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. 9H AGO

    Ana I. Oancea, "Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France" (U Toronto Press, 2025)

    Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of science and technology. The book reveals how Verne, Robida, Zola, and de l’Isle-Adam reimagine the figure of the inventor, reshaping the literary standards of their time. Universally male in these narratives, the inventor serves as a flawed exemplar of national heroism during the Age of Empire – a period marked by significant external threats and internal strife – while also embodying unrestrained creativity. Ultimately, the inventor novel reflects broader French anxieties surrounding scientific progress, empire, and gender. Ana Oancea explores the transmedia and transnational legacy of the fin-de-siècle inventor novel through vignettes that highlight similarly themed narratives in contemporary popular culture. These sections engage with films, television series, graphic narratives, and video games that reinterpret key aspects of the inventor narrative, shedding light on its power structures, racial and gender politics, and colonial aspirations. Guest Ana Oancea is Associate Professor of French at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include the intersections of science and literature, adaptation studies, and visual culture. She has recently published articles in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, and French Screen Studies. 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 in progresson 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

    1h 4m

  2. 9H AGO

    Frontier Films for America250: On the Western Genre and Beyond with Matthew J. Franck

    Here in Episode 7 of Season 5, I interview Dr. Matthew J. Franck. A senior contributing fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, as well as a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, he has written, edited, and contributed to many books, including Against the Imperial Judiciary (1996). Drawing on his Public Discourse column, “The Bookshelf,” which often veers into film history and criticism, we discuss American frontier films broadly construed in light of our country’s 250th anniversary and the successful Artemis II rocket mission. Using Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), we look at why the western is the most prolific genre in film history and how it offers viewers a vicarious lens into its pioneer heroic ethos, from literary works like those of James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, to cinema, whether the westerns of John Ford or science and space exploration movies today. Although the western frontier may have closed, Americans still keep making new ones. Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on our new Substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.” 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. 1D AGO

    Christopher Cusack et al. eds., "The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature" (Liverpool UP, 2026)

    From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge's sodden corpses and Joyce's dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this historical period as expressed in different social, political and creative contexts. Taking Irish literature's obsession with death as its starting point, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature (Liverpool UP, 2026) demonstrates the wide-ranging implications of this fixation, extending it through the contexts of the tragedies of the Irish past and the emergence of new identities in the wake of colonial modernity. In their range of authors and genres from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, the chapters bring into focus patterns of change and continuity and extend current understanding of the Gothic mode, the national tale, the Irish modernist novel, Irish-language poetry, the elegiac mode, comic and tragic revivalist writings and the generic complexity of autofiction and contemporary fiction. In so doing, The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature makes a significant intervention in Irish studies, Gothic studies, death studies and medical and health humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    55 min

  4. 2D AGO

    Malcolm Sen, "Irish Anthropocene: Literature, Climate Change, Sovereignty" (Syracuse UP, 2026)

    In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature responds to climate breakdown. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works to reveal how they engage with the entangled relations between ecology, economy, and politics. Irish writers not only critique the association of greenness with Ireland and the corporatization of sustainability discourses, they also illuminate the acute challenges that the climate crisis poses to political, social, and cultural forms in addition to ecosystems. The Irish canon has historically played a crucial role in Irish nationalism. But contemporary works are written at a time when questions of statehood and citizenship are yielding to the cross-border, multi-generational pressures of climate breakdown. Writing in the shadow of modernity's rhetorical and carbon emissions, contemporary authors are skeptical of business-as-usual sustainability jargon emanating from institutions. Instead, they focus on the local variations of the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the Anthropocene, placing the country in a webwork of ecological and geo-political relations. Cleverly written and groundbreaking in scope, Sen's analyses shows that Ireland's postcolonial identity can be especially helpful to analyze the cultural footprint of the climate crisis. Malcolm Sen is the director of the Environmental Humanities Specialization and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the editor of A History of Irish Literature and the Environment and Race in Irish Literature and Culture. Helen Penet is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at Université de Lille (France). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    53 min

  5. 4D AGO

    David Krolikoski, "Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea" (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)

    Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)is a literary history of modern Korean poetry's origins and its development through translation. As the use of Korean became increasingly restricted during the Japanese occupation, translation was not a choice but a necessity for higher education and intellectual labor. Yet it also had an expansive, creative function: Korean poets wielded it as an instrument to reimagine their literature. Around the turn of the twentieth century, intellectuals began abandoning classical Chinese as the default written language to embrace a new vernacular style in prose and verse that was closer to everyday speech. Pushing back against the perception of translation as a process of simple replication, Lyrical Translation reveals how poets used it to forge an entirely new mode of poetic composition. Dr. David Krolikoski is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures. His research interests include modern Korean poetry, translation, poetics, postcolonial theory, and transnational literature, and his articles have appeared in Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature and Culture, The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, Hyŏndae sihak, among others. Visit Dr. David Krolikoski’s University Profile here Buy Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea here About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    1h 7m

  6. 6D AGO

    Andrea Horbinski, "Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989" (U California Press, 2025)

    Andrea Horbinski's Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (U California Press, 2025) centers the fans and creators who built Japanese comics into a massive global phenomenon. The book traces the history of manga from the art form's distinctly modern emergence in the early 1900s, one that first hybridized the artistic legacy of Japan with the world of Western political satire but very quickly expanded its scope. By the 1920s and 1930s, manga was already beginning to show some of the breadth of genre and style that has become a trademark of Japanese comics and their byproducts today. In the postwar, manga's embrace of new audiences and stylistic conventions, and the embrace of these new forms by audiences of amateur consumer-creators especially since the mid-1970s, led to an explosion in popularity that has made manga a global phenomenon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    50 min

  7. APR 28

    David Womersley, "Thinking Through Shakespeare" (Princeton UP, 2026)

    In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Johnson’s view largely prevailed until the late twentieth century, when it was challenged by a growing scepticism about the existence of a general human nature. In Thinking Through Shakespeare (Princeton UP, 2026), eminent literary critic David Womersley pushes back against this change by exploring how Shakespeare’s plays think through—and invite us to think through—deep human questions of lasting importance.Thinking Through Shakespeare explores four perennial human problems: personal identity, the distinction between civilization and barbarism, the relation between political power and religious authority and the tension between means and ends. It examines the history of these problems, from antiquity to today, and traces how Shakespeare engages with them in the great tragedies—Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear—but also in his other plays. Without arguing that human nature is universal or unchanging, or that Shakespeare has some special access to timeless wisdom, the book makes the case that his drama is powerful because it serves as a forensic tool, probing rival perspectives on questions that have preoccupied many people in many societies over many centuries.By revealing in new ways how Shakespeare’s plays are animated and driven by central human problems, and why he should again be viewed as the great poet of human nature, Thinking Through Shakespeare opens up a richer understanding and appreciation of his work. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    1h 1m

  8. APR 25

    Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon, "Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis" (NYU Press, 2026)

    Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects—such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media—while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible, attuned to both aesthetics and politics, and responsive to today’s media environment. Essential for students and scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies, Reading Media both reaffirms and renews textual analysis as an indispensable way of engaging with the mediated worlds that shape contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

    45 min
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4.8
out of 5
25 Ratings

About

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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