New Books in Literary Studies

Naturalism's Imaginary Museum, French Art, and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century (University of Toronto Press, 2024) examines one of the most revered art historical narratives of Western
art: the famous turning point for painting and sculpture usually
emblematized by the works of Édouard Manet and then the Impressionists.
Instead of the usual revaluation of this turning point, Sara Pappas
argues for the importance of the failure to find a cohesive story for
the art world in the period itself, a difficulty that carries forward to
galleries today. In order to demonstrate the importance of incongruity
and disorder, Pappas brings together two worlds that may seem
incompatible: nineteenth-century literary writers involved in naturalism
and the organization of permanent collections of later
nineteenth-century French art in today's museums. Drawing on the art
novels and art criticism of these writers, the book provides optimal
access to the questions that continue to haunt the categorization and
display of nineteenth-century art.

Guest Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture
at the University of Richmond. In addition to this volume, she has
published articles on topics from 19th century art criticism by literary figures such as Baudelaire and Zola to the Expositions universelles
to contemporary artist Kehinde Wiley’s influence on French art, as well
as co-curating an exhibit of Nineteenth Century French and Russian Art
at the Harnett Museum of Art.

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 under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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Following Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, new possibilities of travel and improvements in printing technology saw an emergence of publishing ventures in France and Britain dedicated to the production of albums and travel accounts featuring images of Muslim Egypt and Islamic architecture and catering to a growing European fascination with the East. In her debut book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century (American University in Cairo Press, 2025) Paulina Banas analyzes the context and process of production of these highly illustrated publications, from their conceptualization to the finished product and its afterlife, from marketing to the sales of these books, and from circulation to their reception by nineteenth-century audiences. By tracing the long, arduous, and often risky publishing journeys of the makers of these books, including publishers, writers, and artists, such as the Frenchman Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Banas reveals a complex terrain of changing market demands, collaborations, and conflicting views, and the unsettled authorship of these works, prompting us to think more profoundly about artistic and intellectual exchange in the world of nineteenth-century Orientalist book production. Visualizing Egypt considers nineteenth-century book illustrations on Egypt and the “Orient” not merely as expressions of enduring ideology and colonial propaganda, but as representations shaped by the often-overlooked commercial exigencies of the growing publishing industry and the reckless competition within it.

Paulina Banas is an Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she teaches course on Islamic world arts, 19th century European visual culture, and cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East.

Saman Nasser holds an M.A. in history from James Madison University, where he currently works as an educational staff.
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Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social classes, Sufi mystics, merchants, and travelers—a richly layered urban space in which cultures, histories, and spiritual traditions continually intersect. Presented in a bilingual edition featuring the original French alongside the English translation, the book introduces a wider readership to the work of one of North Africa’s most significant literary and intellectual voices.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Esposito and Reeck to discuss Meddeb’s distinctive literary and intellectual presence, his movement across languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, and his intimate portrayal of Marrakesh. They also explore the collaborative process of translating his multilingual, layered prose and consider how translation can extend—and even renew—a writer’s literary afterlife.

Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026).
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In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Mikhail Pelevin about his book Love, Honour and God: Pashto Writings of Early Modern Times (Iran and the Caucasus Monographs, vol. 5, Brill, 2025).

Love, Honour and God is a survey of three centuries of Pashto
literary and educational writing, from roughly 1530 to 1830,
the period Pelevin identifies as classical in the history of Pashto
letters. Moving from the earliest, now-lost administrative "Daftar" of
Shaykh Mali through the sectarian mystical poetry of Bayazid Ansari's
Roshani movement, the Sunni traditionalist manuals of Akhund Darweza,
and the towering figures of Khushhal Khan Khatak and ʿAbd al-Rahman
Momand (Rahman Baba). This
book reconstructs a written tradition that has been persistently
marginal to both regional and Western scholarship. Pelevin frames this
history through what he calls the dissolution of the Persophonie and the
slow emergence of Pashto as a written language in the shadow of, and
eventually alongside with
the dominant Persian literary cosmopolis. Rather than reading this as a
proto-nationalist story imposed retroactively, he traces a much older
and more specific discourse of Pashtun self-identity — descent,
language, custom, and religion, articulated by the authors themselves,
long before any colonial or nationalist framework existed to name it.

What
makes the book distinctive is its insistence on working from the Pashto
texts as primary sources in their own right, rather than as
illustrations for arguments made in Persian chronicles, in colonial-era
administrative writing, or in the historiography of "Pashtun tribal
society" that has tended to treat literary production as peripheral to
political and military history. Pelevin is explicit about this reversal:
he wants to shift attention from the political to the poetical.

Qaseem
Ahmadzai holds a master's degree in intellectual history from Södertörn
University, Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory,
historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular
attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persephone worlds.
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Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet. And it was through letters that she shared prose reflections–alternately humorous, provocative, affectionate, and philosophical–with her extensive community. While her letters often contain poems, and some letters consist entirely of a single poem, they also constitute a rich genre all their own. Through her correspondence, Dickinson appears in her many facets as a reader, writer, and thinker; social commentator and comedian; friend, neighbor, sister, and daughter.

The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 2024) is the first collected edition of the poet’s correspondence since 1958. It presents all 1,304 of her extant letters, along with the small number available from her correspondents. Almost 300 are previously uncollected, including letters published after 1958, letters more recently discovered in manuscript, and more than 200 “letter-poems” that Dickinson sent to correspondents without accompanying prose. This edition also redates much of her correspondence, relying on records of Amherst weather patterns, historical events, and details about flora and fauna to locate the letters more precisely in time. Finally, updated annotations place Dickinson’s writing more firmly in relation to national and international events, as well as the rhythms of daily life in her hometown. What emerges is not the reclusive Dickinson of legend but a poet firmly embedded in the political and literary currents of her time.

Dickinson’s letters shed light on the soaring and capacious mind of a great American poet and her vast world of relationships. This edition presents her correspondence anew, in all its complexity and brilliance.

Guest: Dr. Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, and serves on the advisory board of the Emily Dickinson Archive. Her scholarship on Dickinson includes Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar; Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them; and The Letters of Emily Dickinson, which she co-edited with Domhnall Mitchell.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the creator, producer and host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

The World She Edited: Katharine S White at the New Yorker

Once Upon A Tome

Your Art Will Save Your Life

Wild Everything

The Banned Book

Becoming The Writer You Already Are

Archival Etiquette What To Know Before You Go

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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