Frankenstein (1818)

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 interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Nick is Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University, UK. His research interests are Restoration and eighteenth-century literature.

Recommended Readings:
Johnathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels (2023)

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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 Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine; and another book titled Chekhov Becomes Chekhov: The Emergence of a Literary Genius.

Recommended Readings:
My Struggle
Conversation With Karl Ove Knausgaard

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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 ghosts of notable historical visitors to Oxford, who are present but otherwise invisible to the human characters at certain times in the novel, adding an element of the supernatural. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Zuleika Dobson 59th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Robert Mighall in his Afterword to the New Centenary Edition of Zuleika (published by Collector's Library, in 2011), writes: "Zuleika is of the future that Beerbohm anticipates an all-too-familiar feature of the contemporary scene: the D-list talent afforded A-list media attention."

With us today is Dr. Margaret Stetz, the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.

Recommended Reading:
Zuleika Dobson

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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 Reardon, a novelist of some talent with limited commercial prospects, and Jasper Milvain, a young journalist, hard-working and capable of generosity, but cynical and only semi-scrupulous about writing and its purpose in the modern  world.

With us today to discuss this wonderful novel are Doctors. Katy Mullin, Tom Ue and Richard Menke. Dr. Mullin is professor of modern literature and culture at University of Leeds. Her research explores connections between late-Victorian and Modernist fiction, and sexuality and popular culture. She’s the author of James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity and another book titled Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality and Modernity.

Dr. Ue is Assistant Professor in English of the Long Nineteenth Century at Cape Breton University and Advising Editor of The Complete Letters of Henry James at University of Nebraska Press. He is the author of Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare. He also writes on George Gissing and Henry Ryecroft. 

Dr. Menke is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems and another book titled “Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions.”

Recommended Reading:
George Gissing, New Grub Street

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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 aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. With us today is the book’s author Peter J. Kalliney. Dr. Kalliney is Professor of  English at the University of Kentucky. His books include Cities of Affluence and Anger, Commonwealth of Letters, and Modernism in a Global Context.

Recommended Reading:
Peter J. Kalliney, The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature, 2022

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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 Beckett,  Pound and Joyce. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Recommended Reading:
Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2014)

Recommended Merchandise:
Freudian Sip Coffee Mug for Psychoanalysis geeks
The Unemployed Philosophers Guild Freud After therapy Breath Mints

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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 believe to be his later comedies. What is so enigmatic about these later plays? Today, the distinguished American scholar and professor of English, Dr. Seth Lerer is going to walk us through the major transitions of Shakespeare's plays as well as how to appreciate the aestheticism demonstrated in his later plays.

Dr. Seth Lerer specializes in historical analyses of the English language, and in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Humanities from 2009 to 2014. Dr. Lerer previously held the Avalon Foundation Professorship in Humanities at Stanford University and won the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Children’s Literature: A Readers’ History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

Recommended Readings:
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hamlet
The Tempest

Music Credit:
Artists: Dowland, Holborne, & Byrd. Album: Lifescapes Music in the Time of Shakespeare Song: The Fairie Rounde

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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 complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays. Since the publication of the novel, the name "Frankenstein" has often been used, erroneously, to refer to the monster, rather than to his creator.

With me today is Dr. Glynis Ridley, Professor of English at the University of Louisville. Glynis received her Ph.D. from Trinity College, Oxford. She is best known as the author of Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, which was winner of the Institute of Historical Research Prize.

Recommended Reading:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), ed. David Wootton

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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 important to world civilization as that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or even the works of William Shakespeare. With me today are Dr. Nikhil Govind and Dr. Brian Black.

Dr. Govind has published in the areas of Indian aesthetic and political modernism . He is the author of Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature (2019) and Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (2014).
Dr. Black is a lecturer in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. His research interests include Indian religion and philosophy, comparative philosophy, the use of dialogue in Indian religious and philosophical texts, and Hindu and Buddhist ethics. He is the author of the book The Character of the Self in Ancient India: Priests, Kings, and Women in the Early Upaniṣads.

Recommended Reading:
The Mahābhārata

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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 literary genre. It is generally seen as a contender for the first English novel. The work has been variously read as an allegory for the development of civilization; as a manifesto of economic individualism; and as an expression of European colonial desires. 

Joining me today are Dr. Jakub Lipski, Dr. Glynis Ridley and Dr. Andreas Mueller. Dr. Jakub Lipski is an associate professor of English at Kazimierz Wielki University in  Poland. He is the author of In Quest of the Self: Masquerade and Travel in the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Painting the Novel: Pictorial Discourse in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction.

Dr. Glynis Ridley is the author of Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, which was winner of the Institute of Historical Research  Prize. She is professor of English at the University of Louisville.

Dr. Andreas Mueller is professor and chair of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse and editor of Daniel Defoe’s Non-Fiction: Form, Function, Genre. He has published several essays on Defoe.

Recommended Readings:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Glynis Ridley, Andreas Mueller eds. Robinson Crusoe After 300 Years (2021)
Jakub Lipski ed. Rewriting Crusoe: The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media (2020)

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