The global novel

What is the future of fiction in an age of globalization? In The Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century’s best-known writers—including Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, and Elena Ferrante—and how they each have a way of imagining the world that sees...

The global south atlantic

Not only were more African slaves transported to South America than to North, but overlapping imperialisms and shared resistance to them have linked Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean for over five centuries. Yet despite the rise in transatlantic, oceanic, hemispheric, and regional studies,...

The making of barbarians

A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for todayDebates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique. But literature is a universe with many cen...

The monstrous and the marvelous

With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous—as transmuted in the alembic ...

The national frame

The National Frame rethinks the politics of art by focusing on the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship, continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the...

The politics and poetics of friendship

The portrayal of breastfeeding in literature

Analyses the depiction of breastfeeding in literature, what it tells us about how women are perceived in our society and how it matters.

The postcolonial contemporary

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it.

The return of proserpina

Sicily and the strategies of empire in the poetic imagination of classical and medieval EuropeIn the first century BC, Cicero praised Sicily as Rome’s first overseas province and confirmed it as the mythic location for the abduction of Proserpina, known to the Greeks as Persephone, by the god of ...

The self-help compulsion

The Self-Help Compulsion reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Beth Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebuke...

The shahnameh

Hamid Dabashi insightfully traces the history, authorship, poetic significance, complicated legacy, and enduring significance of the Iranian epic poem the Shahnameh. In addition to explaining what makes it such a distinctive literary work, he makes a powerful case that we need to rethink the noti...

The social work of narrative

This book addresses the ways in which a range of representational forms have influenced and helped implement the project of human rights across the world, and seeks to show how public discourses on law and politics grow out of and are influenced by the imaginative representations of human rights....

The transcontinental maghreb

Through close readings of literary and cultural texts, proposes to recalibrate readings of Francophone Maghrebi literature and their critical methodologies in light of Mediterranean Studies.

The underwater eye

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceansIn The Underwater Eye, Margaret Cohen tells the fascinating story of how the development of modern diving equipment and movie camera technology has allowed docu...

The values in numbers

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application together with reflection on the kin...

Through the looking glass

Translation and violence

Rethinking the ethics and politics of translation in the age of AIThe rapid development of AI-powered translation tools is making translation more accessible than ever before, raising in a dramatic new way the old utopian promise of translation—to allow transparent dialogue across linguistic barr...

Translation multiples

A new genre of writing demonstrating that translation is neither a transparent medium nor a secondary form of literatureIn Translation Multiples, Kasia Szymanska examines what happens when translators, poets, and artists expose the act of translation by placing parallel translation variants next ...

Translation theory for literary translators

This book analyses how practicing literary translators can benefit from translation theory.

Transmedial resonance

Introduces a new way of understanding influence, reception, and adaptation via the work of Italy’s most famous modern writer In Transmedial Resonance, Robert A. Rushing addresses the remarkable and ongoing responses to the imagination of Italo Calvino, Italy’s most important modern writer. Since ...

Underground passages

Investigating the connections between political culture and political potency.

Up from the depths

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in BiographyA double portrait of two of America’s most influential writers that reveals the surprising connections between them—and their uncanny relevance to our age of crisisUp from the Depths tells the interconnected stories of two of the mos...

Vernacular english

How English has become a language of the people in India—one that enables the state but also empowers protests against itAgainst a groundswell of critiques of global English, Vernacular English argues that literary studies are yet to confront the true political import of the English language in t...

Voices, places

Celebrated poet David Mason’s delightful collection of essays explores the connections between literary voice and place.

What's so great about the great books?

A popular novelist and literary blogger answers those who claim the classics are too difficult, too problematic, and too white—and explains what we gain by reading themWhen she was in her early twenties, then-aspiring writer Naomi Kanakia set out to read the Great Books—humankind’s most highly re...

Words from india in the west

This edited volume critically assesses different aspects of five literary genres – novels, poetry, short-stories, drama, and non-fictional prose – contributed to by the Indian diasporic writers settled principally in North America and Europe.