Literature & Writers

We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...

How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...

This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist...

As a folklorist and historian of ancient science, I investigate the crossroads of classical antiquity, literature and art, archaeology, and history. My goal is uncovering historical and scientific realities embedded...

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

Most readers browsing through the book in a bookstore will probably end up lingering over the fourth chapter, which has not only a catchy title (“Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy”), but...

Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

This book took me many years to write—longer than the Trojan War itself took. At Oxford University, where I teach, students study every period of English Literature from 800 CE...

I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to...

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them.How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

The History of Missed Opportunities explores an unrecognized, certainly an unappreciated, development in Romantic-era Britain: the discovery of everyday life as a world that had been overlooked or, as Maurice...

My book elaborates upon the ongoing, centuries-long reality of anti-blackness as a structure of feeling; the recent ecological turn in black studies as an inter-institutional, intracommunal response to the fact...

Loath to Print considers a brief moment in the much longer history of knowledge production and dissemination; specifically, the book addresses ideas of scientific elitism. With the advent of print,...

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

I became interested in writing about age as a “non-traditional” graduate student in my early forties. Not just self-conscious about being older than my classmates, I also couldn’t help but...

Inventing Tomorrow sets out to tell a story of 20th century literary culture that follows an entirely different path from the one that has dominated academia for the last fifty...

Fake It investigates a set of fictional literary and art forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations that range from the 1660s to the twenty-first century. In the prologue, I...

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

This book examines the huge number of artistic representations of women warriors that exist in German from the Renaissance to the present—on the stage, in the opera house, on the...

Theory of the Gimmick continues the effort undertaken in my previous books, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) and Ugly Feelings (2005) to get people to take “minor,” trivial, or everyday affective...

The long and short of short fiction is that it’s been mostly ignored in literary history. We literary critics have a distinct bias towards novels. The genre is supposedly narratively...

The migration of intellectuals and academics made refugees by the politics and wars of mid-twentieth-century Europe consolidated the emergence of comparative literature as a field in the American university system...

In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...

The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...

Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters...

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...

We meet great artists backward—through the masterpieces, with the ending already known—so their greatness starts to look inevitable. But nobody lived it that way. A book about the long, uncertain middle of creative lives, and a pointed skepticism toward the comforting idea that failure is secretly good for us.

Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense poet. But few people know that he was also...

Russians are famous for taking ideas to the extreme and then acting on them. That is why they created totalitarianism. Russian thinkers before Communism also tended to take ideas to...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney opens a new door into understanding the dynamics between the president’s office and the vice president’s office. Material for the book was gathered over...

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

In a nutshell, this richly illustrated biography explores Charlotte Brontë’s life through the garments she left behind, pieces that, until now, had remained largely unexplored.Collectively, these material witnesses...

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

Through these various case studies, Public Acoustics offers a parallel history to traditional narratives of the emergence of the public sphere, emphasizing how writers understood the importance of public discourse in terms of its sensuous, affective, confusing, and mobile qualities over its capacity to produce clear articulations of public opinion.

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike...

Fashioning Faces, a cross-disciplinary study, looks at how literary and visual portraiture in the British Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture.I consider the Romantic era as a transitional period...

As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts...

Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...

In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...

My book is about the making of the literate imagination in the history of children’s literature. More than just a survey of books and authors, Children’s Literature is a critical...

As a Canadian who specializes in American literature, I’ve always been fascinated by the weakness of the U.S. welfare state compared to that of other first world nations. The reasons...

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place...

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a...

The treatment of beasts in Renaissance literature tells us something about their evolving place in European culture more generally. It also tells us how early modern society understood the difference...

The main purpose of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? is to offer a science-fictional theory of representation.Most people think of science fiction as a genre devoted not to the...

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex.Rather than a return...

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...

My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...

Essaying Shakespeare, as its title suggests, is a collection of essays about Shakespeare.To” essay” means both to try or attempt, and to put to the test. Written and published over...

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

Most likely someone flipping through On Tarzan at a bookstore will first notice the photographs introducing each chapter and the epigraphs. I hope this potential reader sees the humor here.There’s...

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...

The greatest challenge in writing a cultural history is that its primary object of study is incredibly hard to pin down. The focus should not only be on the materiality...

The Conservative Turn began, alas, as a dissertation, which is one reason why it’s based on archival research. I had entered graduate school with an interest in the Russian Revolution...

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...

With the exception only of the Civil War, Americans faced in the Depression of the 1930s the most wrenching and divisive domestic crisis in their history. An economic structure that...

Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...

Mark Twain didn’t believe in ghosts—at least, not the sort that rattle chains or float down darkened corridors. This fact, however, appears to carry no weight in the afterlife. Only a few years after his death, a number of psychics and mediums began to conjure the ghost of Mark Twain. And with an impressive regularity, the ghostly Twain appeared on cue, keen to perform and willing to offer advice...

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...

We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...

How do nations, peoples, and ethnic groups fashion their own collective identities? For antiquity as well as for the modern era, one general answer has prevailed: societies shape their self-consciousness...

This book is about the cultural connection between love and illness—a connection often referred to in the everyday use as “lovesickness” and all too often automatically assumed. As a specialist...

As a folklorist and historian of ancient science, I investigate the crossroads of classical antiquity, literature and art, archaeology, and history. My goal is uncovering historical and scientific realities embedded...

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to...

Most readers browsing through the book in a bookstore will probably end up lingering over the fourth chapter, which has not only a catchy title (“Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy”), but...

Songbooks is a book about books on American popular music. It’s a vast subject, and my book covers books from a 1770 collection of psalmody by a tanner in revolutionary...

At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had...

This book took me many years to write—longer than the Trojan War itself took. At Oxford University, where I teach, students study every period of English Literature from 800 CE...

I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to...

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in...

As an historian I have always been interested in the problem of defining historical periods and understanding the transitions between them.How, for example, did the Middle Ages, with its religious,...

The History of Missed Opportunities explores an unrecognized, certainly an unappreciated, development in Romantic-era Britain: the discovery of everyday life as a world that had been overlooked or, as Maurice...

My book elaborates upon the ongoing, centuries-long reality of anti-blackness as a structure of feeling; the recent ecological turn in black studies as an inter-institutional, intracommunal response to the fact...

Loath to Print considers a brief moment in the much longer history of knowledge production and dissemination; specifically, the book addresses ideas of scientific elitism. With the advent of print,...

George W. Bush is said to have claimed that “the problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Whether or not it is true, that...

I became interested in writing about age as a “non-traditional” graduate student in my early forties. Not just self-conscious about being older than my classmates, I also couldn’t help but...

Inventing Tomorrow sets out to tell a story of 20th century literary culture that follows an entirely different path from the one that has dominated academia for the last fifty...

Fake It investigates a set of fictional literary and art forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations that range from the 1660s to the twenty-first century. In the prologue, I...

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway...

This book examines the huge number of artistic representations of women warriors that exist in German from the Renaissance to the present—on the stage, in the opera house, on the...

Theory of the Gimmick continues the effort undertaken in my previous books, Our Aesthetic Categories (2012) and Ugly Feelings (2005) to get people to take “minor,” trivial, or everyday affective...

The long and short of short fiction is that it’s been mostly ignored in literary history. We literary critics have a distinct bias towards novels. The genre is supposedly narratively...

The migration of intellectuals and academics made refugees by the politics and wars of mid-twentieth-century Europe consolidated the emergence of comparative literature as a field in the American university system...

In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...

The best entry point for the book is probably the introduction. I use that rather lengthy section to demonstrate the permeability of modernist boundaries and to lay out my argument...

Stalking Nabokovfocuses always on Vladimir Nabokov and occasionally also on me in persistent pursuit, wielding a variety of nets, in different seasons and terrains, panting with effort while he flutters...

The final three chapters of The New Asian City each examine in detail one national site and one aesthetic form: Singaporean city poetry, Taiwanese New Cinema, and Korean minjung (people’s...

My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...

In ancient myth, Achilles is killed by Paris as he tries to invade the gates of Troy. After being buried in a magnificent mound by the sea, his shade enjoys...

The book examines Israeli culture in the 1990s between the two popular Palestinian uprisings, the intifadas, in 1987 and 2000, respectively. By looking at popular media and literature, I highlight...

We meet great artists backward—through the masterpieces, with the ending already known—so their greatness starts to look inevitable. But nobody lived it that way. A book about the long, uncertain middle of creative lives, and a pointed skepticism toward the comforting idea that failure is secretly good for us.

Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense poet. But few people know that he was also...

Russians are famous for taking ideas to the extreme and then acting on them. That is why they created totalitarianism. Russian thinkers before Communism also tended to take ideas to...

The Co-Presidency of Bush and Cheney opens a new door into understanding the dynamics between the president’s office and the vice president’s office. Material for the book was gathered over...

What I'm looking at is less what the media itself is saying and more how people get attached to it — how they begin to police it and say, this is the way it has to be. When The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power comes out, and there are Black elves and Black dwarfs, and people throw a fit — well, why do you care? What is it about your vision of this imagined world that has you so opposed to the presence of diversity?

In a nutshell, this richly illustrated biography explores Charlotte Brontë’s life through the garments she left behind, pieces that, until now, had remained largely unexplored.Collectively, these material witnesses...

I develop the concept of ‘culturally adapted strategy’ to explain how they creatively engage with political narratives, draw moral legitimacy, and harness cultural resources to carve out a unique identity, one that affords them an..

Through these various case studies, Public Acoustics offers a parallel history to traditional narratives of the emergence of the public sphere, emphasizing how writers understood the importance of public discourse in terms of its sensuous, affective, confusing, and mobile qualities over its capacity to produce clear articulations of public opinion.

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

Human beings think, speak, and write in metaphors. Those metaphors change as cultures do; people use them to respond to and reshape the world. Indeed, neuroscientists and literary scholars alike...

Fashioning Faces, a cross-disciplinary study, looks at how literary and visual portraiture in the British Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture.I consider the Romantic era as a transitional period...

As recently as the 1930s there were no creative writing programs, and now there are hundreds. My book The Program Era is a literary history of postwar America that puts...

Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...

In the Company of Strangers is about how different ideas of the family affect the deep narrative structure of novels.The principles of marriage and reproduction seem to be fundamental to...

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists...

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new...

On the face of it, my title is silly: there is no “before fiction” for humans, for we are, from the start of recorded history and from the start of...

My book is about the making of the literate imagination in the history of children’s literature. More than just a survey of books and authors, Children’s Literature is a critical...

As a Canadian who specializes in American literature, I’ve always been fascinated by the weakness of the U.S. welfare state compared to that of other first world nations. The reasons...

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place...

The Interethnic Imagination raises to view an important shift in the contemporary literature Americans have been reading. It claims that since the last quarter of the twentieth century, in the...

Most of the existing scholarship on Palestinian citizens of Israel revolves around Israeli policies and majority-minority relations. This approach reflects in part the dominance of anthropologists and sociologists and social...

I am trained in philosophy and literary analysis. My particular take on the intersection of philosophy and literature consists in using the tools of a literary scholar to analyze a...

The treatment of beasts in Renaissance literature tells us something about their evolving place in European culture more generally. It also tells us how early modern society understood the difference...

The main purpose of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? is to offer a science-fictional theory of representation.Most people think of science fiction as a genre devoted not to the...

As someone who trained in comparative literature, I have been taught to focus on literary text and ignore science and technology. I was among the first generation of graduate students...

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist...

The book asks not where the Global South is—a fair question in its own right—but when it is. After the colonial era, many postcolonial writers felt an acute sense of belatedness. They considered the “true present” to be somewhere else—namely, in Europe...

The concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” introduced in the book’s title, is one of the book’s innovations and points to its larger significance. The term Anthropocene was introduced in 2000...

At its heart, Radical Romanticism is a book about how we might live—ethically, imaginatively, and in fuller relation—at a time when so many feel unmoored by environmental upheaval, social injustice, and the fraying of democratic life. It suggests that a subset of Romanticism, when seen from a broader angle

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex.Rather than a return...

Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere,...

My book looks at what happened to American literary culture when a new world of mass culture—tabloid newspapers, amusement parks, early cinema, Wild West shows—began to dominate public life. Most...

Essaying Shakespeare, as its title suggests, is a collection of essays about Shakespeare.To” essay” means both to try or attempt, and to put to the test. Written and published over...

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.I write about Habsburg emperors like...

Most likely someone flipping through On Tarzan at a bookstore will first notice the photographs introducing each chapter and the epigraphs. I hope this potential reader sees the humor here.There’s...

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...

The greatest challenge in writing a cultural history is that its primary object of study is incredibly hard to pin down. The focus should not only be on the materiality...

The Conservative Turn began, alas, as a dissertation, which is one reason why it’s based on archival research. I had entered graduate school with an interest in the Russian Revolution...

Throughout history people have taken their dreams very seriously. Dreams themselves, and the way we interpret them, take us into the deepest part of our individual as well as cultural...

With the exception only of the Civil War, Americans faced in the Depression of the 1930s the most wrenching and divisive domestic crisis in their history. An economic structure that...

Were a browsing reader to open my book at random, he or she could do worse than opening up to the third chapter, which deals with the average artist. Here...

Mark Twain didn’t believe in ghosts—at least, not the sort that rattle chains or float down darkened corridors. This fact, however, appears to carry no weight in the afterlife. Only a few years after his death, a number of psychics and mediums began to conjure the ghost of Mark Twain. And with an impressive regularity, the ghostly Twain appeared on cue, keen to perform and willing to offer advice...

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire....

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon...