New Books in Literary Studies

In Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026), analysing the past two decades of literature on Holocaust memory and migration stories, Agnes Mueller engages with writers such as W.G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Hilsenrath, Benjamin Stein, Mirna Funk, Fred Wander, Barbara Honigmann, Julia Franck, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Olga Grjasnowa, and Kat Kaufmann to explore current debates on Israel, the German Democratic Republic, gender, Jewish and Muslim identity, and antisemitism.

Her new readings of German-language texts by younger authors present robust challenges to entrenched ideas concerning the singularity of the Holocaust, multidirectional memory, and a range of other memory debates. Jewish identity and Muslim identity are shown in direct conversation with other migrants' experiences, and literature is revealed to be a brave space where Holocaust memory is newly imagined. Mueller's study invites a radically new way to think about the Holocaust and sheds new and valuable light on adjacent contemporary discourses.

Agnes Mueller (M.A., LMU Munich, Germany; Ph.D., Vanderbilt U), Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature. She is core faculty in Jewish Studies and affiliated with Women's and Gender Studies. Her essay publications are on German American relations, contemporary literature, German Jewish studies, and Holocaust memory. Her 2004 anthology German Pop Culture: How "American" Is It? (U of Michigan P) is still widely used for teaching and research. Her 2015 monograph is entitled The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature, (Northwestern UP), available in German translation as Die Unfähigkeit zu lieben (Königshausen & Neumann, 2017). With Katja Garloff she edited German Jewish Literature After 1990 (Camden House, 2018). In Spring of 2025 she was the Carol Kahn Strauss Fellow in Jewish Studies at the American Academy in Berlin. Her new book, Holocaust Migration in German Jewish Literatures (Cambridge UP, 2026) reveals how, in recent German Jewish literature, Jewish and Muslim migration stories converge to shape the future of Holocaust memory. She is currently at work on a new monograph entitled The Family’s Fight: Resisting State Control, where she investigates how families deal with loved ones who are or were political prisoners, and how that relationship reflects back on authoritarian regimes.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn’head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author wasn’t only America’s greatest humorist, but also one of its most subtle political thinkers. But what was the political philosophy of the elusive and ironic Mark Twain for his new democratic America?

To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest Ivan Kenneally. A contributor to The New Atlantis and First Things, among other publications, he wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review on modern reactions to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), titled: “Mark Twain’s Absurd, Noble America,” which we will be discussing today.

We also talk about the travels of the two runaways Huck and Jim, along with their many disguises and rouses, how Americans like Tom Sawyer read European literature too dogmatically, the conmen Twain depicts in the Duke and Dauphin, technical versus tacit knowledge in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, contemporary interest in Twain from Ron Chernow and Percival Everett, the nature of irony as well as the poverty of modern comedy, and what philosophers and comedians alike can learn from the Missouri author and philosopher.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of
Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating
the country’s still-flourishing
and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most
emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and
stone built
cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland
had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism,
due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of
Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and
hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James
‘Ossian’ Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel,
Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others.

Edinburgh: City of Romanticism
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a
long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and
much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and
Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how
Edinburgh’s Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst
whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals,
and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic
cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character
of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that
countless tourists come daily to see.

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

Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026) María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, explores people’s relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and 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

What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine?

In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood
reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book
argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the
plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Sugar, sweetness, moral
instruction, and domestic comfort were all tied to systems of
enslavement and colonial trade, even as the violence behind them was
softened or erased in stories for young readers.

The book also
examines how ideas of white civility shaped childhood. White children,
particularly girls, were cast as symbols of innocence, refinement, and
moral feeling, while Black children were excluded from those same
protections. Through analyses of persecuted-heroine narratives,
missionary education, and colonial schooling, the study reveals how
children’s literature helped normalise racial hierarchy across the
British Empire.

Yet the project is equally attentive to
resistance and alternative ethical traditions. Afro-Caribbean oral
storytelling, including Anansi tales, songs, and folktales, emerges as a
powerful counterarchive. These traditions preserved histories of
survival, collective memory, and resistance that colonial print culture
often attempted to suppress. The discussion of the “Queen Mary” Fireburn
song, for instance, highlights how storytelling became a form of
ethical education and cultural continuity across generations.

One
of the book’s most striking contributions is its global scope.
Children’s texts on slavery circulated far beyond Britain and the
Caribbean, travelling to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East via
missionary and imperial networks. In translation and adaptation, these
works sometimes reinforced imperial ideologies, but they could also be
reshaped in unexpected ways by ‘local’ readers and writers.

Sugarcoated Ethics
asks readers to reconsider what children’s literature teaches us about
morality, empathy, and history. It challenges the assumption that
childhood stories are politically neutral and invites us to think more
critically about the ethical worlds children’s books continue to create
today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies