Hopkins Press Podcast 4.13: MLN on Literature, War, and Exile: A Rediscovered Typescript by Erich Auerbach

On today's episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we bring you a discussion about the forthcoming comparative literature issue of MLN, which contains a dossier on Erich Auerbach, an instrumental figure in the history of comparative literature. This issue contains previously lost work by Auerbach which is appearing in English for the first time. And to tell us all about this historic discovery, we’ve got MLN managing editor Victoria Livingstone, Leonardo Lisi, who is the executive editor of the MLN comparative literature issue, and Christian Rivoletti, who is responsible for editing many of Auerbach’s works. It's a delightful and discussion about about this manuscript’s discovery and translation, as well as everything else MLN has in store for us this issue, and into the future.

Christian Rivoletti (Pisa 1970) is full professor of Romance Philology at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and has held a Heisenberg Professorship from the German Council of Research. His research spans the Italian Renaissance and its European reception (Ariosto e l’ironia della finzione, Marsilio, 2014), literary utopias, and modern narrative and poetry. He has edited three volumes by Erich Auerbach: Romanticismo e realismo e altri scritti su Dante, Vico e l’Illuminismo (2010), Kultur als Politik (2014; translated into Spanish, 2017, and Japanese, 2025), and Letteratura, guerra e storia dell’Europa (forthcoming).

Leonardo F. Lisi is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University and the executive editor of the Comparative Literature issue of MLN. In addition to articles on Rilke, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, W.H. Auden, Soyinka, J.L. Heiberg, Strindberg, Conrad, Goethe, Shakespeare, and European Modernism, he is the author of two monographs: Marginal Modernity: Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (Fordham UP, 2013), and Modern Tragedy and the End of Worlds: Lillo, Leopardi, Ibsen (Northwestern UP, 2026).

Victoria Livingstone is the managing editor of MLN. She is also a writer with essays published in outlets such as Guernica, Time, UNESCO Ideas Lab, The Washington Post, and Hypertext. She holds a doctorate in Hispanic literature and was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil. She is writing a book on the circulation of translated Latin American literature (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic) and she publishes a newsletter called Human Generated.