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Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Sarah Dowling, "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
Description: People who lie down are a fixture of contemporary literature, art, and life. Murder victims, protesters, invalids, depressives, sex workers, and more: these are the recumbent figures that populate Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern UP, 2025) the latest book from literary critic and poet Sarah Dowling.
Out now from Northwestern University Press, this fascinating and ambitious study moves to the ground of mainstream and experimental literary and artistic work from the late twentieth century to the present. There Dowling traces a pattern of prone figures, like a chain of paper dolls strewn across the floor. These figures do...