Today, we're unfurling the scrolls of one of the most provocative, scandalous, and riveting novels to ever emerge from China’s Ming dynasty: "Jin Ping Mei," or as it's tantalizingly translated, "The Plum in the Golden Vase." This novel is not just a story; it's a journey into the opulent, and often morally ambiguous, world of 16th-century China. We have the esteemed Dr. Junjie Luo, associate professor in East Asian Studies at Gettysburg College, joining us in the studio. Dr. Luo, with his...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Orphan of Zhao (趙氏孤兒) was the first classical Chinese play to be translated into any European language dating from 1731. It was also the first Chinese play to be adapted and re-enacted by the Royal Shakespeare company in 2012. Prof. Patricia Sieber and Prof. Shih-pe Wang(汪詩珮) in our last episode have jointly revealed how the classical narrative form called zaju(雜劇) effectively enacts the moral dilemma of the protagonist Cheng Ying(程嬰) who sacrifices his own son in order to save his lord’s...

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 are Dr. Patricia Sieber, associate professor of Chinese literature at Ohio State University and Dr. Shih-pe Wang(汪詩珮), Professor of...

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...

Little Nemo in Slumberland is a comic strip created by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. It depicts Nemo having fantastic dreams that were interrupted by his awakening in the final panel. The strip is considered McCay's masterpiece for its experiments with the form of the comics page, its use of color and perspective, its timing and pacing, the size and shape of its panels, and its architectural and other details. Joining the show today is Prof. Scott Bukatman, who is a cultural theorist and...

A cornerstone of world literature and a monument to the power of storytelling, the Arabian Nights has inspired countless authors, from Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce and A.S. Byatt. Now, in this lavishly designed and illustrated edition of The Annotated Arabian Nights, the acclaimed literary historian Paulo Lemos Horta and the woman poet and translator Yasmine Seale co-present a new selection of tales, featuring treasured original stories as well as later additions...