raconteur: Sovereignty and Storytelling in Colonial India (Cornell UP, 2020) argues that even the most hegemonic circumstances cannot suppress "audacious raconteurs": skilled storytellers who fashion narrative spaces that allow themselves to remain sovereign and beyond subjugation. The book tells the stories of four Indian narrators who lived in colonial India: a Goan Catholic ayah, a Telugu lawyer from the Raju community, a Tamil brahmin archaeologist, and a librarian from the medara (basket-weavers) caste. These four Indian narrators, through their vigorous orality, maverick use of photography, literary ventriloquism, and bilingualism, dismantle the ideological bulwark of colonialism—colonial modernity, history, science, and native knowledge.This book is open access.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas (SUNY Press, 2020), Krista Brune brings together Brazilian fiction, film, journalism, essays, and correspondence from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Drawing attention to the travels of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to the United States and other parts of the Americas, Brune argues that experiences of displacement have had a significant influence on their work. Across Brazilian literary and cultural history, translation becomes a way of navigating and representing the resulting encounters between languages, interactions with Spanish Americans, and negotiations of complex identities. While Creative Transformations engages extensively with theories of translation from different national and disciplinary contexts, it also constructs a vision of translation uniquely attuned to the place of Brazil in the Americas. Brune reveals the hemispheric underpinnings of works by renowned Brazilian writers such as Machado de Assis, Sousândrade, Mário de Andrade, Silviano Santiago, and Adriana Lisboa. In the process, she rethinks the dynamics between cosmopolitan and national desires and between center and periphery in global literary markets.“This book presents the reader with an original hypothesis and a very thorough recapitulation of theories of translation. These theories inform Brune’s analysis, but the analysis also adds its own voice to the chorus of studies dealing with translation. In this way, Creative Transformations provides a new way to understand translation and the position of Brazilian literature and culture in a global context.” — Leila Lehnen, author of Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian LiteratureKrista Brune is Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Pennsylvania State University.Victoria Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This book offers the first extensive study of the dialogue form in the Mahābhārata. Despite its importance, the variety of uses and implications of dialogue in the Mahābhārata remain relatively unexplored, which leaves a significant gap in the understanding of this key work of Indian literature. Dialogue is a recurring and significant feature of Indian religious and philosophical literature generally, but nowhere is it explored more elaborately and more profoundly than in the Mahābhārata. Brian Black's In Dialogue with the Mahābhārata (Routledge, 2020), therefore, examines the details of some of the central dialogical encounters in the text, including, structural features; intra-textual relationships with other dialogues; implicit methods of reasoning; and potential avenues for a meaningful engagement with interlocutors beyond the text. This attention to the dialogue form not only brings out otherwise unexplored aspects of the text's teachings, but also highlights aspects of the Mahābhārata that will have particular relevance to modern readers. This is a fresh perspective on the Mahābhārata that will be of great interest to any scholar working in Religious Studies, Indian/South Asian religions, Comparative Philosophy, and World Literature. 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 Empty House, Sherlock Holmes makes a dramatic reappearance in the surgery of his friend Dr Watson. Presumed dead at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes recounts his travels in the East, including the palace at Khartoum where General Charles Gordon was killed. ‘It was a sorry sight, a ruin. His blood still upon the staircase’. The Sudan, or more properly, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium of the Sudan lasted from 1898 to 1956, and was one of many glimpses of the exotic that appeared in the Holmes stories. That Conan Doyle included the little vignette about Gordon reveals the place of the Sudan in the public consciousness of empire.In Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (I. B. Tauris, 2020), Lia Paradis explores the myriad ways in which the Sudan, whose internal politics were influenced and shaped by Britain, figured in metropolitan culture. Like many locales of empire, the Sudan influenced literature, perceptions of self, framed ideals of manhood, of nation, and of Britain’s place in the world. This book is a ‘biography of an administrative cohort’, a meticulous and fascinating recovery of a network of officials and civil servants whose immersion in Sudanese culture shaped how this remote and foreboding corner of Africa found its way into letters, newspapers, magazines, images and volumes that were eagerly consumed in London.Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Cluster. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies