New Books In Literary Studies

Benjamin Disraeli was unique among British prime ministers in the 19th century in many ways, but perhaps none more so than for his career as a novelist. Whereas many scholars have treated Disraeli’s literary endeavors as an aberration born of financial necessity, in his book Disraeli: The Romance of Politics (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Robert O’Kell presents the novels as key to understanding his inner life and how he conceptualized his political career. Beginning with his participation in publisher John Murray’s attempt in the 1820s to establish a rival newspaper to The Times, O’Kell uses Disraeli’s novels and other writings to illuminate his self-image, one defined by his Jewish ancestry and his own intellectual and rhetorical gifts. Though convinced of his own genius, Disraeli had to overcome both anti-Semitic slurs and the stigma gained as the author of gossipy “silver-fork” novels to win election to Parliament and to become the leader of the Conservative

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) explores the entanglement of literature, religion, and community in China. Thunder rituals were used to capture unruly and uncanonical spirits that enthrall local communities and to transform them into sacred beings aligned with cultural institutions that transcend any single locality or region. These rituals were part of a Daoist liturgical structure that was supported by early Ming emperors, and they helped shape the story and significance of Canonization of the Gods. Meulenbeld situates this focused case within larger contexts of Ming imperial politics and culture, and explores larger themes that include the hist

In Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York University Press, 2014), Josh Lambert, Academic Director of the Yiddish Book Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UMass Amherst, explores the role of Jews in the history of obscenity in America. Through a series of case studies, he shows how Jews battled censorship as writers, editors, publishers, critics, and lawyers. In their engagements in battles over obscenity, Jews have played a previously underappreciated role in transforming American culture.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aisha Geissinger’s monograph, Gender and the Construction of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’an Commentary (Brill, 2015), contributes to the growing field of intersections between gender studies and Qur’anic studies. Unlike some recent studies that have explored the role of gender in the Qur’an itself or in applications of the Qur’an, Professor Geissinger takes a step back to explore how exegetes (broadly conceived) have historically understood the relevance and importance of gendered sources, in terms their authority to make sense of the Qur’an. What does it mean, for example, when a particular Qur’an commentary mentions a hadith with women in the isnad, while other commentaries do not? Are these rhetorical moves intentional? Were they significant in their time? In order to address these questions and others, Geissinger looks at traditional works of exegesis, sections on exegesis in hadith compilations, and literature on the virtues of

Biography is a genre of largely unexamined power: a literary field that preserves stories of lived lives and, through them, perpetuates notions that there are certain ways lives can be lived. This is particularly true of the lives of women, which are often, in biography, confined to the marriage plot and detailed as events in the lives of men. As Jessa Crispin writes in her new book, The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats & Ex-Countries (University of Chicago Press, 2015), “The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway.” The founder and editor of the recently shuttered lit-blog Bookslut, Crispin spent a year and a half traveling abroad. Her genre-bending book, The Dead Ladies Project, is the legacy of that year and it’s a work that goes a long way in modifying the stories we typically tell, not just about women but about human beings- as thinkers, travelers, artists, and individuals. It’s a contemplative, wandering work, which captures the disori

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America’s natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (University of Washington Press, 2016), Sarah Wald analyzes this legacy and its consequences by examining the paradoxical representations of California farmers and farmworkers from the Dust Bowl migration to present-day movements for food justice and immigrant rights. Analyzing fiction, nonfiction, news coverage, activist literature, memoirs, and more, Wald gives us a new way of thinking through questions of

Dr. Susan Kavaler-Adler a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist in private practice and founder of The Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis where she is a training analyst, is a prolific writer and thinker celebrated for integrationist approach to Object Relations thinking. The Compulsion to Create: Women Writers and their Demon Lovers, originally published by Routledge in 1993 and recently re-published by ORI Academic Press in 2013, is Dr. Kavaler-Adler’s first of five published book a labor of her love for the creative process which earned her an honorary Doctorate of Literature from Ignatius University. Dr. Kavaler-Adler calls into question the myth that one must be crazy to be creative and raises concern about the implication that therapeutic intervention is a deterrent to creative growth. For Dr. Kavaler-Adler, the therapeutic process is an inherently creative process. Like the artists encounter with her work, the subject’s encounter with the couch involves an eng

Starting with Metternich’s declaration that the Balkans begin at Rennweg (a street in the Third District of Vienna), Ana Foteva draws on novels, plays, librettos and travelogues from the 19th through the 21st century to explore the various forms the Balkan region has taken in Europe’s political and cultural imagination. Her analysis of these literary works reveals concepts of belonging, multi-belonging and unbelonging among Serbians, Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenes and even Austrians. Ana Foteva applies postmodern geography, literary, and colonial theories to demonstrate the relationship between the development of national identity, the pull of Habsburg imperial identity, the shaping of Yugoslav identity, and the fracturing of the Balkans in the 1990s. In our podcast conversation, she discusses and challenges stereotypes of the Balkans as a region of perpetual conflict. Do the Balkans Begin in Vienna? The Geopolitical and Imaginary Borders Between the Balkans and Europe (Peter Lang, 20speaks to comp

The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour (Brill, 2015) makes the collection available for English-language readers in a volume that contributes to how we understand both early modern China and the history of humor. In the course of our conversation we talked about the craft and challenges of translation, Feng Menglong’s approach to morality, and the linguistic textures of the collection, among many other things. Pi-Ching was generous enough to read some of her translated jokes for us, so stay tuned until the end!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900-1959 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) investigates the discursive construction of youth’s symbolic meanings and to explore how these meanings underlie the novelistic narrative of modern Chinese youths’ personal development. Song situates the study within a broader narrative of the emergence and development of the Chinese Bildungsroman in careful analyses of works like Wu Jianren’s The New Story of the Stone (with its figure of the old youth), Chen Duxiu’s New Youth journal, Ye Shengtao’s Ni Huanzhi, and the work of Ba Jin, Lu Ling, Lu Qiao, Yang Mo, Wang Meng, and much much more. The book concludes by looking at the contemporary science fiction of Liu Cixin. It’s fascinating work, well worth reading for anyone interes

All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a fight with a friend or an hurtful comment made in passing. On the other end of the spectrum, we have those experiences that induce so much anger, sadness, fear, or disgust that we readily acknowledge our difficulty moving forward. These are everything from the death of loved one to the diagnosis of a disease to an instance of sexual abuse. How might creative expression help with the healing process? What can we learn and teach others from the writing and artwork that emerge from these traumas? How might we come to value personal writing as worthy of increased scholarship? In Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image (Parlor, 2015), Roy Fox, shares his reflections based on years spent developing a graduate course that asks students to come to terms with the most difficult moments in their lives. Fox

In her stunning new book The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant (Stanford University Press, 2012), Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History at Boston College, presents a riveting narrative of the intersection of literature, religion, and history in early modern Muslim societies. She does so by focusing on the chronicle of a common Barber in 18th-century Damascus Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr. Through a close reading of the intellectual and political conditions that gave rise to such forms of nouveau literature and by carefully interrogating the themes, tensions, and reception of this text, Sajdis analysis provides a fascinating window into the complexity and diversity of knowledge traditions in the early modern context. Most importantly, this book serves the immensely important task of bringing into central view non-Ulama archives and imaginaries of history and history writing. In our conversation we discussed the key themes of this book such as the concept of nou

The border that divides the island of Hispaniola has been the site of commercial and cultural exchanges, labor migrations, environmental change, and violence. Maria Cristina Fumagalli‘s wonderful, wide-ranging On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Liverpool Press, 2015) offers glimpses of the numerous literary texts, art works and films that try, in some way or another, to come to terms with what the border is and how it shapes the lives of both Haitians and Dominicans, creating a space of dynamic and creative exchanges for some and proving tragically divisive for others. The book moves from the earliest years of colonization to recent events, arguing for possibilities of co-existence rather than irremediable conflict. It is a necessary read for anyone interested in this region and in borderland literary production. Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests include histories of media, race, and

At what point does the world end? More importantly, how did this idea of a whole, unified world emerge to begin with? In Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Ayesha Ramachandran illustrates the anticipated enormity and surprising subtlety of these questions. Prose, vivid imagery and poetry form the text’s arc as Ramachandran distills an interdisciplinary evolution of Eurocentric debates about the relationship between self and god, self and nation, world and empire, and world and universe. Worldmakers combines a set of “founding” works, from maps to medical literature, to portray a period where allegory, the Cosmos, and classical myth interacted directly with physics and biology. Dr. Ramachandran creatively captures “two modes of world-making: imperial and cosmic” through the constructed notion of the “Other”, which frames not only the logic of imperial conquest, but earlier attempts to separate and organize the scien

In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work after all this time? It’s a good question. Even today, Kafka’s fiction retains a felt strangeness, the “Kafkaesque,” a quality Dr. Troscianko calls “both compelling and unsettling.” His stories have had an enduring readership, sustaining critical attention for over a century. This was what Troscianko wanted a better explanation for. In the book, Troscianko finds that explanation from theories current in the cognitive sciences. She approaches Kafkas fiction (and what is Kafkaesque about it) as a realistic depiction of visually perceived space. In other words, for Troscianko, Kafka’s fiction works by simulating fictional places, people and phenomena as real, as happening in real visual space, according to how vision actually works. This seems, in part at least, to ex

Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part, by the work of Friedrich Kittler, Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015) traces the story of shorthand in Japan. First introduced for recording political speeches and the conduct of the state, by the mid-1880s shorthand was used to transcribe popular theatrical storytelling and enabled a kind of unvarnished vernacular writing that was the forerunner of genbun itchi, the unification of speech and writing, or the unified style. Its history interweaves in important ways with the histories of standardization movements, script reform, the rise of communications systems like telegraphy and the postal system, and the development of new literary styles of realism. (Also, in case you missed it above: th

The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee (Penn State UP, 2015) is unique. The book, edited by David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit Shalev-Eyni, combines a gorgeous facsimile of a late 15th-century illuminated haggadah with a Latin prologue written by a Dominican Friar! Mystery abounds as a Jewish Passover text, written in Hebrew by a Jewish scribe, is found to include illustrations of Christian significance. Thanks to a special collaboration of multi-disciplinary experts from three continents and an element of serendipity, the manuscript of a haggadah from the 15th century, now at home in a state library in Munich, was discovered, translated, and its importance as a primary source for Christian Jewish relations during the late medieval and early modern period recognized.The prologue by fifteen-century Dominican Hebraist Erhard von Pappenheim includes the testimony of Jews tortured to testify to blood libel in 1475 in Trent. Recorded by von Pappen

“There still exists little organized sense of what a woman’s biography or autobiography should look like,” Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote in her 1988 classic, Writing A Woman’s Life, noting, “Even less has been told of the life of the unmarried woman.” One can only hope that Kate Bolick‘s Spinster is a sign that, nearly thirty years later, the circumstances Heilbrun described are, at long last, about to change. Bolick burst onto the national scene when her article in The Atlantic, entitled “All the Single Ladies,” went viral in November 2011. But Spinster is a departure from her reportage rather than a continuation or a sequel– a biographical/autobiographical/sociological mash-up that is engaging, observant, and fiercely critical. Examining the socio-historical phenomenon of the feme sole, Bolick mines her own experiences and the lives she’s read about to examine how, as Heilbrun suggested, we use the stories of other lives to navigate our own. R

Marlene Daut tackles the complicated intersection of history and literary legacy in her book Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She not only describes the immediate political reaction to the Haitian Revolution, but traces how writers, novelists, playwrights, and scholars imposed particular racial assumptions onto that event for decades afterward. Specifically, she identifies a number of recurring tropes that sought to assign intense racial divisions to the Haitian people. Individuals of joint African and European heritage, she contends, received the blunt of these attacks, as they were portrayed as monstrous, vengeful, mendacious, and yet also destined for tragedy. Moreover, observers and chroniclers of the Revolution maintained that these supposed characteristics produced ever-lasting discord with black Haitians. Daut analyzes hundreds of fictional and non-fictional accounts to argue that portrayals of

In Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), Sarah Phillips Casteel, associate professor of English at Carleton University, explores the representation of Jewishness in Caribbean literature. She investigates the meaning of two episodes of trauma in Jewish history, the 1492 expulsion and the Holocaust, for Caribbean and diaspora writers. Her focus on this under-explored Caribbean story serves as an alternative to the traditional U.S.-based critical narratives of Black-Jewish relations.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices