The Global Novel: a literature podcast Claire Hennessy

Today, we're unfurling the scrolls of one of the most provocative, scandalous, and riveting novels to ever emerge from China’s Ming dynasty: "Jin Ping Mei," or as it's tantalizingly translated, "The Plum in the Golden Vase." This novel is not just a story; it's a journey into the opulent, and often morally ambiguous, world of 16th-century China. We have the esteemed Dr. Junjie Luo, associate professor in East Asian Studies at Gettysburg College, joining us in the studio. Dr. Luo, with his vas...

Madame Bovary scandalized and fascinated nineteenth-century France upon its release, and is a groundbreaking exploration of desire, romantic disillusionment, and the mundane realities of rural life. Joining us are Professors Mary Donaldson-Evans who taught at University of Delaware, Jennifer Yee from Oxford University, Rachel Mesch from Boston University, and C.F.S. Creasy from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. Recommended Readings:Flaubert, Gustave. Madame BovaryCreasy, C.F...

Gulliver’s Travels remains one of the finest satires in the English language, delighting in the mockery of everything from government to religion and —despite the passing of nearly three centuries-remaining just as fun, funny and relevant today.Our guest-speakers are chief editors of the 2023 Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels Dr. Daniel Cook and Dr. Nicholas Seager. Daniel is an Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee whose teaching and research int...

A Norwegian author and well-known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle and multiple prize winner, Karl Ove Knausgaard has been described as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations". With us today is our returning guest-speaker Dr. Bob Blaisdell. As I’ve introduced him on the show before, he is professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He is author of Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and t...

Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford love story, is the only novel by English essayist Max Beerbohm, a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford published in 1911. The book largely employs a third-person narrator limited to the character of Zuleika then shifting to that of the Duke, then halfway through the novel suddenly becoming a first-person narrator who claims inspiration from the Greek Muse Clio, with her all-seeing narrative perspective provided by Zeus. This allows the narrator to also see the g...

New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing published in 1891, which is set in the literary and journalistic circles of 1880s' London.The story deals with the literary world that Gissing himself had experienced. Its title refers to the London street, Grub Street, which in the 18th century became synonymous with hack literature; by Gissing's time, Grub Street itself no longer existed, though hack-writing certainly did. Its two central characters are a sharply contrasted pair of writers: Edwin...