New Books in Literary Studies

How do we compare across languages, media, and histories, all without flattening differences? And what might Hong Kong teach us about doing comparison differently? Alvin K. Wong examines these and other questions in Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone (Duke UP, 2025), a wide-ranging and thought-provoking study of queerness in Hong Kong. Bringing together Sinophone literature, independent and commercial cinema, documentary films, and visual art, the book asks how Hong Kong’s queer productions might help us rethink the work of comparison itself. Rather than treating Hong Kong as a marginal or derivative space — a space defined by British colonialism, China-centrism, or global capitalism — this book approaches the city as a site of methodological possibilities. The key concept the book advances, “unruly comparison,” replacing neat equivalences and stable categories with incommensurability and transnational connections and linking Hong Kong to other places, times, and queer spaces across the Sinophone. Theoretically deft, the book is filled with a wide range of fascinating material, including work by filmmakers including Wong Kar-wai, Scud, and Fruit Chan; transnational and transgender visual cultures; documentaries about Southeast Asian domestic workers and queer intimacies; and poetry about language and precarity. This book will appeal to those interested in queer theory, Hong Kong studies, Sinophone studies, and comparative approaches. Listeners should also check out Alvin Wong's co-edited volume Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies(Routledge, 2020) and the Society of Sinophone Studies webpage (of which Alvin is currently chair!).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

People who lie down are a fixture of contemporary literature, art, and life. Murder victims, protesters, invalids, depressives, sex workers, and more: these are the recumbent figures that populate Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern UP, 2025) the latest book from literary critic and poet Sarah Dowling. Out now from Northwestern University Press, this fascinating and ambitious study moves to the ground of mainstream and experimental literary and artistic work from the late twentieth century to the present. There Dowling traces a pattern of prone figures, like a chain of paper dolls strewn across the floor. These figures do a surprising amount of work from their horizontal position, challenging our notions of human subjectivity and political agency, and, at the same time, turning our attention to the ground against which they stretch. In this rich and wide-ranging conversation with Alix Beeston, Dowling shares how researching and writing Here Is a Figure allowed her to work through unexpected and minor forms of feminist and anti-colonial action, the inextricability of literature and the other arts, and the groundedness—the historical and material conditions—of all artistic and scholarly labor. She issues a call for scholars of literature and art to shake off habits of mastery and detachment and instead to approach their work as a form of passionate advocacy for the enduring value of criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bandits in Print: "The Water Margin" and the Transformations of the Chinese Novel (Cornell UP, 2023) uses the classic novel The Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan) to examine the world of print in early modern China. Scott W. Gregory traces the way this beloved novel about outlaw heroes, honor, corruption, and brotherhood was adapted and changed by different editor-publishers. While in other contexts print and printing brought stability to texts, Scott shows how in the Ming print itself was an agent of textual change. Bandits in Print is a refreshing take on this traditional novel, one that highlights how malleable Water Margin really was. This book is sure to appeal to those interested in Chinese literature, Ming history, and print culture, as well as those who want to know more about the interaction between manuscript and print in the early modern world. In addition to being an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, Scott is also co-director of the Center for East Asian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

New Orleans is an indispensable element of America's national identity. As one of the most fabled cities in the world, it figures in countless novels, short stories, poems, plays, and films, as well as in popular lore and song. T. R. Johnson's book New Orleans: A Writer's City (Cambridge UP, 2023) provides detailed discussions of all of the most significant writing that this city has ever inspired - from its origins in a flood-prone swamp to the rise of a creole culture at the edges of the European empires; from its emergence as a cosmopolitan, hemispheric crossroads and a primary hub of the slave trade to the days when, in its red light district, the children and grandchildren of the enslaved conjured a new kind of music that became America's greatest gift to the world; from the mid-twentieth-century masterpieces by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and Walker Percy to the realms of folklore, hip hop, vampire fiction, and the Asian and Latin American archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea (University of Hawaii Press, 2025) explores literary texts that countered the prevailing rhetoric of South Korea’s exploitative developmental state. These texts capture moments of anti-utilitarian sacrifice, and include Kim Hyŏn’s critical essays, Pak Sangnyung’s monumental novel A Study of Death (1975), and Ko Chŏnghǔi’s poems about the Passion of Jesus. In Against the Chains of Utility, Serk-Bae Suh challenges the notion of utilitarian sacrifice, which continues to pervade every aspect of Korean society. He argues that any act of sacrifice for a higher cause is inherently utilitarian, regardless of whether its motives are morally sound or questionable. Such sacrifices establish a circuit of exchange, where sacrifice is valued solely based on its ability to achieve an end. To counter this instrumentalization, anti-utilitarian sacrifice must exist as a means without an end. Suh posits that literature’s relevance to society lies in this seemingly nihilistic sacrifice, viewing literature not as a proxy for politics but as the art of imagination in language. Dr. Serk-Bae Suh is an associate professor in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He primarily studies modern Korean literature, and the underlying concern that guides his research issues from the inescapable human condition of being with others. He is also the author of Treacherous Translation: Culture, Nationalism, and Colonialism in Korea and Japan from the 1910s to the 1960s. View his university profile at https://www.faculty.uci.edu/pr.... Buy Against the Chains of Utility: Sacrifice and Literature in 1970s and 1980s South Korea: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/tit... About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies