New Books in Literary Studies

New Books Network
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  1. 2d ago

    Transcending Disciplinary Confinements With(in) Beckett Studies

    This is Dr. Swati Joshi's inaugural episode on the New Books Network. In this episode, she interviews Dr. Lucy Jeffery about her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (ibidem Press, 2021). She is also co-editor and author of Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, published by CEU Press and AUP in 2026. She is co-founder of the Replaying Communism project, which received funding from the AHRC SWW-DTP (2023) and the Visegrad Fund (2024). Dr. Jeffery's published research is on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. Her monograph—Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process—was published by Ibidem in 2021, and, in 2022, she co-edited a special issue for Green Letters, entitled ‘A New Poetics of Space’.  This episode weaves together Beckett's transdisciplinary creative process with Dr. Jeffery's journey of research, and cogitation over challenges to preserve integrity and creativity of the author's works in the wake of rapidly developing AI tools. Furthermore, the colour blue occupies an integral role in Dr. Jeffery's monograph, so this episode entails analytical segments on pigments used in Beckett's works beyond the black, white, and grey. Dr. Jeffery and I also briefly discuss our ongoing special issue, "A Writer's Palette: Colour in Late Modernist Literature," for Textual Practice. Colleagues interested in sharing their proposal until 12th December, can write to us on latemodernists@gmail.com, for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  2. 3d ago

    Patricia A. Billingsley, "Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover" (High Road Books, 2026)

    A groundbreaking reassessment of the relationship between Federico García Lorca and American poet Philip Cummings and its impact on the poems in Lorca's landmark collection, Poet in New York.In August 1929, Spanish poet Federico García Lorca left New York City to spend ten days with his friend and lover Philip Cummings at a lakeside cottage in northern Vermont. Lorca in Vermont: The Spanish Poet and His American Lover (High Road Books, 2026) tells the story of two young men with mismatched goals and expectations: Lorca, already well established in his career, who sought a sustained romantic relationship with another man, and Cummings, a new college graduate eight years his junior, who had no interest in long-term commitment or in challenging social conventions. Based on over a decade of research, Lorca in Vermont explores the full course of Lorca’s relationship with Cummings, an affair that spanned three years and two continents. Combining unique access to primary sources, extensive original research, and a fresh analysis of published sources, the book describes not only the pair’s history as a couple but also the suppression of their relationship by Lorca scholars after the poet’s tragic death in 1936. Perhaps most importantly, it reveals previously unrecognized links between the disappointment and loss Lorca experienced in his relationship with Cummings and at least eight of the poems in his landmark collection Poet in New York, a work that has long intrigued and inspired other writers. The book brilliantly blends compelling new findings and an engaging narrative style in a page-turning tale that is a must read for anyone interested in Lorca and his legacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  3. 3d ago

    Sabrina Inowlocki, "Ancient Apologetics and the Bibliographic Imagination" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

    Ancient apologetics is usually treated as a literary genre or a branch of early theology. This Element offers a different account. It argues that many Jewish and Christian texts conventionally labeled 'apologetic' are better understood through a bibliographic and archival lens: They produce authority not only by defending doctrines, but by organizing books, constructing corpora, mobilizing archives, and regulating interpretation. Tracing a trajectory from the Letter of Aristeas to Jerome's De viris illustribus, this Element shows how citation, collection, cataloguing, and textual ordering made traditions appear authoritative. Examining Aristeas, Josephus, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius, and Jerome, it argues that apologetics is best understood as a form of curatorial power through which ancient communities learned to think with books. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core. New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review. Sabrina Inowlocki is a Senior Research Fellow Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (IRCI) at the Australian Catholic University. Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  4. 5d ago

    Joseph Acquisto, "Baudelaire's Objects" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

    Baudelaire's Objects (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines Baudelaire's multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation. Charles Baudelaire's representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them. Baudelaire's poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial. Baudelaire's Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire's poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us. Guest Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French and Director of the School of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Vermont. He writes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature with a particular focus on the intersections of literature with philosophy and music. In addition to Baudelaire's Objects, Dr. Acquisto’s books include French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music, The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy, Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France, and Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Dissonance, Subjectivity, Transcendence.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  5. Aug 20

    Emily Sibley, "The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture" (Cornell UP, 2026)

    The Poetics of Incivility: Satire and Subversion in Modern Arab Culture (Cornell UP, 2026) explores impolite modes of expression—satire, crude humor, and rudeness—as a critical lens for both aesthetic innovation and sociopolitical critique. In the Arab world—from Cairo's Tahrir Square and the thoroughfares of Beirut to war-torn Gaza—political demands have been framed by satirical cartoons and graffiti or in subversive poetry and song. Emily Sibley shows that these forms of resistance are not new to Arab culture but return to mid-nineteenth-century debates over literary propriety. In case studies concerning women's education in 1850s' Beirut, the satirical press in colonial Egypt, colloquial theater in the era of decolonization, street art and graphic novels during and after the 2011 Egyptian protests, Sibley follows the threads of an expressive culture that announces and celebrates its own impropriety. Concluding with analyses of Gaza poetry on the internet as a space where the stakes of incivility are acutely visible, The Poetics of Incivility offers a timely consideration of incivility as an aesthetic resource for authors and artists engaging with some of the most controversial issues of their times—and ours. Emily Sibley is Senior Research Associate at Whitman College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  6. Aug 15

    Aarthi Vadde, "We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia UP, 2026)

    We the Platform: How the Internet Changed Twenty-First-Century Literature (Columbia University Press 2026) by Aarthi Vadde is a groundbreaking account of mass writing in the twenty-first century, identifying rarely recognized forms of literary possibility amid the profound upheavals in traditional publishing. Aarthi Vadde examines the explosion of textuality across digital platforms: countless writers, diverse publishing formats, and vast communities of readers responding to stories publicly and instantly. Countering ubiquitous decline narratives, she offers powerful examples of literary innovation, adaptation, and survival. Among them are Jonathan Lethem and Lauren Oyler’s challenges to individualist ideas of authorship, the Twitter fiction of Jennifer Egan and Teju Cole, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s collaborative writing on Wattpad, conceptual projects like Book from the Ground, and the experimental use of chatbots by authors including Sheila Heti. Through nuanced and illuminating readings, We the Platform shows how platform-based writing has altered cornerstone concepts of authorship, aesthetic form, and craft, delivering a bold new understanding of literature now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  7. Aug 15

    Xiaofan Amy Li, "The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

    The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies. Comparatively analysing an original selection of texts by modern and contemporary French-Francophone and East Asian writers, each chapter focuses on a particular genre such as the novel, life-writing, poetry, and image-texts. The reimagination of risk in literature is revealed to be closely related to different forms of play such as structured games, masquerade, poetic and intermedial experimentation. Franco-East Asian literatures help us rethink risk in linguistically diverse and cross-cultural contexts, providing a new paradigm for comparative criticism and world literature. Guest Xiaofan Amy Li is Associate Professor in Comparative Cultural Studies at University College London and holds a PhD in French from Queens' College, Cambridge. Her research spans comparisons and exchanges from the 20th-21st centuries between France, China, and East Asia broadly speaking. Her first monograph Comparative Encounters between Artaud, Michaux and the Zhuangzi (Legenda, 2015) re-reads two avant-garde French writers and the imaginative classical Chinese text Zhuangzi through their intertextual, poetic, and conceptual dialogues. Besides her two monographs, she has published extensively on Surrealism, poetry, and literary translation. She is a member of the AILC/ICLA (International Comparative Literature Association) Research Committee on Literary Theory. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript underreview on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

  8. Aug 14

    Caroline Bicks, "Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King" (Hogarth, 2026)

    After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maineʼs inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?Bicks focuses on five of his most iconic early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026)—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them. Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Her academic books include Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; her popular writing has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and includes a humorous Bard-themed cocktail book, Shakespeare Not Stirred. She is the co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. Recommended Books: Ben Lerner, Transcription Libby Edwardson, We Sent Them Down Singing Daniel Mason, Country People Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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