Avsnitt

  • Madame Bovary scandalized and fascinated nineteenth-century France upon its release, and is a groundbreaking exploration of desire, romantic disillusionment, and the mundane realities of rural life. Joining us are Professors Mary Donaldson-Evans who taught at University of Delaware, Jennifer Yee from Oxford University, Rachel Mesch from Boston University, and C.F.S. Creasy from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

    Recommended Readings:
    Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary
    Creasy, C.F.S.. "Flaubert’s Alibi: The Impossible Ensemble of Madame Bovary," Novel. 2015. p363-380.
    Donalson-Evans, Mary. Madame Bovary at the Movies. Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009
    Yee, Jennifer. "Making Madame Bovary's Wedding Cake." article

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Gulliver’s Travels remains one of the finest satires in the English language, delighting in the mockery of everything from government to religion and —despite the passing of nearly three centuries-remaining just as fun, funny and relevant today.
    Our guest-speakers are chief editors of the 2023 Cambridge Companion to Gulliver’s Travels Dr. Daniel Cook and Dr. Nicholas Seager. Daniel is an Associate Dean and Reader in English Literature at the University of Dundee whose teaching and research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Nick is Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. His research interests are Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.

    Recommended Readings:
    Johnathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
    Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023)

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Saknas det avsnitt?

    Klicka här för att uppdatera flödet manuellt.

  • A Norwegian author and well-known worldwide for six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle and multiple prize winner, Karl Ove Knausgaard has been described as "one of the 21st century's greatest literary sensations". With us today is our returning guest-speaker Dr. Bob Blaisdell. As I’ve introduced him on the show before, he is professor of English at the City University of New York’s Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He is author of Creating Anna Karenina: Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine; and another book titled Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius.

    Recommended Readings:
    My Struggle
    Conversation With Karl Ove Knausgaard

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Zuleika Dobson, or an Oxford love story, is the only novel by English essayist Max Beerbohm, a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford published in 1911. The book largely employs a third-person narrator limited to the character of Zuleika then shifting to that of the Duke, then halfway through the novel suddenly becoming a first-person narrator who claims inspiration from the Greek Muse Clio, with her all-seeing narrative perspective provided by Zeus. This allows the narrator to also see the ghosts of notable historical visitors to Oxford, who are present but otherwise invisible to the human characters at certain times in the novel, adding an element of the supernatural. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Zuleika Dobson 59th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Robert Mighall in his Afterword to the New Centenary Edition of Zuleika (published by Collector's Library, in 2011), writes: "Zuleika is of the future that Beerbohm anticipates an all-too-familiar feature of the contemporary scene: the D-list talent afforded A-list media attention."

    With us today is Dr. Margaret Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.

    Recommended Reading:
    Zuleika Dobson

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • New Grub Street is a novel by George Gissing published in 1891, which is set in the literary and journalistic circles of 1880s' London.The story deals with the literary world that Gissing himself had experienced. Its title refers to the London street, Grub Street, which in the 18th century became synonymous with hack literature; by Gissing's time, Grub Street itself no longer existed, though hack-writing certainly did. Its two central characters are a sharply contrasted pair of writers: Edwin Reardon, a novelist of some talent with limited commercial prospects, and Jasper Milvain, a young journalist, hard-working and capable of generosity, but cynical and only semi-scrupulous about writing and its purpose in the modern world.

    With us today to discuss this wonderful novel are Doctors. Katy Mullin, Tom Ue and Richard Menke. Dr. Mullin is professor of modern literature and culture at University of Leeds. Her research explores connections between late-Victorian and Modernist fiction, and sexuality and popular culture. She’s the author of James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity and another book titled Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality and Modernity.

    Dr. Ue is Assistant Professor in English of the Long Nineteenth Century at Cape Breton University and Advising Editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James at University of Nebraska Press. He is the author of Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare. He also writes on George Gissing and Henry Ryecroft.

    Dr. Menke is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems and another book titled “Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions.”

    Recommended Reading:
    George Gissing, New Grub Street

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In the book The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka —carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. With us today is the book’s author Peter J. Kalliney. Dr. Kalliney is Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. His books include Cities of Affluence and Anger, Commonwealth of Letters, and Modernism in a Global Context.

    Recommended Reading:
    Peter J. Kalliney, The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature, 2022

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Taking Sigmund Freud's theories as a point of departure, Jean-Michel Rabaté's 2014 book The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis, explores the intriguing ties between psychoanalysis and literature. With me today is Professor. Jean-Michel Rabaté. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Rabaté has authored and edited more than 40 books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    Recommended Reading:
    Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2014)

    Recommended Merchandise:
    Freudian Sip Coffee Mug for Psychoanalysis geeks
    The Unemployed Philosophers Guild Freud After therapy Breath Mints

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • The famous English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare had during his lifetime produced 39 plays which are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world, translated into every major living language. In recent years, modern criticism has labeled some of these plays "problem plays" that elude easy categorisation, or perhaps purposely break generic conventions, and has introduced the term romances for what scholars believe to be his later comedies. What is so enigmatic about these later plays? Today, the distinguished American scholar and professor of English, Dr. Seth Lerer is going to walk us through the major transitions of Shakespeare's plays as well as how to appreciate the aestheticism demonstrated in his later plays.

    Dr. Seth Lerer specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. Dr. Lerer previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University and won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

    Recommended Readings:
    A Midsummer Night's Dream
    Hamlet
    The Tempest

    Music Credit:
    Artists: Dowland, Holborne, & Byrd. Album: Lifescapes Music in the Time of Shakespeare Song: The Fairie Rounde

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. It recounts the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature through an unorthodox scientific experiment. Though Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, some scholars have argued for it as the first true science-fiction story. The novel has had a considerable influence on literature and on popular culture, spawning a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays. Since the publication of the novel, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used, erroneously, to refer to the monster, rather than to his creator.

    With me today is Dr. Glynis Ridley, Professor of English at the University of Louisville. Glynis received her Ph.D. from Trinity College, Oxford. She is best known as the author of Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, which was winner of the Institute of Historical Research Prize.

    Recommended Reading:

    Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), ed. David Wootton


    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • In a most unsettling dice gambling game that is to determine the fate of its two players, a man loses his brothers, himself, his wife, and his kingdom to the servitude of the monster incarnate, thus meeting the threshold of an ominous age where the good and the just fight the battle against the evil and unjust. Thank you for tuning in to the Global Novel. I’m Claire Hennessy. The Mahābhārata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, and is often compared by Western scholars as important to world civilization as that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or even the works of William Shakespeare. With me today are Dr. Nikhil Govind and Dr. Brian Black.

    Dr. Govind has published in the areas of Indian aesthetic and political modernism . He is the author of Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature (2019) and Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (2014).
    Dr. Black is a lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. His research interests include Indian religion and philosophy, comparative philosophy, the use of dialogue in Indian religious and philosophical texts, and Hindu and Buddhist ethics. He is the author of the book The Character of the Self in Ancient India: Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early Upaniṣads.

    Recommended Reading:
    The Mahābhārata

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character – who is a castaway spending 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad, and encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. Robinson Crusoe was well received in the literary world and is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre. It is generally seen as a contender for the first English novel. The work has been variously read as an allegory for the development of civilization; as a manifesto of economic individualism; and as an expression of European colonial desires.

    Joining me today are Dr. Jakub Lipski, Dr. Glynis Ridley and Dr. Andreas Mueller. Dr. Jakub Lipski is an associate professor of English at Kazimierz Wielki University in Poland. He is the author of In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.

    Dr. Glynis Ridley is the author of Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, which was winner of the Institute of Historical Research Prize. She is professor of English at the University of Louisville.

    Dr. Andreas Mueller is professor and chair of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse and editor of Daniel Defoe’s Non-Fiction: Form, Function, Genre. He has published several essays on Defoe.

    Recommended Readings:
    Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
    Glynis Ridley, Andreas Mueller eds. Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years (2021)
    Jakub Lipski ed. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media (2020)

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Emily Apter’s Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability is a pivotal monograph in the study of comparative literature, published in 2014, ushering a significant turn in theorizing what is world literature and what it should be as a discipline in the US academia. Emily Apter is the major contributor to the recent debate about world literature theory. She is a Harvard graduate and her areas of expertise range from philosophizing in Languages, Political Theory, Translation theory, to continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, French and German literature. She is currently Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University.

    Recommended Reading:
    Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2014)

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Water Margin (水浒传) is one of the earliest Chinese novels written in vernacular Mandarin, and is attributed to Shi Nai'an(施耐庵).It is also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh or All Men Are Brothers. The story, which is set in the Northern Song dynasty (around 1120), tells of how a group of 108 outlaws gather at Liangshan (梁山)Marsh to rebel against the government. Later they are granted amnesty and enlisted by the government to resist the nomadic conquest of the Liao(辽) dynasty and other rebels. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early vernacular fiction and Chinese literature. It has introduced readers to many of the best-known characters in Chinese literature, such as Wu Song(武松), Lin Chong(林冲), Song Jiang(宋江) and Lu Zhishen(鲁智深) to name just a few. Water Margin also exerted a towering influence in the development of fiction elsewhere in East Asia, such as in Japanese literature.

    With us today is Professor. Andrew Plaks. He is Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Archetype and Allegory in the Dream of the Red Chamber as well as The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel.

    Recommended Reading:
    Water Margin
    The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • In today’s episode of the Global Novel, Dr. Daniel Tutt will review Marxism’s key concept of "alienation." He will also discuss the relationship between Marxism and literature.

    Recommended Readings:
    S.S. Solomon Prawer, Karl Marx and World literature
    Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism
    Raymond Williams, Marxism and literature

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. Today I speak with philosopher Daniel Tutt on several basic notions of Marxism and literature. Daniel’s research focuses on psychoanalytic theory and Marxist thought. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation. He is also Adjunct Professor of philosophy at George Washington University, Marymount University and Senior Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies.

    Recommended Reading:
    Robert C. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, second edition

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Don Quixote is a Spanish epic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It was originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. It is the most generative work of fiction of all time. There are literally thousands of works of fiction, theater, poetry, and music inspired, based on, or dealing in other ways with Cervantes’s novel. Don Quixote has been depicted by more artists than any other fictional character, which is part of the reason why he is the most easily recognized fictional character. A founding work of Western literature, Don Quixote is often labelled as the first modern novel and one of the greatest works ever written. It is also one of the most-translated books in the world and the best-selling novel of all time.

    Guest-speakers:
    Prof. Daniel R. Schwarz from Cornell University
    Prof. Howard Mancing from Purdue University


    Recommended Readings:
    Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
    Howard Mancing, Don Quixote: A Reference Guide
    —The Cervante Encyclopedia
    —Don Quixote Around The Globe
    Daniel R. Schwarz ed. Reading the European Novel to 1900

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Aethiopica is a fascinating and complex work that tells the story of a young Ethiopian princess named Chariclea and her lover Theagenes, a Thessalian nobleman. The novel is filled with adventure, romance, and intrigue, and it has captured the imagination of readers for centuries. Written in the third or fourth century AD, Aethiopica is considered one of the earliest surviving examples of the ancient Greek novel. It is a product of a rich literary tradition that flourished in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and is known for its vivid storytelling, complex characters, and exploration of themes such as love, identity, and fate.

    We will explore the world of Aethiopica, its historical and cultural context, and the literary techniques that make it such a compelling work. We will delve into the characters, their motivations, and the complex relationships that drive the plot. We will also examine the enduring legacy of Aethiopica and its influence on later works of literature.

    Recommended Reading:
    Heliodorus, Aethiopika
    Blackwell's A Companion to Ancient Novel

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • Consider, even English literature was a late comer to the academy, therefore the novel, being a late comer to the late comer, did not made it to the curriculum in the English departments world wide by the 1950. In fact, even by the mid 1980, it was so marginal that taking any graduate seminar related with fiction would be considered as side-tracked. Now, major theorists of the novel such as Franco Moretti hailed this field of study as “a great anthropological force,” highlighting its close examination on humankind by redefining the sense of reality and the meaning of individual existence. As now, scholars of the world celebrate the novel’s plurality as the borders of literature are continuously, unpredictably expanded, in today’s episode of the Global Novel, we will concentrate on the rise of the novel, especially its philosophical underpinnings and its main characteristics that set it apart from its predecessors—the epic and prose fiction as well as other earlier novel forms from different cultures and traditions.

    Recommended Readings:
    Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
    Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel
    Franco Moretti, The Novel Vol.1
    —The Novel Vol.2

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • The Orphan of Zhao(趙氏孤兒) is a famous play from the Chinese Yuan dynasty, in the 13th century generally attributed to the dramatist Ji Junxiang (紀君祥). The play is classified in the zaju (雜劇) genre of Chinese drama and revolves around the central theme of revenge and was the earliest Chinese play to be known and even translated in Europe.

    Joining the show today is Dr. Patricia Sieber, associate professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University. Prof. Sieber is the author of the book Theaters of Desire: Authors, Readers, and the Reproduction of Early Chinese Song-Drama and the editor of How To Read Chinese Drama: A Guided Anthology, among her other scholarly publications.

    Recommended reading:
    The Orphan of Zhao and Other Yuan Plays: The Earliest Known Versions

    Video clip of the Royal Shakespeare production’s The Orphan of Zhao

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show
  • La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel which was published anonymously in 1678. Many regarded the novel as the precursor to the modern psychological novel and a classic of world literature. Its author is generally attributed to Madame de La Fayette. The novel is unique for its highly realistic plot, introspective language that explored the characters' inner thoughts and emotions.

    Joining the show today is Dr. Benjamin Fancy, author of the recently published essay titled ‘Fantôme de devoir’: La Princesse de Clèves’s Haunting Duty.

    Recommended Readings:
    Madame de La Fayette, Princesse de Clèves

    This podcast is sponsored by Riverside, the most efficient platform for video recording and editing for podcasters.

    Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched!
    Start for FREE

    Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

    Support the show