New Books in Literary Studies

The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author(PostHill Press, 2024) by Rebecca Rego Barry is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) excelled at writing country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie entered the scene. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books annually, she was dubbed “about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the US.” On top of that, Wells wielded her pen in just about every literary genre, producing several immensely popular children’s books and young adult novels; beloved anthologies; and countless stories, prose, and poetry for magazines such as Thrilling Detective, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. All told, Wells wrote over 180 books. Some were adapted into silent films, and some became bestsellers. Yet a hundred years later, she has been all but erased from literary history. Why? How? This investigation takes us on a journey to Rahway, New Jersey, where Wells was born and is buried; to New York City’s Upper West Side, where she spent her final twenty-five years; to the Library of Congress, where Carolyn’s world-class collection of rare books now resides; and to many other public and private collections where exciting discoveries unfolded. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whoseforthcoming bookfocuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The American Poet Laureate: A History of U.S. Poetry and the State(Columbia University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Paeth shows how the state has been the silent centre of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Dr. Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organisations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The American Poet Laureatecontributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whoseforthcoming bookfocuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives(Reaktion, 2023) by Jad Adams chronicles the vibrant and passionate women who wrote for the 1890s journalThe Yellow Book. During the 1890s, British women for the first time began to leave their family homes to seek work, accommodation, and financial and sexual freedom.Decadent Womenis an account of some of these women who wrote for the innovative art and literary journalThe Yellow Book. For the first time, based on original research, Dr. Adams describes the lives and work of these vibrant and passionate women, from well-connected and fashionable aristocrats to the desperately poor. He narrates the challenges they faced in a literary marketplace, and within a society that overwhelmingly favoured men, showing how they were pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease and unwanted pregnancy. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whoseforthcoming bookfocuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Historian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail--namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture.InThe Age of Nightmare: The Gothic and British Culture, 1750-1900(St. Augustine's Press, 2022),Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution. Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts. In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’sDunefilms embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s original series ofDunenovels, the Fremen were inspired by the Bedouin, nomadic pastoralist inhabitants of the Middle East. Aspects of Bedouin culture and lifeways as well as episodes from Bedouin history, such as the effects of resource extraction on Bedouin landscapes and Bedouin participation in the Great Arab Revolt, heavily informed the novels’ themes and narratives. In this episode, Dr. Kara Kennedy joins me to discuss representations of nomadic peoples in theDunenovels and their onscreen adaptations as well as her latest bookAdaptations of Dune: Frank Herbert's Story on Screen(Blue Key, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sven Birkerts is the co-editor ofAGNImagazine, an essayist, and a literary critic perhaps best known for his bookThe Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age(FSG, 2006),about the impact of the internet and “electronic culture” in general. He’s taught at Bennington College, Harvard University, and elsewhere. What is MFA culture, and how has the rise of writing programs in academia changed the course of literature for better and, at times, perhaps for worst? That’s this episode’s first major topic, with Sven Birkerts offering observations about the rise of braided essays (spurred by Wikipedia perhaps), plus tonal and other stylistic marks that have become common. This episode next features three essays, all with a duality to them. Sarah Khatry’s essay, “Afterlives,” has both an objective element to it (she’s a data scientist working on Covid-19 data) and a subjective component, too, as she navigates her grandmother’s death. Mara Naselli’s essay, “My Misogny,” takes on how Pablo Picasso “manhandled” the women who appeared in his paintings, even as Naselli battles with the lessons she’s gathered from interacting with her parents. Peter Balakian’s essay, “A Poetry Reading in Diyarbakir” is seasoned with lush description of the food to be found in eastern Turkey, juxtaposed with the ethnic hatreds that make life so tough in that region. In every case, Birkerts does an admirable job steering listeners through the material at hand. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leadsSensory Logic, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker'sGulag Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intercontexual Reading(Indiana UP, 2019) shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives and texts against the background of historical information about the Soviet and the Nazi regimes of repression. Writers at the center of this work include Varlam Shalamov, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Ka-Tzetnik, and others, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniya Ginzburg, and Jorge Semprún, illuminate the discussion. Toker's twofold analysis concentrates on the narrative qualities of the works as well as on the ways in which each text documents the writer's experience and in which fictionalized narrative can double as historical testimony. References to events might have become obscure owing to the passage of time and the cultural diversity of readers; the book explains them and shows how they form new meaning in the text. Toker is well-known as a skillful interpreter of Gulag literature, and this text presents new thinking about how Gulag literature and Holocaust literature enable a better understanding about testimony in the face of evil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris,Paris and the Art of Transposition: Early Twentieth Century Sino-French Encounters(U Michigan Press, 2023)uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context. Angie Chauis Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Film at the University of Victoria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

When celebrated American novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor died at the age of thirty-nine in 1964, she left behind an unfinished third novel titledWhy Do the Heathen Rage?Scholarly experts uncovered and studied the material, deeming it unpublishable. It stayed that way for more than fifty years. Until now. For the past ten-plus years, award-winning author Jessica Hooten Wilson has explored the 378 pages of typed and handwritten material of the novel—transcribing pages, organizing them into scenes, and compiling everything to provide a glimpse into what O’Connor might have planned to publish. Flannery O'Connor's 'Why Do the Heathen Rage?' A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress(Brazos Press, 2024)is the result of Hooten Wilson's work. In it, she introduces O’Connor’s novel to the public for the first time and imagines themes and directions O’Connor’s work might have taken. Including illustrations and an afterword from noted artist Steve Prince (One Fish Studio), the book unveils scenes that are both funny and thought-provoking, ultimately revealing that we have much to learn from what O’Connor left behind. Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University. She is the author of several books, includingGiving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, which received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author ofCreating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readersand articles on G. K. Chesterton and John Ford, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcastFifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, foundhereon the New Books Network and onX. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field,Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters(Cambridge UP, 2024) argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. By introducing the concept of ‘literary sovereignty’, the book argues that political sovereignty in colonial India went hand in hand with a massive project of textually understanding local cultures that colonial officials encountered. This in turn gave rise to paradigms such as those of comparison, fields of study such as literary history and most importantly – world literature. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light. The book also offers us tools to decolonise literary studies by highlighting the genealogies of modern ideas of world literature and comparative literature that are rooted in European colonialism. Baidik Bhattacharya works at the crossroads of literary studies, social sciences, and philosophy. His first book,Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations(Routledge, 2018), explores the debates surrounding two dynamic fields-postcolonial studies and world literature. Contrary to many dominant narratives in critical theory, the book asserts that as an analytical framework the idea of world literature is dead: the nineteenth-century ideal of world literature had always and already been embedded in colonial histories; and, in our contemporary times, the promise of that ideal has been exhausted by postcolonial Anglophone literature. Through fresh and incisive readings of the postcolonial canon and some of its most prominent authors like Rudyard Kipling, V. S. Naipaul, J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie, the volume discusses how these Anglophone writings have used the banal and ordinary ideal of world literature to fashion out their own trajectories. Bhattacharya is the co-editor of two volumes: Baidik Bhattacharya and Sambudha Sen (eds.)Novel Formations: The Indian Beginnings of a European Genre(Permanent Black, 2018); Baidik Bhattacharya and Neelam Srivastava (eds.)The Postcolonial Gramsci(Routledge, 2012). His other works have appeared in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies among other places. Bhattacharya has held visiting scholarships at the University of Virginia and the University of Western Cape. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Postcolonial Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies