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
Latest episodes
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40 min
Chekhov's Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer with Jonathan Cole (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering…
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46 min
Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public with Keegan Cook Finberg (Columbia UP, 2025)
What is the place of poetry in the modern world? In Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025), Keegan Cook Finberg, an Associate Professor of English…
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1 h 10
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity with Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïch…
A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentie…
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31 min
Taking Apart a Metaphor: Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette on the Literary Ecosystem
Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the…
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13 min
In Praise of Agnes Heller (1929-2019)
Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camara…
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37 min
Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh (Syracuse UP, 2026)
A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Syracuse UP, 2026).Present in the heart of modern Palestinian liter…
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59 min
American Flash Fiction: Brilliant Brevities & Miniature Masterpieces
Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Fla…
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1 h 12
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia with Ali Altaf Mian (U Notr…
Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U Notre Dame 2026) explores the rich vast textual archive of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi, a South…
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38 min
Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture with Matthew Warner Osborn (U…
On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the ann…
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1 h 01
Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying Women with Eleanor Johnson (Princeton UP, 2026)
For as long as human societies have been telling stories, the patriarchy has felt threatened by women. In this book, Eleanor Johnson provides an engaging cultural history of a figu…
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48 min
Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early Twentieth-Century Britain with Lise Shapi…
Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press. Read…
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42 min
An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics with Yigal Bronner (Columbia UP, 2026)
Classical Indian poetics prized the skillful use of alaṅkāras, or “ornaments”—literary figures of speech. Across more than a millennium, Sanskrit writers developed and elaborated a…
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1 h 06
Realism After the Individual: Women, Desire, and the Modern American Novel with Rafael Walker (U Chicago Press…
The realist novel, so the story goes, isn’t really an American genre but a European and British one. And what the realist novel does—again, according to conventional wisdom—is entr…
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1 h 12
David Bentley Hart on Life, Literature, and Baseball (U Notre Dame Press, 2026)
Today I’m speaking with David Bentley Hart about his book, A Gathering of Leaves: Extravagances and Ephemera, from the University of Notre Dame Press. David is a multi-faceted scho…
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58 min
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet with Daria S. Smirnova (Academic Studies…
A Room of His Own: Joseph Brodsky and the Making of a Bilingual Poet (Academic Studies Press, 2025) makes the original and persuasive claim that Brodsky’s force as a transnational…
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1 h 01
Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing with Katherine L. Alexander (U Mi…
Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Katherine L. Alexander explores how one late Qing Confucian reformer sought…
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38 min
11.1 Indie Presses and the Literary Ecosystem: Meg Reid and Will Evans
Meg Reid and Will Evans join Mesha Maren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem. As leaders of two nonprofit independent presses,Hub City Writers Project and Deep Vellum…
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33 min
The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations with Heleen De Jonckhee…
Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrati…
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32 min
Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronicles with Carol Loeb Shloss
The story of two women in the mid-twentieth-century South navigating financial independence, a changing rural landscape, and social norms.Flannery and Regina: The Andalusia Chronic…
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48 min
Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere with Nsah Mala, Richard Watts and Giulia Champion
Through a postcolonial lens, Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere (Liverpool, 2025) explores the various ways in which francophone writers, visual artists and activists are re…