New Books in Literary Studies

While many know that Mark Twain created some of the most famous characters in literature—Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and Puddn’head Wilson—too few have understood that the Missouri author wasn’t only America’s greatest humorist, but also one of its most subtle political thinkers. But what was the political philosophy of the elusive and ironic Mark Twain for his new democratic America?

To help answer that question, as we continue Season 6, I have as our guest Ivan Kenneally. A contributor to The New Atlantis and First Things, among other publications, he wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review on modern reactions to Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), titled: “Mark Twain’s Absurd, Noble America,” which we will be discussing today.

We also talk about the travels of the two runaways Huck and Jim, along with their many disguises and rouses, how Americans like Tom Sawyer read European literature too dogmatically, the conmen Twain depicts in the Duke and Dauphin, technical versus tacit knowledge in his memoir Life on the Mississippi, contemporary interest in Twain from Ron Chernow and Percival Everett, the nature of irony as well as the poverty of modern comedy, and what philosophers and comedians alike can learn from the Missouri author and philosopher.

Hosted by Ryan Shinkel, Madison’s Notes is the podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. The transcript for this interview is available on the JMP substack page, “Madison’s Footnotes.
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Romanticism made Scotland famous. It critically shaped the course of
Scottish culture, while impacting on cultures elsewhere and inaugurating
the country’s still-flourishing
and lucrative tourist industry. This book is about Edinburgh’s most
emblematic architecture over the long 19th century: the castellated and
stone built
cityscape of national revivalist architecture. It reveals why Scotland
had by the 1820s become one of Europe’s great centres of Romanticism,
due both to the majestic Highlands, and to Edinburgh itself as city of
Romanticism. Additionally, Edinburgh developed as the main centre and
hub for travellers drawn to Romantic Scotland through the work of James
‘Ossian’ Macpherson and Sir Walter Scott: visitors including Schinkel,
Mozart, Verne, Turner, Haydn, amongst innumerable others.

Edinburgh: City of Romanticism
(Lund Humphries, 2026) by Dr. Aonghus MacKechnie also provides a
long-overdue counterbalance to the contrastingly much-examined and
much-published topic of Enlightenment Edinburgh, showing how this and
Romantic Edinburgh have comfortably co-existed. It examines how
Edinburgh’s Romanticism was similarly driven by intellectuals, amongst
whom were Enlightenment figures and artistically talented individuals,
and it discusses the legacy of those who contributed to the Romantic
cityscape of today; an architecture that provides much of the character
of the UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site and of the city that
countless tourists come daily to see.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
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Why do people read? In The Love of Books: Attachment to a Changing Cultural Object (Manchester University Press, 2026) María Angélica Thumala Olave, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, explores people’s relationship to books and to reading, demonstrating the pleasure and importance books provide in contemporary life. Moving beyond a narrow focus on the social status offered by books and reading, the analysis shows the role of material objects, along with the emotional engagements and social bonds forged by the practices associated with books and reading.
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What if children’s literature was never as innocent as we imagine?

In Sugarcoated Ethics: Children’s Literature and Atlantic Enslavement (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2026), the relationship between childhood
reading and Atlantic slavery is brought into sharp focus. The book
argues that children’s literature did not merely emerge alongside the
plantation economy; it was deeply shaped by it. Sugar, sweetness, moral
instruction, and domestic comfort were all tied to systems of
enslavement and colonial trade, even as the violence behind them was
softened or erased in stories for young readers.

The book also
examines how ideas of white civility shaped childhood. White children,
particularly girls, were cast as symbols of innocence, refinement, and
moral feeling, while Black children were excluded from those same
protections. Through analyses of persecuted-heroine narratives,
missionary education, and colonial schooling, the study reveals how
children’s literature helped normalise racial hierarchy across the
British Empire.

Yet the project is equally attentive to
resistance and alternative ethical traditions. Afro-Caribbean oral
storytelling, including Anansi tales, songs, and folktales, emerges as a
powerful counterarchive. These traditions preserved histories of
survival, collective memory, and resistance that colonial print culture
often attempted to suppress. The discussion of the “Queen Mary” Fireburn
song, for instance, highlights how storytelling became a form of
ethical education and cultural continuity across generations.

One
of the book’s most striking contributions is its global scope.
Children’s texts on slavery circulated far beyond Britain and the
Caribbean, travelling to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East via
missionary and imperial networks. In translation and adaptation, these
works sometimes reinforced imperial ideologies, but they could also be
reshaped in unexpected ways by ‘local’ readers and writers.

Sugarcoated Ethics
asks readers to reconsider what children’s literature teaches us about
morality, empathy, and history. It challenges the assumption that
childhood stories are politically neutral and invites us to think more
critically about the ethical worlds children’s books continue to create
today.
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Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2025) by Stefan Collini

The
study and teaching of English literature is generally regarded as one
of the central disciplines in the modern university, yet for much of its
history it struggled to gain academic legitimacy and was frequently
derided as 'a soft option'. Its early professors responded by
emphasizing its scholarly character, foregrounding philology and
literary history in ways that marked the syllabus far into the twentieth
century.

Stefan Collini provides here the first full account of the
discipline's development from its late-eighteenth-century beginnings up
to the early 1960s. Paying special attention to institutional settings,
he challenges numerous assumptions about the character of universities
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the detailed
exploration of syllabuses, exam papers, and other institutional records,
the impact of literary criticism is revealed to be later and more
partial than is commonly assumed. Rather than seeing the early teaching
of English literature as 'a substitute for religion' or 'a means to
soften class conflict', Collini emphasizes the role of ideals of
learnedness and scholarship, as well as of external factors such as
opportunities for employment in the civil service and secondary
school-teaching. There are full discussions of the parts played by such
figures as John Churton Collins, A.C. Bradley, George Saintsbury, and
Walter Raleigh, together with sceptical analyses of the decisive
significance usually attributed to Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, I.A.
Richards, and F.R. Leavis. Separate chapters are devoted to neglected
aspects of the story such as the role of Classics, the importance of the
subject for women's higher education, and the connections with English
teaching in schools.

Drawing on extensive use of institutional
archives and records as well as the writings of contemporary
participants, the book offers a vivid and wide-ranging history of
English-as-discipline and its centrality across academic, literary,
cultural, and educational life over the past two year hundred years, as
well as a resounding testament to its continued importance and relevance
today.

Stefan Collini, Professor Emeritus of Intellectual
History and English Literature, University of Cambridge. Stefan Collini
was educated at Cambridge and Yale. Following a Research Fellowship at
St John's College, Cambridge, he was Lecturer, then Reader, in
Intellectual History at the University of Sussex 1974-86; Lecturer, then
Reader, then Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature
at the University of Cambridge 1986-2014. He is a Fellow of the British
Academy, and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and Guardian.

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature. 
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