Happy ‘pub’ days: Fine, Irish, Newhauser
By Kristen LaRue-Sandler — January 3, 2025
Three faculty members in the ASU Department of English announce five volumes published last year or imminently forthcoming this winter. Works include an edited volume, a journal special issue, a monograph, an interdisciplinary survey, and a translated collection of essays. Topics include sex in westerns, literary emotion, envy and jealousy, universal emotions, and sensology and the Middle Ages.
‘Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western’ (University of Nebraska Press, 2025)
Kerry Fine’s edited volume — with Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush and Sara L. Spurgeon — in the Postwestern Horizons series was released in January. From the publisher:
“‘Hell-Bent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western’ builds on the Locus Award finalist ‘Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre.’ This new collection takes a deep dive into the myriad ways sex and sexuality are imagined in weird western literature, film, television, and video games, paying special attention to portrayals of power and privilege. The contributors explore weird western challenges to assumptions about varied genders and sexualities, drawing our attention to how the western can reinforce existing gender and sexual paradigms or overturn them in delightful, terrifying, or unexpected ways.
Primary texts range from CBS’s campy BDSM-inflected steampunk western ‘The Wild Wild West’ to the Star Wars franchise’s popular leather-daddy bounty hunter ‘The Mandalorian,’ from Ishmael Reed’s satirical postmodern western ‘Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down’ to C Pam Zhang’s acclaimed novel ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold.’ Chapters engage texts from Australia and Great Britain, classic horror like ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ the popular video games ‘BioShock Infinite’ and ‘The Last of Us II,’ and less well-known texts like Laguna Pueblo–Navajo author A. A. Carr’s erotic vampire/monster slayer western ‘Eye Killers.’”
Fine is an instructor in the ASU Department of English’s Writing Programs.
Emotion Review 16:2 (April 2024)
Bradley Irish is guest editor of this special journal issue, themed “Literature and Emotion.” From the introduction:
- “To say that literature generates emotion is not to say anything profound: this fact has long been recognized by every tradition of literary criticism, and, even more immediately, is instantly apparent to anyone who's ever picked up a book. Since Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and the Sanskrit Nāṭyaśāstra (2nd century BCE–2nd century CE), theorists have attempted to account for the affective dynamics of literature, and the development of modern professional literary criticism in the 20th century ensured that scholars would continue to think about how emotion functions within the verbal arts. But while critics have always acknowledged that emotionality is central to literature, the last two decades have seen a tremendous growth in the number of scholars giving serious attention to how, specifically, literary emotion works, a reflection of the larger ‘Affective Turn’ that has been identified through the sciences and humanities.
This special issue ‘Literature and Emotion’ is designed to give readers — especially readers from outside the discipline of literary studies — a broad introduction to the kind of cutting-edge scholarship that is currently being developed by scholars of literary emotion. What should immediately be apparent is the scope of this work: in the pages that follow, you will encounter the affective interpretation of particular literary works, the development of large-scale theories of emotion and affect, and empirical assessment of the sorts of things that literature does and does not do. Literary critics interested in emotion take a variety of approaches, and consider affectivity at different levels of analysis; the articles in this issue are intended to give a sense of this range, which is helping to make literary emotion studies one of the most vibrant subfields in the discipline.”
‘The Rivalrous Renaissance: Envy and Jealousy in Early Modern English Literature’ (Routledge, 2024)
In December, Irish produced a monograph on the history of emotion in the press’s New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture series. From the publisher:
- “Envy and jealousy are the emotions that fuel interpersonal rivalry, and interpersonal rivalry is a cornerstone of literature. Emerging from growing scholarly interest in the history of emotion, ‘The Rivalrous Renaissance’ is the first full-length study of envy and jealousy in Renaissance England.
The book introduces readers both to the cultural dynamics of affective rivalry in the period and to how these crucial feelings inspired literary works across a wide range of genres, by luminary authors such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Mary Wroth, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Early modern concepts of envy and jealousy were more actively theorized as central components of human experience than is typical today. Bradley J. Irish argues that literature is the key domain where this Renaissance theorization of affective rivalry was brought to life. Poetry, drama, and narrative prose created the conditions for these concepts to become most socially meaningful, simulating the interpersonal experiences in which the emotions practically manifest.
This volume will appeal to scholars interested in the history of emotion and affect, as well as more broadly to scholars of the literature and social dynamics of early modern England, and to undergraduate and graduate students in specialized seminars.”
‘The Universality of Emotion: Perspectives from the Sciences and Humanities’ (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
Irish’s third new volume — a multidisciplinary exploration in the Cambridge Elements series — will be released at the end of January. From the publisher:
- “This Element surveys how a number of major disciplines − psychology, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, linguistics, and literary/cultural studies − have addressed the long-standing research question of whether human emotions should be thought of as meaningfully "universal." The Element presents both the universalist and anti-universalist positions, and concludes by considering attempts to move beyond this increasingly unhelpful binary.”
Irish is an associate professor in the ASU Department of English’s literature program.
‘Por una Edad Media Sensorial: Aportes de Richard Newhauser’ (Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, 2024)
A volume of translated articles on the senses authored by Richard Newhauser was released in November. From the publisher:
- "‘Por una Edad Media Sensorial’ (‘For a Sensorial Middle Ages’) is a Spanish translation of collected writings by Richard Newhauser. The collection was conceived by Gerardo Rodríguez within the scope of the Medieval Studies and Research Group (GIEM) of the Interdisciplinary Center for European Studies (CIEsE) of the Faculty of Humanities of the National University of Mar del Plata. Its purpose is to make known to a wide public, both academic and general, the foundations, advances and the most relevant contributions on sensory themes and problems of and in the Middle Ages.
Each volume in this series offers a selection of works by a specific author, due to their status as founder or promoter of the field of sensory history, with the intention of bringing together essays, articles, chapters and conferences that, during their career, have been disseminated dispersedly in time and space. In cases where the originals are written in other languages, the collection provides the respective versions in Spanish, made by specialists in academic translation and reviewed by the editors and/or members of their work team. Studies on the senses, emotions and body in the Middle Ages constitute a range of unavoidable approaches when it comes to understanding that fascinating and unfathomable period in the history of humanity. The breadth of such thematic area makes it especially permeable to the views of various disciplines and research practices, which this collection seeks to share with interested readers in a 'sensitive' way, that is, with the certainty that all knowledge generates sensations and that all perception can become a source of knowledge.”
Newhauser is a professor in the ASU Department of English’s literature program.