New Books in Literary Studies

• Ellen Scheible, "Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of 'Mother Ireland'" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

  Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of 'Mother Ireland' (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland. Scheible dissects the ways that 'the woman-as-symbol' remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of sexuality and gender that characterized Irish culture during the twentieth century. Examining works by Elizabeth Bowen, Pamela Hinkson, Emma Donoghue, Tana French, Sally Rooney and James Joyce, this book demonstrates that the definition of Irish nationhood in our contemporary experience of capitalism and biopolitics is dependent on the intertwining and paradoxical tropes of a traditional, yet equally sexual, feminine identity which has been quelled by violence and reproduction. 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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• Douglas Field, "Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and I" (Manchester UP, 2024)

  A moving exploration of the life and work of the celebrated American writer, blending biography and memoir with literary criticism. Since James Baldwin's death in 1987, his writing - including The Fire Next Time, one of the manifestos of the Civil Rights Movement, and Giovanni's Room, a pioneering work of gay fiction - has only grown in relevance. Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the Dark: James Baldwin, My Father and I (Manchester UP, 2024), he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthral us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Field paints an intimate portrait of the writer's life and influence. At the same time, he offers a poignant account of coming to terms with his father's Alzheimer's disease. Interweaving Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory and place, Walking in the dark is an eloquent testament to the enduring power of great literature to illuminate our paths. Douglas Field is a writer and academic who teaches American literature at the University of Manchester. He has published two books on James Baldwin, the most recent of which is All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin (2015). His work has been published in Beat Scene, the Big Issue, the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, where he has been a regular contributor for twenty years. He is a founding editor of James Baldwin Review. 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. Twitter. 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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• Karl Berglund, "Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Streaming Age" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

  What is the future of reading? In Reading Audio Readers: Book Consumption in the Digital Age (Bloombury, 2024), Karl Berglund, Assistant Professor in Literature at Department of Literature and Rhetoric at Upsala University, examines the rise of audiobooks as a new mode of reading books. The analysis draws on digital humanities methods and a detailed industry case study to show who are the readers of audiobooks, how those readers engage and consume books, what sort of genres are most popular, and crucially how all of this us impacting on the publishing industry. The research also picks up on important themes of continuity and change represented by audiobooks, from ongoing issues of inequalities through to the new forms of writing practice and AI generated narrators. A richly detailed but easily accessible text, the book is essential reading for scholars across academia, as well as anyone interested in reading! 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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• Melissa Vise, "The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

  The Unruly Tongue: Speech and Violence in Medieval Italy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025) by Dr. Melissa Vise, offers a new account of how the power of words changed in Western thought. Despite the association of freedom of speech with the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that ushered in the era of modern democracies, Dr. Vise locates the history of the repression of speech not in Europe’s monarchies but rather in Italy’s republics. Exploring the cultural process through which science and medicine, politics, law, literature, and theology together informed a new political ethics of speech, Dr. Vise uncovers the formation of a moral code where the regulation of the tongue became an integral component of republican values in medieval Europe. The medieval citizens of Italy’s republics understood themselves to be wholly subject to the power of words not because they lived in an age of persecution or doctrinal rigidity, but because words had furnished the grounds for their political freedom. Speech-making was the means for speaking the republic itself into existence against the opposition of aristocracy, empire, and papacy. But because words had power, they could also be deployed as weapons. Speech contained the potential for violence and presented a threat to political and social order, and thus needed to be controlled. Dr. Vise shows how the laws that governed and curtailed speech in medieval Italy represented broader cultural understandings of human susceptibility to speech. Tracing anthropologies of speech from religious to political discourse, from civic courts to ecclesiastical courts, from medical texts to the works of Dante and Boccaccio, The Unruly Tongue demonstrates that the thirteenth century marked a major shift in how people perceived the power, and the threat, of speech: a change in thinking about “what words do.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. 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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• Tahrir Hamdi, "Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

  Tahrir Hamdi is a Professor of Resistance Literature at the Arab Open University in Jordan. She is the author of the award-winning Imagining Palestine and serves as an assistant editor of Arab Studies Quarterly. National identities are inherently fluid, shaped as much by collective beliefs and cultural practices as by official borders and territory. For Palestinians, whose national status remains contested, the articulation and imagination of national identity take on particular urgency. Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity (Bloomsbury, 2022) examines how Palestinian intellectuals, artists, activists, and ordinary citizens envision their homeland, engaging with the works of key figures such as Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Naji al-Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Radwa Ashour, Suheir Hammad, and Susan Abulhawa. Drawing on decolonial and resistance concepts—particularly Palestinian sumud—Hamdi argues that the imaginative construction of Palestine is central to the Palestinian struggle. This interdisciplinary study, rooted in critical theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and literary analysis, offers valuable insights for students and scholars of Palestine, Middle East studies, and Arabic literature. Imagining Palestine received the Counter Current Award at the 2023 Palestine Book Awards. Bryant Scott is a professor of English and film studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Texas A&M University at Qatar. 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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