Paul Giles

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University in New York, starts his new book with an epigraph listing two dictionary definitions of ‘playbook’: ‘[a] book containing the scripts of dramatic plays’, but also a ‘set of tactics frequently employed by one engaged in a competitive activity’. The Playbook turns on bringing these two definitions together. It argues that the Federal Theatre Project that developed in the United States between 1935 and 1939, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, was effectively scuppered by the political machinations of ambitious Texas congressman Martin Dies. In 1938, the wily Dies succeeded in setting up the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with himself at its head. HUAC became notorious during the Cold War, under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, for its persecution of political dissenters. Shapiro’s thesis is that its nefarious influence began earlier, with the democratic principles he regards as inherent in theatre being peremptorily shut down by Dies’s political opportunism. Shapiro presents this conflict as a forerunner of more recent American culture wars driven by Pat Buchanan in the early 1990s through to Donald Trump in the present day.

Clocking in at 513 pages, Tim Winton’s new novel carries all the apparatus of a major publishing event. Juice is an ambitious work, technically very skilful, which seeks to delineate not only a dystopian prospect of the planet’s future but also an alternative, revisionist version of its historical past.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.

Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.

One striking feature of Nicholas Jose’s fine new novel is its principled versatility. Set in multiple locations – Adelaide, Washington, DC, East Timor – and introducing alternative narrative voices, Jose evokes a world of complex intersections comprising many different angles and viewpoints. As a former diplomat himself, he writes with expert knowledge of a variety of professional and personal environments. His novel ranges across the ‘loyalties and long memories’ of lives rooted in Adelaide, along with some of the city’s ‘dunderhead complacencies’, while also presenting an insider’s view of diplomatic exchanges in Washington, DC and Canberra.

'Interracial,’ explains Korey Garibaldi in his compelling first book, is a term ‘not as familiar as it once was’, though it was often used in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century to describe ‘cross-racial collaborations and cultural influences’ across the literary world. One of the most influential advocates of such literary interracialism was W.S. Braithwaite, a poet, critic, and anthologist born in Boston in 1878 to a British Guyanese father and an African American mother, with Braithwaite boldly declaring that ‘all great artists are interracial and international’. Garibaldi’s critical work traces the ups and downs of this interracial aesthetic from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s. In the process, he adds another dimension to our understanding of the complex racial dynamics of this era.

John Guillory is an eminent professor of English at New York University who has written extensively on English studies as an academic discipline. Professing Criticism brings together in revised form a selection of essays he has written on this subject over the past twenty years, together with some new material. Overall, the book offers a very knowledgeable and incisive analysis of the state of literary studies today.