New Books in Literary Studies

With Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020), Robert Bartlett provides a stirring argument for the relevance of comic playwright Aristophanes as a serious political and philosophical thinker. In his translations of two lesser-known plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, Bartlett presents an Aristophanes who is equally a thinker of his times and a prescient voice warning about the fragility of democracy. Equally noteworthy are the essays that accompany the translations, which provide necessary political and philosophical context for understanding these plays.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard University Press, 2020), Sianne Ngai continues her theoretical work of demystifying the vernacular aesthetic categories encountered in late capitalist daily life. In this witty and penetrating book-length treatment of the affective experience of the “gimmick,” Ngai draws upon formalist literary criticism, post-Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and Marxist political economy in order to illuminate the historical production of this attractive yet unsettling cultural form. From The Magic Mountain to It Follows, smiley faces to subprime mortgages, Ngai’s image of the surprisingly ubiquitous gimmick emerges from a careful evaluation of the capitalist subject’s fundamental discomfort surrounding the coupling of value to labor-time.Michael Eby is a writer and researcher on contemporary art and digital culture. He lives in New York and tweets @michaeleby2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ye Shitao was a Taiwanese public intellectual who rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. His encyclopedic A History of Taiwan Literature was published in 1987, the same year that the island’s decades-long period of martial law came to an end. The book provides a thorough overview of the major themes and representative works of each stage in the development of Taiwanese literature from the days of the Qing Dynasty through the Japanese colonial period and the postwar era up to the 1980s.Each chapter of the book discusses the historical context necessary to understand the concerns and influences shared by writers in each period, and Ye comments on both major and less prominent writers. Rather than a critical study driven by a particular theoretical approach or a central argument, the book is structured as a comprehensive reference work designed to be inclusive and accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike.Thanks to the skillful translation work of Christopher Lupke (Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, University of Alberta) this valuable resource is now available in English for the first time. In addition to the main text, Lupke also includes voluminous footnotes contributed by two Japanese scholars who specialized in Ye Shitao’s work. Lupke’s introduction adds contextual information about Ye Shitao himself, and the translator’s epilogue traces developments in the literature of Taiwan from the time of the book’s publication in 1987 to the present.A History of Taiwan Literature (Cambria Press, 2020) is an important resource for anyone interested in the intellectual, cultural, and political history of East Asia.Steve Wills is Associate Professor of History at Nebraska Wesleyan University and one of the hosts of the New Books in East Asia series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) explores commemorative practices as they developed in the nineteenth century. The editors of the volume, Katherine Grenier and Amanda Mushal, and its contributors invite the readers to consider memorial practices as insights into the culture of both the public and the private. Through a number of investigations that range from the explorations of music to the study of photographs, the volume emphasizes the interplay of the individual and the society on a larger scale. On the one hand, commemorative practices zero in on the individual: remembering loved ones; honoring friends and acquaintances; celebrating the accomplishments of others, as well as forgetting some events while selecting others to construct family and community stories. On the other hand, however, memorial practices almost always surpass the realm of the private. The volume demonstrates how individual instances of commemorative practices contribute to the formation of the public/national/international paradigms of collective and cultural memory. Moreover, Cultures of Memory in the Nineteenth Century: Consuming Commemoration demonstrates the continuity of commemorative practices which were to some extent incepted and developed in the nineteenth century: in spite of the new technologies which this way or another shape the way we remember and forget, the commemorative consumption of the present day reflects the rudiments of the previous centuries. This memorial continuity is an essential factor in how to manage the inherent discontinuity of remembering and forgetting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Queen of the Gangsters: Stories by Margie Harris (Off-Trail Publications, 2011), is the first anthology of work of crime fiction writer Margie Harris. Edited by John Locke, Queen of the Gangsters bring the work of Harris, the first woman hardboiled crime fiction writer in history, to a larger audience. During the height of the 1930s gangster pulps, Harris wrote some of the roughest, toughest stories to be published in pulps such as Gangland Stories and Mobs. Readers question whether a woman could write stories that were so mired in the underworld. Harris was a mystery. She had spent time in the Chicago underworld, interviewed death-row inmates in San Francisco, and knew the lingo of the crime world that made her fiction come to life. Margie Harris is still a mystery today. Little is known of her life and what became of her after she finished writing for the pulps. In this collection of eight stories, Locke also presents readers with a biography of Harris, covering the limited details known about her life and her writing.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Joshua Kotin’s Utopias of One (Princeton University Press, 2017) analyzes a particular and peculiar sub-genre of utopian literature. Kotin identifies works by Thoreau, Dubois, the Mandel’shtams, and the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J.H. Prynne as “utopias of one.” In these works, the authors at one and the same time publish for an external audience, but sketch out modes of living and being that are in important ways both non-accessible and non-replicable. This is much different way of thinking about “utopia” than the more standard communal experiments of reality and fiction.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. 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 interview, Roberta Rosenberg and Rachel Rubinstein (editors), engage our listeners in a conversation about different approaches to teaching Jewish American Literature, complicating what it means to be “American”. Teaching Jewish American Literature (MLA, 2020) consciously pushes against the boundaries of the canon, and undermine the stereotype of the immigrant Jewish experience. A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States.This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege.Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and “Goodbye, Columbus,” along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.Roberta Rosenberg is professor emerita at Christopher Newport University, and Rachel Rubinstein taught at Hampshire College and serves as vice president of Academic and Student Affairs at Holyoke Community College.Rachel Adelman (the host) is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College in Boston, MA. 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 this interview, Carrie Tippen talks with Jessica Martell about her new book, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, published in 2020 by University of Nevada Press for their Cultural Ecologies of Food series. In Farm to Form, Martell contextualizes some familiar texts of British Literary Modernism, into a history that recognizes the role of food and agriculture not just in the social fabric that these writers were living in and often writing against but also the role that these industries played in determining how writers experimented with literary forms. Food isn’t just in the content of the novels analyzed, but as Martell argues, responses to food systems are reflected in the experiments in form that are a hallmark of literary modernism. If the Modernist era is “a spectacle of lived unevenness,” food (its presence and absence) is particularly good at exposing unevenness and inequity. Martell’s historicizing makes clear that the average British subject was most directly experiencing the projects of imperialism at the table. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the emerging modern food system as reflected in specific texts. The overproduction of rural milk for urban markets is reflected in the overripeness of landscapes in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and the collapsing of time and space brought on by technologies of freezing and canning are reflected in the anachronism of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway bears the marks of wartime rationing and total war on civilians. Joseph Conrad’s images of starving colonial laborers and fat colonizers demonstrates a critique of the “metabolism of empire” that gobbles energy with terrifying efficiency, while James Joyce’s infamous formal and textual excess is a direct response to the Famine and a representation of Ireland as empty and hungry, simultaneously overpopulated and drained by migration. Martell’s central argument is that an understanding of the rapidly changing and visibly uneven experience of modern food industries can offer fresh insights into experiments of literary form.Jessica Martell is assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University. She is the also the co-editor of Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (University Press of Florida, 2019). Martell serves on the executive board of Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, a woman-led non-profit helping to build an equitable and sustainable food system in the North Carolina High Country.Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Most contemporary digital studies are interested in distant-reading paradigms for large-scale literary history. This book asks what happens when such telescopic techniques function as a microscope instead. The first monograph to bring a range of computational methods to bear on a single novel in a sustained fashion, it focuses on the award-winning and genre-bending Cloud Atlas (2004). Published in two very different versions worldwide without anyone taking much notice, David Mitchell's novel is ideal fodder for a textual-genetic publishing history, reflections on micro-tectonic shifts in language by authors who move between genres, and explorations of how we imagine people wrote in bygone eras. Though Close Reading with Computers (Stanford University Press, 2019) focuses on but one novel, it has a crucial exemplary function: author Martin Paul Eve demonstrates a set of methods and provides open-source software tools that others can use in their own literary-critical practices. In this way, the project serves as a bridge between users of digital methods and those engaged in more traditional literary-critical endeavors.Close Reading with Computers was the winner of the 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize, sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust.Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology, and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London.Reading mentioned in the episode:-Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020)-Lauren F. Klein, ‘Distant Reading After Moretti’-Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (University of Chicago Press 2018)-Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (University of Chicago Press, 2019).Joanna Taylor is Presidential Academic Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on literary geographies and environmental histories in nineteenth-century Britain. She is on Twitter at @JoTayl0r0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In his compelling evaluation of Cold War popular culture, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines (Cambridge UP, 2020), Gregory Daddis explores how men's adventure magazines helped shape the attitudes of young, working-class Americans, the same men who fought and served in the long and bitter war in Vietnam. The 'macho pulps' - boasting titles like Man's Conquest, Battle Cry, and Adventure Life - portrayed men courageously defeating their enemies in battle, while women were reduced to sexual objects, either trivialized as erotic trophies or depicted as sexualized villains using their bodies to prey on unsuspecting, innocent men. The result was the crafting and dissemination of a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish GIs' expectations and perceptions of war in Vietnam. By examining the role that popular culture can play in normalizing wartime sexual violence and challenging readers to consider how American society should move beyond pulp conceptions of 'normal' male behavior, Daddis convincingly argues that how we construct popular tales of masculinity matters in both peace and war.Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies