New Books in Literary Studies

The discipline of folkloristics in the People’s Republic of China is robust and well-funded. With thousands of scholars across the country, it is surprising then that there is relatively little understanding of the research and contributions of Chinese folklorists to the discipline. This despite the fact that Chinese folklorists are well-acquainted with many of the latest advances in folkloristics research globally. As the first English language attempt to discuss the historical development, current situation, and theoretical contributions of Chinese Folklore studies to the discipline of folklore more broadly, Chinese Folklore Studies Today: Discourse and Practice (Indiana University Press, 2020), edited by Lijun Zhang and Ziying You, attempts to rectify this situation. The volume’s five essays point out different issues relevant to folklore studies, including urban folklore studies, studies of women’s folklore, folksong, myth and belief, and intangible cultural heritage. This unique contribution not only introduces folklore of China, but also will certainly prove vital in encouraging and framing future international collaborations.Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

"It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.” This line from Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, captures what is at the heart of all great literature: the irrepressible urge to speak, to be heard and understood. I spoke with Professor Deborah Plant, a scholar of African-American literature and culture, an expert on Hurston, and the editor of Hurston’s posthumously published Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo". When I asked Deborah about this sentence, how Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God could fear misunderstanding more than death, she gently corrected me. Janie no longer feared death even before this pivotal scene, Deborah explained. Deborah also corrected me, again gently but firmly, when I misspoke and suggested that Hurston had been largely forgotten between 1937, when Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published and she was still a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and the book’s renewed popularity starting in the mid-1970s. "Their Eyes Were Watching God was never really forgotten in my community," Deborah explained. Hurston's work re-shuffles the tradition of American literature so productively that public success may be the wrong measure.Professor Plant also explained how Hurston’s training as an anthropologist with Franz Boas at Barnard College shaped her writing. She helped us see African-American language and culture as the greatest cultural treasure of our nation. Professor Plant explained how best to understand this magisterial book in light of Hurston’s other work. “I had things clawing inside of me that must be said,” Hurston added in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, to explain her decision to leave a man she truly loved. But it’s not specific facts and experiences that need to be heard; it is the human voice. This, of course, is what great literature is: the need for one's voice and vision to be accepted on their terms.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Nella Larsen's gripping 1929 novel Passing recounts the fateful encounter, first on a fancy Chicago hotel rooftop restaurant on a sweltering August afternoon and later in New York City, of two women who grew up together and then lost touch, and who can pass from being black to white, and back again -- with devastating moral and social consequences. The book examines the American mythology of race, and its real-world effects, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance and during a time when racial segregation regulated the lives of all Americans and severely disadvantaged African-Americans in nearly all aspects of existence. Many people chose to escape this injustice by 'passing' for white, which gave Larsen the idea to examine race and racism in a powerful work of fiction. I spoke with Professor Emily Bernard, Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and the author of many award-winning books, including: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten; Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship; Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs; Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White, and the 2019 Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Why did early modern people change their religious affiliation? And how did they represent that change in writing? In this outstanding new book, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (Palgrave, 2018), Abigail Shinn, who teaches in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, opens up a broader range of conversion narratives than literary or historical scholars have previously discussed. By expanding the chronological and geographical range of her sources, and so expanding their religious affiliation of her authors and drawing into discussion larger numbers of women, she shows how the representation of conversion changed from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and how disparate narratives relating experiences of Protestant, Catholic and Islamic conversion nevertheless continued to show similar rhetorical characteristics.Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Wollstonecraftian Mind (Routledge, 2019) is an extensive compendium of Mary Wollstonecraft as a writer, as an interlocutor, as a philosopher and political theorist, and as a feminist thinker. The text, which is impressive in its reach, breath, and considerations, will be of use to any reader or scholar who may want to learn more about Mary Wollstonecraft, her thought, and her influence. But it is much more extensive than that, since it provides deep scholarly examination of all of Wollstonecraft’s works, as well as considering the context for Wollstonecraft’s work, and those with whom she was in intellectual encounters, and those with whom she had contemporary engagement as well.In this wide-ranging survey of Mary Wollstonecraft, Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, Alan Coffee have done an exceptional job of bringing together experts from a diversity of disciplines and perspectives. The Wollstonecraftian Mind projects both backwards and forwards, positioning Wollstonecraft’s thinking within the philosophical tradition in the first section of the text, and then, in the final section, projecting it forward, through a collection of chapters that explore her legacy. The text is part of The Philosophical Mind series at Routledge that examines, in substantial depth, the work of an individual thinker, and The Wollstonecraftian Mind follows the contours of many of the other volumes in this series. The central sections of the book examine the works themselves, the ideas with which Wollstonecraft was in dialogue, and explorations of her philosophy. This is an incredibly useful text and resource for scholars and students, with accessible analyses and an array of considerations and perspectives.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Starting in the early 1930s, a small group of academics and writers met weekly in a pub in Oxford, England to discuss literature, religion, and ideas. Known as the Inklings, it was in part from their companionship that some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature were produced. In their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski focus on four key members of the group to show how their interactions shaped the development of their thinking and of the writings they produced.As Carol Zaleski explains, the four men came to Oxford from different backgrounds and professing different ideas, all of which were at play in their wide-ranging conversations. In gatherings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College they read aloud drafts of their works, with their subsequent suggestions helping such works as Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet taking the forms by which readers know them today. Through their writings and their growing public celebrity, Zaleski demonstrates, their relationships helped to transform Christian faith and Western culture in ways still being felt today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

America’s “environmental prophet,” Henry David Thoreau, set out for a simpler, more mindful, and more deeply lived life on Walden Pond on July 4th, 1845. How to live deliberately, being mindful of the things that truly matter and not let ourselves be distracted by what everyone else seems to expect and want from us. The date of July 4th is important, for the book is another Declaration of Independence: an effort to unshackle America from the consumerism, competitiveness, and the profound and shameful dishonesty that created a new nation without reaching true freedom and equality.Thoreau’s Walden is as much about how to live a better, simpler life, as it is about the right way of settling a continent stolen from Native peoples and aided by the moral sin of slavery. Thoreau, after all, gave a word to the idea of “civil disobedience,” refused to pay his taxes to a state that supported slavery (he was jailed for it), and railed against the dishonesty that propped up what today we call white supremacy. Walden is a deeply philosophical book about making sense of one’s circumstances, taking control of one’s life and reckoning with the temptation of living up to the expectations of others. The late Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who did much to insist that the United States have a unique tradition of thinking and writing (and with whom I was able to study in college), said that Thoreau’s Walden “means every word it says.” Cavell taught me how to read this book and take its claims seriously: that so much of what we think are circumstances given to us are structures we buy into — and that so many of the structures we cannot change by ourselves are deeply corrupt. “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” What’s amazing about Walden is how Thoreau switches seamlessly from literal description (how many nails to build a cabin; how many rows of peas to make a harvest; how many hours to make a day) to metaphorical (or metaphysical) observations.“To be awake is to be alive, yet I never met a man who is quite awake.” Are we perhaps walking among a nation of sleepwalkers? How do we rouse ourselves from the slumber: how do we find not our true selves but our “next selves”? Walden breaks off (Thoreau did not chronicle his second year on Walden Pond) because Thoreau says that he “had other lives to live.” This should tell us that we ought not to follow in Thoreau’s path but choose our own path. We should realize we have other lives to live, and that to change our lives we must first genuinely live our life.I spoke with Benjamin Reiss, Samuel Candler Professor of English at Emory University and author of Wild Nights: How Taming Sheep Created Our Restless World and The Showman and the Slave, about Walden’s continued significance, how to read philosophically, and — yes, I did ask — how to get a good night’s sleep.Uli Baer is a professor at New York University. He is also the host of the excellent podcast "Think About It" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which simultaneously follows the personal story of a Muslim reformer and trader and the court struggles between the rulers of Central Asia, gives us a glimpse into early Soviet Central Asia, as well as the world of Central Asia on the eve of 19th-century Russian Imperial conquest. Yet, Qodiriy’s Bygone Days is much more than that; it addresses universal themes of cultural and political change, the place of tradition in societies, questions of reform and revolution, to name a few. Reese’s wonderful translation offers an opportunity to learn more about Uzbekistan past and present and offers something for anyone interested in Central Asia, literature, or the triumphs and tragedies of modernizing societies.Nicholas Seay is 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

Revisionism, a form of literary criticism, is an integral part of scholarly research, and revisionists often find themselves challenging the orthodox views held by scholars before their time. In Arabo-Islamic writing, modern scholars often tend to neglect traditional scholarly commentary, such as from the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods—two critical periods in the history of Arabic literature.Dr Adam Talib, from Durham University, UK, explores these issues in his study titled “Al-Ṣafadī, His Critics, and the Drag of Philological Time”, published in Brill’s Phenomenogical Encounters. He focuses on the work and commentary of Al-Ṣafadī, a Turkic author, to show how modern scholarly agendas may have influenced the chronological plane of Arabic literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies