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Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. It collectively fosters new transoceanic modes of thinking to reframe postcolonial debates and reveal the interconnected dialogues led by women from former French colonies and post-contact island territories. Thus, the volume unsettles the male agenda (captains, missionaries, mariners, ethnographers), and pays attention to the ways in which artists, writers, and activists have theorized or poetized women and the seas, reclaimed agency and created transformative possibilities. To critically map out a gendered conversation with the ocean, the contributors explore activisms and feminisms, intersectional praxes of care, ecological and health impacts of nuclear radiation and chlordecone contamination, queerness, decolonizing dance, the unsettling of official archives and female tidalectical corporeality and embodiments, Mā'ohi epistemologies and ontologies, silence as empowerment against colonial violence, forced migration and vulnerability. The volume's overarching approach belongs to a "politics of refusal" which brings forth formerly discarded archives and discredited sites of knowledge to counter ideologies and doctrinal apparatus that promote forgetting or erasure among non-sovereign populations. In exploring transoceanic feminine spaces as vital sites of knowledge production, this interdisciplinary collaboration aims to ensure that readers actively engage with feminine praxes, understanding their significance not only as theoretical constructs but as lived experiences (re)occupying, (re)appropriating and transcending patriarchal and postcolonial spaces. Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Professor of French in the Department of Modern & Classical Literatures & Cultures at Rice University and the author of 2016’s Dangerous Creole Liaisons: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses from 1806 to 1897 and 2021’s Sex, Sea, and Self: Sexuality and Nationalism in French Caribbean Discourses 1924–1948, as well as editing several critical editions and special journal issues, and authoring numerous articles and book chapters.  Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and has published two monographs : Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraibe in 2006 and Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée in 2020. She has also co-edited a special issue of Esprit Créateur on “Francophonies of the Early Modern,” and published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes. 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 progress on 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

Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived—decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War (Stanford UP, 2023) is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age. Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford University. He has published extensively on the cultural, political, and literary milieu of twentieth-century Britain, including (with William Abrahams) the Orwell biographies The Unknown Orwell (1972) and Orwell: The Transformation (1980), both finalists for the National Book Award. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculation (Duke UP, 2026) takes Black speculative fiction as a central archive for understanding global security culture from the Reagan administration to the present. Drawing on black feminist, critical race, and queer of color theoretical traditions, Justin L. Mann posits that world-breaking is an ethical and aesthetic orientation to the dangerous, worldmaking process of securitization--the process by which state and parastate agents augment and build up the tools, techniques, and infrastructures intended to make people safer. World-breaking appears in the fiction of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, N.K. Jemisin, in the music and video work of Janelle Monae, as well as unexpected places such as the Marvel and DC Cinematic Universes. Breaking the World charts the difference between securitization and "Black insecurity." Linking securitization to mass incarceration and the militarization of policing, Mann contributes to Black feminist and abolitionist conversations that seek an end to institutional and structural violence. Breaking the World emphasizes that world-breaking is an important aspect of the Black radical imagination, showing that speculation is an essential response to the dangerous worlds of securitization"-- Provided by publisher. 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 Literature for Little Bodhisattvas: Making Buddhist Families in Modern Taiwan (U Hawai'i Press, 2025), Natasha Heller makes two key interventions: first, she argues that picturebooks are a new genre of Buddhist writing, and second, she calls attention to an emergent family Buddhism in Taiwan that fashions children as religious subjects through shared attention with adult readers. Surveying Taiwanese Buddhism from the ground up, Heller explores the changing family dynamics that have made children into a crucial audience for Buddhist education and the home a key site for Buddhist cultivation. By taking picturebooks seriously as part of the Buddhist textual tradition, Heller demonstrates their engagement with canonical sources alongside innovations formodern audiences. Close readings analyzing both text and image trace narrative themes aboutBuddhist figures, and connect representations of buddhas and bodhisattvas to a visual culturewhere new values such as cuteness are articulated. Heller shows that picturebooks have becomean integral part of a contemporary Buddhist education that equips children with strategies tointerpret everyday life in Buddhist ways and provides religious models for action in the modern world. Literature for Little Bodhisattvas is a pathbreaking work revealing how contemporary picturebooks reframe Buddhism and offer fresh perspectives on its teachings and ideals of family for both children and adults. Natasha Heller is associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is a cultural historian of Chinese Buddhism with research interests spanning the premodern period (primarily 10th through 14th c.) and the contemporary era. Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben, her first book, is a study of an eminent monk of the Yuan dynasty using poetry, calligraphy, and gong’an commentary to explore the social and cultural dimensions of Chan Buddhism. Li-Ping Chen is a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What did medieval authors know about their world? Were they parochial and focused on just their monastery, town, or kingdom? Or were they aware of the broader, medieval Europe that modern historians write about?  Christian Raffensperger's edited volume Authorship, Worldview, and Identity in Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2022) brings the focus back to medieval authors to see how they describe their world. While we see in these essays that each author certainly had their own biases, the vast majority of them did not view the world as constrained to their small piece of it. Instead, they talked about the wider world, and often they had informants or textual sources that informed them about the world, even if they did not visit those distant places themselves. This volume shows that they also used similar ideas to create space and identity – whether talking about the desert, the holy land, or food practices in their texts. By examining medieval authors and their own perceptions of their world, this collection offers a framework for discussions of medieval Europe in the 21st century. In this conversation we talk about how this volume goes about broadening both the geographical scope and methodological approaches to reading medieval sources. Erika Monahan is the author of The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Cornell UP, 2016) and a 2023-2024 Alexander von Humboldt Fellow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Alison Rowlands, professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Essex, joins Jana Byars to talk about her classic book, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany, Rothenberg, 1561- 1652, out Manchester UP 2003. This conversation took place on the occasion of a new edition, this time a paperback release, in January 2026 Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561-1652 (Manchester UP, 2026). This meticulously-researched book relies on copious, detailed archival documents concerning people accused of witchcraft in  the German city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber between 1561 and 1652. This city experienced a very restrained pattern of witch-trials and just one execution for witchcraft during that time, unlike some other places in German lands and Europe more broadly. This book explores the social and psychological conflicts that lay behind the making of accusations and confessions of witchcraft and offers insights into other areas of early modern life, such as experiences of and beliefs about communal conflict, magic, motherhood, childhood and illness. It also includes analysis on the role of gender. Find the open source of the original edition 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

The various words for “divorce” in Japanese—rien, enkiri, fūfu wakare, rikon—reflect how the socially constructed institutions of marriage and family, along with their dissolutions, have been understood in Japanese history and jurisprudence. Employing a broad definition of divorce as the end of a romantic union sanctioned by law, social custom, or mutual agreement, Bold Breaks: Japanese Women and Literary Narratives of Divorce explores the shifting attitudes toward divorce in literature by women from the Heian (794–1185) to Heisei (1989–2019) periods. The collection features writing by renowned authors Tamura Toshiko (1884–1945), Uno Chiyo (1897–1996), and Tsushima Yūko (1947–2016), who used divorce as a literary device to enable their female protagonists to take bold steps toward new lives. A coda explores more contemporary views on marriage, divorce, and romantic love in the work of novelists Itoyama Akiko (1966–) and Kawakami Mieko (1976–) and poet Saihate Tahi (1986–). A wide-ranging introduction provides an overview of the historical, legal, and literary significance of divorce in Japan. The translated texts, appearing in English for the first time, are accompanied by essays introducing the authors and offering brief analyses. Bold Breaks will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese literature and culture, particularly those interested in gender issues and family social practices, and will enrich the growing conversation on marriage and divorce across cultures and eras. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Fantastic and informative talk with Sara Petrosillo of the University of Evansville about her new book, Hawking Women: Falconry, Gender, and Control in Medieval Literary Culture (Ohio State University Press, 2023). Listen all the way to the end for a great description of the process of hunting with birds! While critical discourse about falconry metaphors in premodern literature is dominated by depictions of women as unruly birds in need of taming, women in the Middle Ages claimed the symbol of a hawking woman on their personal seals, trained and flew hawks, and wrote and read poetic texts featuring female falconers.  Sara Petrosillo's Hawking Women demonstrates how cultural literacy in the art of falconry mapped, for medieval readers, onto poetry and challenged patriarchal control. Examining texts written by, for, or about women, Hawking Women uncovers literary forms that arise from representations of avian and female bodies. Readings from Sir Orfeo, Chrétien de Troyes, Guillaume de Machaut, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and hawking manuals, among others, show how female characters are paired with their hawks not to assert dominance over the animal but instead to recraft the stand-in of falcon for woman as falcon with woman. In the avian hierarchy female hawks have always been the default, the dominant, and thus these medieval interspecies models contain lessons about how women resisted a culture of training and control through a feminist poetics of the falconry practice. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time. A History of England in 25 Poems (Penguin, 2025) by Professor Catherine Clarke is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Professor Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story. 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

In this interview we discuss The Unraveling Heart: Women's Oral Poetics and Literary Vernacularization in Marathi (Columbia UP, 2025). Women’s songs of the grind mill are among the oldest oral traditions in South Asia. They have been sung to accompany a daily household labor, making flour using a stone hand mill, for many centuries. Even today, grind mill songs are still well known in Maharashtra, testifying to the endurance of a remarkable genre. Yet these songs have long been understood through sociological or anthropological lenses, treated as entirely separate from literary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think. Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society's mind about rape culture - and to reassure survivors they were not alone. Courting Disaster: Reading Between the Lines of the Regency Novel (Manchester UP, 2025) takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent. In an era that's clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway. 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

How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison differently? Alvin K. Wong examines these and other questions in Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke UP, 2025), a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of queerness in Hong Kong. Bringing together Sinophone literature, independent and commercial cinema, documentary films, and visual art, the book asks how Hong Kong’s queer productions might help us rethink the work of comparison itself. Rather than treating Hong Kong as a marginal or derivative space — a space defined by British colonialism, China-centrism, or global capitalism — this book approaches the city as a site of methodological possibilities. The key concept the book advances, “unruly comparison,” replacing neat equivalences and stable categories with incommensurability and transnational connections and linking Hong Kong to other places, times, and queer spaces across the Sinophone. Theoretically deft, the book is filled with a wide range of fascinating material, including work by filmmakers including Wong Kar-wai, Scud, and Fruit Chan; transnational and transgender visual cultures; documentaries about Southeast Asian domestic workers and queer intimacies; and poetry about language and precarity. This book will appeal to those interested in queer theory, Hong Kong studies, Sinophone studies, and comparative approaches. Listeners should also check out Alvin Wong's co-edited volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies(Routledge, 2020) and the Society of Sinophone Studies webpage (of which Alvin is currently chair!).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

People who lie down are a fixture of contemporary literature, art, and life. Murder victims, protesters, invalids, depressives, sex workers, and more: these are the recumbent figures that populate Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern UP, 2025) the latest book from literary critic and poet Sarah Dowling. Out now from Northwestern University Press, this fascinating and ambitious study moves to the ground of mainstream and experimental literary and artistic work from the late twentieth century to the present. There Dowling traces a pattern of prone figures, like a chain of paper dolls strewn across the floor. These figures do a surprising amount of work from their horizontal position, challenging our notions of human subjectivity and political agency, and, at the same time, turning our attention to the ground against which they stretch. In this rich and wide-ranging conversation with Alix Beeston, Dowling shares how researching and writing Here Is a Figure allowed her to work through unexpected and minor forms of feminist and anti-colonial action, the inextricability of literature and the other arts, and the groundedness—the historical and material conditions—of all artistic and scholarly labor. She issues a call for scholars of literature and art to shake off habits of mastery and detachment and instead to approach their work as a form of passionate advocacy for the enduring value of criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan) to examine the world of print in early modern China. Scott W. Gregory traces the way this beloved novel about outlaw heroes, honor, corruption, and brotherhood was adapted and changed by different editor-publishers. While in other contexts print and printing brought stability to texts, Scott shows how in the Ming print itself was an agent of textual change. Bandits in Print is a refreshing take on this traditional novel, one that highlights how malleable Water Margin really was. This book is sure to appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, Ming history, and print culture, as well as those who want to know more about the interaction between manuscript and print in the early modern world. In addition to being an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, Scott is also co-director of the Center for East Asian 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

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies