New Books in Literary Studies New Books Network

Polo B. Moji's book Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (Routledge, 2022) approaches the study of AfroEurope through narrative forms produced in contemporary France, a location which richly illustrates race in European spaces.
Moji adopts a transdisciplinary lens that combines critical black and urban geographies, intersectional feminism, and textual analysis to explore the spatial negotiations of black women in France. It assesses literature, film, and music as narrative forms and engages with the sociocultural and political contexts from which they emerge. Through the figure of the black flâneuse and the analytical framework of "walking as method", the book goes beneath spectacular representations of ghettoised banlieues, televised protests, and shipwrecked migrants to analyse the spatiality of blackness in the everyday. It argues that the material-discursive framing of black flânerie, as both relational and embodied movements, renders visible a politics of place embedded in everyday micro-struggles of raced-sexed subjects.
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Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Sohini Pillai's Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford UP, 2024) is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. This book argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or "devotion" focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. 
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The Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers (MHM Limited and Amsterdam University Press, 2022) offers a comprehensive overview of women writers in Japan, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Featuring 24 newly written contributions from scholars in the field—representing expertise from North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia—the Handbook introduces and analyzes works by modern and contemporary women writers that coalesce loosely around common themes, tropes, and genres. Putting writers from different generations in conversation with one another reveals the diverse ways they have responded to similar subjects. Whereas women writers may have shared concerns—the pressure to conform to gendered expectation, the tension between family responsibility and individual interests, the quest for self-affirmation—each writer invents her own approach. As readers will see, we have writers who turn to memoir and autobiography, while others prefer to imagine fabulous fictional worlds. Some engage with the literary classics—whether Japanese, Chinese, or European—and invest their works with rich intertextual allusions. Other writers grapple with colonialism, militarism, nationalism, and industrialization. This Handbook builds a foundation which invites readers to launch their own investigations into women’s writing in Japan.
Professor Rebecca Copeland is a professor of Japanese literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Copeland’s research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary women’s writing in Japan, modern literature and material culture, and translation studies. She is the author of The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo (1992) and Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Meiji Japan (2000), the latter of which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2001. She is the editor of Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women's Writing (2006) and co-editor of The Father-Daughter Plot: Japanese Literary Women and the Law of the Father (2001) and Modern Murasaki: Writing by Women of Meiji Japan (2006), and Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History (2018). Professor Copeland also translates one of the most well-known Japanese woman writer, Kirino Natsuo’s Grotesque (2007) and Joshinki (The Goddess Chronicles, 2012). The Goddess Chronicles won the 2014-15 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Professor Copeland is also a creative writer and her debut novel, The Kimono Tattoo, was published in 2021.
Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Her primary research project focuses on female writers’ war experiences and memories of the Asia-Pacific War, entitled Women Writing War Memories. Her second research project explores how queerness is performed in Sinophone queer cultural productions. She has published articles about gender studies and queer studies in literature and culture as well as translations of scholarly and popular works in Chinese and English. She has been making a podcast named Gleaners with her friends for more than ten years and she is also a host of the East Asian Studies channel for the New Books Network.
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Everyday Reading: Middlebrow Magazines and Book Publishing in Post-Independence India (U Massachusetts Press, 2024) is a timely book on the history of print culture and the creation of publics in postcolonial South Asia. During the two difficult decades immediately following the 1947 Indian Independence, a new, commercially successful print culture emerged that articulated alternatives to dominant national narratives. Through what Aakriti Mandhwani defines as middlebrow magazines--like Delhi Press's Saritā--and the first paperbacks in Hindi--Hind Pocket Books--North Indian middle classes cultivated new reading practices that allowed them to reimagine what it meant to be a citizen. Rather than focusing on individual sacrifices and contributions to national growth, this new print culture promoted personal pleasure and other narratives that enabled readers to carve roles outside of official prescriptions of nationalism, austerity, and religion. Utilizing a wealth of previously unexamined print culture materials, as well as paying careful attention to the production of commercial publishing companies and the reception of ordinary reading practices--particularly those of women--Everyday Reading offers fresh perspectives into book history, South Asian literary studies, and South Asian gender studies.
Aakriti Mandhwani is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. She is interested in book and magazine history, cultural studies, popular literature, South Asian and Hindi Literature, literary history and the history of libraries in South Asia. Her previous publications include Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories, edited by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity and journal articles on Hindi archives, language mixing and Hindi pulp fiction.
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From the author of Sea Change comes Green Frog: Stories (Vintage, 2024) a short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival.
Equal parts fantastical--a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death--and true to life--a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death--the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.
Chung is a master at capturing emotion, and her characters--human and otherwise--will claw their way into your heart and make themselves at home.
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) is the concluding text in political theorist Eileen M. Hunt’s trilogy of books focusing on the work of Mary Shelley. All three books have been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and they weave together Shelley’s novels (Frankenstein, The Last Man) and her short stories, as well as her journals and other writings. Hunt is currently continuing her work on Shelley by annotating Shelley’s The Last Man and her Journal of Sorrow, both of which were written side by side in the mid-1820s. Hunt’s writing of The First Last Man reflects Shelley’s own approach to writing, which integrates her own experiences into her imagined universes to explore humanity and our thinking. Thus, The First Last Man is a pivotal analysis of Shelley’s iconic work of plague fiction or pandemic novels and Hunt researched and wrote the book during our contemporary experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. While Shelley’s Frankenstein may loom large in the background of The Last Man, the focus of the novel is on the legacy of disease, of mass death, of war and conflict, and how to move forward in a destroyed world. Hunt’s thesis about postapocalyptic literature, especially Shelley’s work in this regard, is that the thread of hope that comes through all of this death and destruction is what sustains us as humans. And this is also what sustained Shelley in the face of her own tragedies, which included the loss of a number of her own children, the tragic drowning death of her beloved husband, and the loss of other family members. For Shelley, plague was a metaphor for her, both literally and figuratively having to contend with all of these experiences that were outside of her control.
Hunt explains that Shelley’s pandemic novel is well positioned within the extended literature that focuses on plagues and pandemics. Shelley is deeply read—in literature, political theory, the Bible, classical work, and the like—and her work reflects these various genres and the ways in which they wrestle with the ideas of apocalypses and what happens after such destructive events. But Shelley’s work is not just situated among these writings on plagues; she actually creates a new form of this kind of work that brings in love and hope while opening up new vistas and beginnings, compelling people to think about what happens in the aftermath of plagues or pandemics. This leads us to post-apocalyptic thinking, compelling the focus on what happens next. Hunt suggests that Mary Shelley is a kind of modern-day Sophocles, a great tragic thinker who helps guide our wrestling with these more eternal questions and does so through fictional prose creations. Such creations push on our imaginations and compel us to think about worlds that may be different than our own, but certainly reflects back our very existences.
The First Last Man is a beautiful book, weaving together Mary Shelley’s work, her journals and personal experiences, and commentary on her work at the time of the publications. Into this, Hunt brings some of her own journal entries from her research excursions during the Covid pandemic, and her own experiences with tragedy in her own life, honoring Shelley’s many skills as a writer in so many different genres and capacities.
Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social
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