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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Zubeda Jalalzai, "Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Description: In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Zubeda Jalalzai about her book Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan, analyzes the role literature and poetic sensibility played in colonial British and American writings on Afghanistan from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The book also examines how literature and literariness themselves have shaped Western discourses framing Afghanistan. British Romantic Orientalists of the nineteenth century studied the region in depth and were drawn to what they perceived as an alien space—one in which they could...