New Books in Literary Studies

In James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues (Oxford University Press, 2024), Tom Jenks follows a scene-by-scene, sometimes line-by-line, discussion of the pattern by which Baldwin indelibly writes "Sonny's Blues" into the consciousness of readers. It provides ongoing observations of the aesthetics underlying the particulars of th

Margaret Ziolkowski’s Mega-Dams in World Literature: Literary Responses to Twentieth-Century Dam Building (University of Wyoming Press, 2022) reveals the varied effects of large dams on people and their environments as expressed in literary works, focusing on the shifting attitudes toward large dams that emerged over t

Reading with an "I" to the Heavens: Looking at the Qumran Hodayot Through the Lens of Visionary Traditions (de Gruyter, 2018) examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist unders

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, M

At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friends

Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago.  In Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse UP, 2007), Kaplan describes