The Global Novel: a literature podcast

In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust remains one of the most profound and monumental novels of the 20th century, presenting us an intricate labyrinth of memory, time, and desire. With us are Professor Darci Gardner from Appalachian State University, whose expertise is in 19th and 20th-century French literature and she will shed light on the enigmatic Proustian syntax as a vehicle for story-telling and more. We also have P...

W.H. Auden is the modernist poet who coined the term “the age of anxiety” and is noted for his stylistic and technical achievement. His work intellectually engaged with politics, morals, love and religion. With us today is our distinguished guest, Professor Nicholas Jenkins. Prof. Jenkins teaches English literature at Stanford University and will soon be the director of the Stanford Creative Writing Program. He is also the literary...

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations (1861) stands as a cornerstone of English literature, encapsulating Dickens' unparalleled talent to weave intricate plots with vivid characters against the backdrop of Victorian society. Our guest-speaker today is Prof. Joshua Gooch from D'Youville College in New York. Dr. Gooch's expertise is the intersections of work, power, and aesthetics in literature and film. He is the a...

Known for his masterful blend of realism and romanticism, Stendhal is one of the greatest novelists of the 19th century, and his works offer profound psychological insights and sharp social critiques. His unforgettable characters, such as Julien Sorel in Le Rouge et Le Noir, navigate themes of love, ambition, and identity that remain timeless and relevant. Today on the Global Novel podcast, we will dive into Stendhal's world a...

Despite being rooted in 19th-century France, Honoré de Balzac's exploration of universal themes such as love, greed, and ambition makes his work still relevant today. Our guests are Dr. Melanie Conroy from the University of Memphis, who also authored Literary Geographies in Balzac and Proust (2021), and Dr. Julia Titus from Yale University, author of Dostoyevsky as a Translator of Balzac (2022).

Recommended Readings:...

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 profe...

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.

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 Lit...

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 Co...

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. 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 ...

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. It...

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, a...

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 moderni...

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 gene...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 fro...

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 ...