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…

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 Univ…

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 Co…

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 E…

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 …

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, …

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…

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 Pennsylvan…

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 "pro…

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 ar…

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…

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…

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 wo…

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 th…

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 podcas…

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 notio…

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 depicte…

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 o…

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…

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…

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 charac…

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 siz…

King Shahriyar and his brother King Shahzaman of India and China suspect their suffering to be unique in this world. Their wives have slept with other men, and this drives them to grief, to madness—Shahzaman skewers his wife and her lover. Shahriyar begins to take a new bride each night, only to have her killed the next morning. Parents grieve; the…

In 1886, a twenty-six-year-old Anton Chekhov was publishing short stories, humor pieces, and articles at an astonishing rate, and was still a practicing physician. Yet as he honed his craft and continued to draw inspiration from the vivid characters in his own life, he found himself—to his surprise and occasional embarrassment—admired by a growing …

“Once upon a time: the comic strip was a poor, un- baptized, and unrecognized stepsister of caricature, which was the poor sister of the graphic arts, which were the poor sisters of the fine arts. If there was a fairy godmother at the birth of the sleeping beauty, the prince of public acclaim was slow in coming to wake her.” Such is the witty humor…

Anna Karenina is one of the most nuanced characters in world literature and we return to her, and the novel she propels, again and again. Joining us today is critic and professor Bob Blaisdell who unravels the novel’s author Leo Tolstoy’s family, literary, and day-to-day life during the period that he conceived, drafted, abandoned, and revised Anna…

Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. After I talked with Tierry Groensteen, whose work on comic theory was translated and introduced to the Anglophone world by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen, today I speak with thes…

Listen to Thierry Groensteen, one of the leading French-speaking comics researchers and theorists join and speak on the Global Novel podcast. Tierry's works have profound influence beyond the field of comics. According to the English translators of System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen “is not only the most prolific scholar on the subject of comics,…

Mulan is a legendary folk heroine from the Northern and Southern dynasties era of Chinese history, roughly from 4th to 6th century CE. The story of Mulan was originally told in Ballad of Mulan as a Yuefu (樂府) genre, in which Chinese poems were composed in a folk song style. Over the centuries, the story of Mulan has been reiterated, being performed…

In mythology and the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. Today I speak with Dr. Shepherd Siegel, author of the recently published book titled Tricking Power into …

Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源记) is a short prose fable written by China's best known poet during the six dynasties period, Tao Yuanming (陶渊明). Joining us today is Dr. Wendy Swartz, professor of Chinese literature at Rutgers to share her knowledge with us on the subject. Prof. Swartz is the author of Reading Tao Yuanming: Shifting Paradigms of Historica…

A mysterious spy who wrote about the most captivatingly infamous intellectual of the time, Christopher Marlowe is among the most accomplished and enigmatic of the Elizabethan playwrights. Joining us today is Dr. Robert Sawyer, professor in the department of literature and language at East Tennessee State University. Professor Sawyer’s is the author…

Paradise Lost is an epic poem by the 17th-century English poet John Milton, published in 1667. In its most creative fashion, it supplemented the biblical story of the origin and the Fall of Man, and imaginatively explains how and why Adam and Eve are tempted by the fallen angel Satan and thereby their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is consid…

The word “Inferno” is the Italian for Hell, an imaginary creation by the 14th-century poet Dante. The Inferno is the first part of the Divine Comedy, followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. One of the most therapeutic books of the world, it is about a hero’s journey through Hell, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the poem, Hell is depicted a…

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic to compare "the effect of education(παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. Along with my interpretation of the cave,…

Are ghost stories real? And why do people write and read ghost stories in early medieval China? Prof. Robert Ford Campany, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair of Humanities, from department of East Asian Studies at Vanderbilt University will shed light on a distinctive Chinese narrative genre called "zhiguai"(志怪) or Chinese strange writings. Prof. Ca…

In this episode of The Global Novel podcast, Dr. David Kunzle (UCLA) will uncover the unknown history of how a once frowned-upon visual story-telling genre, called "picture-stories," legendarily made its way into the hands of one of the greatest literary figures of world literature Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and since then, won the hearts of the e…

The Tale of Genji (or Genji Monogatari) is a classic work of Japanese literature written in the early 11th century by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu. The work recounts the fictional life of Hikaru Genji, or "Radiant Prince", who is the son of an ancient Japanese emperor (known to readers as Emperor Kiritsubo) and a low-ranking …

What is world literature? How do we define its scope and nature? This episode will share a critical lens on the current theories, methods and debates on world literature, which move in and between countries and cultures. By investigating canonical works of leading theorists, we will get a sense of how institution shapes its discourse around the fie…

Many may still remember the 2002 martial art film directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Jet Li. The name is Hero and it is based on the historical event of Jing Ke’s assassination attempt on the first emperor of China, King of Qin in 227 BC. The original story is explicitly detailed in the Records of The Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese na…

Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who was known for his beauty. According to Tzetzes, he rejected all romantic advances, eventually falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, staring at it for the remainder of his life. After he died, in his place sprouted a flower bearing his name. This episode explores how aspects o…

In the episode we will explore one of the earliest narratives that attempts at capturing the essence of wisdom, freedom and happiness. It was 375 BC when Plato was writing the Republic, the same time when Zhuangzi wrote his eponymous work in the warring states of China. This episode will explore how Zhuangzi’s philosophical narratives convey their …

What's the difference between oral and written form of story-telling? How do Homer's poetic narratives set the canon for Western literature? We will walk through The Illiad and The Odyssey together to find the answers. Suggested Readings: The Illiad The Odyssey Troy [movie] The Odyssey[movie] Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method This podcast is …