Publications

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
Jing Tsu
Publication Year: 2023
Description:

What does it take to reinvent a language?

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world’s most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China’s most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism - Chapters in Literary Politics
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2023
Description:

Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of the Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Zionism interacted with each other in the nineteenth century. Hannan Hever uses postcolonial theories and theories of nationality to analyze how Jews used literature to make sense of hostility directed toward Jews from their European “host” countries and to set forth their own ideas and preferences regarding their status, control, and treatment. In doing so, Hever theorizes the Enlightenment’s intellectual aims and cultural influences, tracking how the models of integration crucial to Haskalah gave way to Jewish nationalism in the twentieth century.

Bogle Corbet or The Emigrants
Katie Trumpener
Publication Year: 2023
Description:

Through the life-story of its eloquent but depressive narrator, Bogle Corbet links the industrial revolution in Scotland to the French Revolution, Jamaica’s plantation economy to the settlement of English Canada. A pioneering industrial novel, colonial novel, and world systems novel, Bogle Corbet also offers an early psychological portrait of emigrant experience.

Antígonas - Writing from Latin America
Moira Fradinger
Publication Year: 2023
Description:

Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America. This interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies, classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theatre history.

Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative
Peter Brooks
Publication Year: 2022
Description:

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story.  In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

In the Paths of the Pantheon
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2022
Description:

Edited and afterward by Hannan Hever

A quantity of the paths of the Pantheon - essays and studies

Literature of a tribe or literature of a nation?
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2021
Description:

Literature of a tribe or literature of a nation?  discusses the question of the identity of modern Hebrew literature. This sophisticated critical and theoretical look turns to the Hebrew literature written during the Yishuv period, and challenges the relationship that existed between its tribal identity and its national identity, and recounts the fascinating history of the stormy critical debate that took place around the literature of the Land of Israel at the time.

Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons
Katerina Clark
Publication Year: 2021
Description:

A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field.

On the Viewing Platform: The Panorama between Canvas and Screen
Katie Trumpener
Publication Year: 2020
Description:

A wide-ranging study of the painted panorama’s influence on art, photography, and film

Dead Voice Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages
Jesús Velasco
Publication Year: 2020
Description:

An exploration of the thirteenth-century law code known as Siete Partidas

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Martin Hägglund
Publication Year: 2019
Description:

A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism.

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War: Essays on Philology and Responsibility
Hannan Hever
Publication Year: 2019
Description:

Hebrew Literature and the 1948 War, Essays on Philology and Responsibility is the first book-length study to examine the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian Nakba in modern Hebrew literature. Through a rigorous reading of canonical Hebrew literary texts, the author addresses the general failure of Hebrew literature to take responsibility for the Nakba. The book illustrates how the language of modern Hebrew poetry and fiction reflects the symptoms of Israeli national violence, in which the literary language imagines Palestine as an arena where the violent clash between perpetrator and victim takes place. The author uses close readings of the works of Avot Yeahurun, S.