Épisodes

  • Gabriel Ertsgaard, "A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

    Gabriel Ertsgaard, "A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    Jul 21 2025
    Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. By mapping a path less travelled but just as vital in divisive times, in n A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Gabriel Ertsgaard shows writers how they can enact nonviolent heroism in their characters, model civil resistance in their stories, and create worlds around a mythos that champions redemptive nonviolence. With concepts applicable to writing for fiction, drama, the screen, and narrative poetry, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace deconstructs the necessity for violence in popular works, explores key concepts in peace studies, and helps writers establish their own peace poetics. Focused around the narrative craft techniques of character arcs, campaigns, duels, and worldbuilding, the book features numerous creative writing prompts and examples from key works. These include films such as Trading Places, Selma, Lage Raho Munna Bai, and Frozen and literature ranging from Shakespeare's plays to Dickens' A Christmas Carol to Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels. A timely and important expansion to any writer's toolkit, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace allows storytellers to understand the complex dynamics of, and the damage caused by, violent perspectives and actions, giving them a way into considering nonviolence as powerful and preferable. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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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    51 min
  • John McGahern, "The Dark: A Critical Edition" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

    John McGahern, "The Dark: A Critical Edition" (Syracuse UP, 2025)
    Jul 14 2025
    Bringing John McGahern's 1965 masterpiece back into print in the United States after years of inaccessibility, this new sixtieth-anniversary critical edition includes an introduction aimed at first-time readers, explanatory footnotes, McGahern's own glossary, and four scholarly essays aimed at guiding readers through the novel's famously controversial history. While the text was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, this edition demonstrates that McGahern's novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland--from the family to the church, to the government's willingness to ignore national and communal trauma. The Dark follows a promising young boy's struggles to break free from the economic and social forces trapping him in a lifestyle that is both familiar and suffocating. At the heart of the novel is the boy's complex and stormy relationship with his abusive, widowed father, who is left to raise a family with little outside aid. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national identity. 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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    1 h et 25 min
  • Joseph Valente, "Irish Shame: A Literary Reckoning" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

    Joseph Valente, "Irish Shame: A Literary Reckoning" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
    Jul 11 2025
    The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame Offers an anatomy of Irish shame as a cultural predicament Combines theoretical reading with historical and institutional context Includes essays by some of Ireland’s leading researchers on trauma and sexuality studies Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish 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
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    1 h et 27 min
  • Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jul 10 2025
    Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire. Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada explores the Āmuktamālyada as a reflection of one of South Asia's most culturally complex periods, highlighting its rich religious, political, historical and ethnographic detail. Moreover, Loewy Shacham examines the Āmuktamālyada as the work of a king imparting personal insights on empire, kingship, and individuality - specifically, that it is possible to be unbounded by the institution of kingship that he himself embodies. This book demonstrates that Krsnadevaraya's text connects the imperial domain to the village and temple settings, and to the south Indian community of Srivaisnava devotees-and indeed that it situates the source of authority and power not in the royal court but in the margins, where Srivaisnavism originated, giving the far Tamil south a central role in its imperial vision. Employing close textual analysis of the Āmuktamālyada, supplemented by a rich corpus of texts in different languages and genres, Empire Inside Out illuminates a piece of literature that has been fairly neglected, owing to the particularized linguistic and literary training required. The core of the book is based in the historical context of sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, from which it moves to the various pasts that helped shape the Āmuktamālyada, and to our contemporary times and the use of the text in constructing (at times rewriting) history. 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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    35 min
  • Jyotsna G. Singh, "Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory" (Bloomsbury, 2019)

    Jyotsna G. Singh, "Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
    Jul 9 2025
    My guest today is Jyotsna Singh, Professor Emerita of English at Michigan State University. She has written numerous books including Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discovery” of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge), and The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Blackwell), which is co-authored with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms. She has also edited A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500-1700 (Wiley-Blackwell), which has gone through two editions. She was among a handful of early scholars who illuminated Shakespeare’s works within non-western, non-canonical contexts. One such example is her early essay about Shakespeare in India, “Different Shakespeares,” originally published in Theatre Journal in 1989, and then expanded on and reprinted in Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019) tells the story of the academic study of the cultural legacy of European colonialism, showing how the literature of former colonial powers represented and often distorted colonial history and how, in turn, colonized peoples articulated and reclaimed their identity and history by interrogating European culture and history. Singh’s book shows how our reading of Shakespeare’s plays such as ‘The Tempest,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘Othello’ has been forever changed by theater practitioners and scholars alike, while making a a persuasive case that postcoloniality continues to have a unique, still-unfolding relevance on how we read. In part, Singh’s book also memorializes the struggle of scholars for legitimacy within a sometimes-hostile field. Author of the article on The Tempest mentioned at around 35:40 is as follows: Leininger, Lorie Jerrell. "The Miranda trap: Sexism and racism in Shakespeare's The Tempest." The Tempest. Routledge, 2013. 223-230 (first published in 1980). 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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    1 h et 17 min
  • Nan Z. Da, "The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    Nan Z. Da, "The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    Jul 8 2025
    At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist and post-Maoist China. Da, who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, brings Shakespeare's tragedy to life on its own terms, addressing the concerns it reflects over the transition from Elizabeth I to James I with a fearsome sense of what would soon come to pass. At the same time, she uses the play as a lens to revisit the world of Maoist China--what it did to people, and what it did to storytelling. Blending literary analysis and personal history, Da begins in her childhood during Deng Xiaoping's Opening and Reform, then moves back and forth between Lear and China. In The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton University Press, 2025), the unfinished business of Maoism and other elements of Chinese thought and culture--from Confucianism to the spectacles of Peking Opera--help elucidate the choices Shakespeare made in constructing Lear and the unbearable confusions he left behind. Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Caleb Zakarin is the Editor of the New Books Network. 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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    39 min
  • Tom Lutz, "1925: A Literary Encyclopedia" (Rare Bird Books, 2025)

    Tom Lutz, "1925: A Literary Encyclopedia" (Rare Bird Books, 2025)
    Jul 6 2025
    The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction--detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance--was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention. This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration--all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and not very far at all. 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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    1 h et 15 min
  • Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

    Julie Singer, "Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
    Jul 5 2025
    A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings. 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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    45 min