BOOK NEWS: Spatial literary studies, foundations to new approaches

Space and Literary Studies

Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009424240

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/literary-theory/space-and-literary-studies?format=HB

Our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Literature explores and gives expression to the ways in which space impacts human experience. It also powerfully shapes the construction and experience of space. Literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fuelled by feminist and postcolonial insights, the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. This book treats foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside exciting new areas of research, providing a dual emphasis on origins and innovative approaches while maintaining constant attention to how the production and experience of space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Discusses foundational concepts in light of contemporary and emergent research in spatial literary studies
• Examines the intersection of space and literary studies through twenty-one concepts and approaches
• Makes theoretical approaches concrete with reference to a transnational and transhistorical selection of literary texts

Contents

Introduction: space and literary studies, Elizabeth F. Evans

Part I. Origins Revisited:

1. Representation, Andrew Thacker

2. Mapping: cheap maps, spatial politics and England's colonies, Kat Lecky

3. Space, disciplinary power and the novel, Philip Howell

4. Public/private: the spatial form of love and labor in the English novel, Nancy Armstrong and Matthew Taft

5. Urban/Rural, Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee

Part II. Developments:

6. Gender, space and feminist geography, Radost Rangelova

7. Plantation: toward a literary history of race, space, and capital in the Anglo-world, Jared Hickman and Aaron Begg

8. Empire, nation and the question of space. Sandeep Banerjee and Atreyee Majumder

9. Postcolonial space: African literary writing and the articulations of worlding, Madhu Krishnan

10. Borders and the liminal, Mary Pat Brady

11. Encountering the community in third space, Megan Jeanette Myers

12. Literary mobilities and the mobilization of space, Charlotte Mathieson

13. Translocality and translocalism, James Mulholland

14. Psychogeography, Joshua Armstrong

15. Mapping empire's horror: literary gis and colonial spatial logic, Alexander Sherman

Part III. Applications and Extensions:

16. Islands, oceans and the production of spatial theory, Johannes Riquet

17. Other/world(ly): a black ecology of outer space, Stefanie K. Dunning

18. Imaginary space, Siobhan Carroll

19. Digital Space, Peta Mitchell

20. Sensory geographies, Sheila Hones

21. Orientations, Eve Sorum

Elizabeth F. Evans, Wayne State University, Detroit, works on modernism, literary and cultural geography, and the digital humanities. Her first book, Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge UP, 2019), examines gender and space in writing by British and colonial authors.

BOOK NEWS: New perspectives on Ballard's *Crash*

 J. G. Ballard's "Crash"

By Paul March-Russell

Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

ISBN: 978-3-031-73096-2

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-73094-8

J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) remains a byword for transgression in literature: declared "too disgusting for words" upon publication. The basis for David Cronenberg's equally provocative film, Crash has been regarded variously as the apotheosis of New Wave science fiction, the ur-source for postmodernism, a transhumanist manifesto, and a pornographic masterpiece in the tradition of Sade and Bataille. This revisionist account, based on previously unexplored archive material, shatters the myths that have accrued around this tantalizing work whilst also revealing why it continues to inspire writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the 21st century. The book vividly reconstructs how Ballard came to write Crash, the cultural landscape in which it was written, the effect of its reception, and the toll it took on its author. New perspectives reveal how Crash reworks surrealist anthropology, evolutionary theory, and pornographic imagery in order to expose a society addicted to the abuse of power, the silencing of others, and its own environmental destruction. As Ballard later admitted, he "must have been mad" to write Crash.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

“Accessible, thought-provoking and filled with new insights, Paul March Russell’s study of Ballard’s seminal novel is written from a place of finely honed knowledge and contagious enthusiasm. A must-read volume that every Ballardian will want to add to their bookshelf as soon as possible.” --Nina Allan, author of The Rift

“Paul March-Russell writes with an air of quiet authority and moves around the field of Ballard and New Wave science fiction with evident expertise.” --Roger Luckhurst, Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-founder with Una McCormack of the feminist imprint Gold SF. His previous books include The Short Story: An Introduction (2009), Modernism and Science Fiction (2015), and with Andrew M. Butler, Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays (2022). 

BOOK NEWS: Totality in contemporary global realist fiction

New Global Realism: Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel

By Gabriele Lazzari 

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781350385672

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/new-global-realism-9781350385672/

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book examines writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India, and Mexico.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

By theorizing four modalities of totalization employed by contemporary realist writers, this book explores the current resurgence of realism and challenges critical approaches that consider it naive or formally unsophisticated. Instead, it argues that realist novels offer a self-conscious and serious representation of the world we inhabit while actively envisioning new social designs and political configurations. Through comparative studies of novels by Fernanda Melchor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Vivek Shanbhag, Nicola Lagioia, Igiaba Scego, Yaa Gyasi and Roberto Bolaño, this book further explains why realism can be a powerful antidote to the skepticism about the possibility of making truth-claims in humanist research.

"This is a very exciting book; timely, intellectual, and moving in all the right directions of the future of literary study." --Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick

Gabriele Lazzari is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey, UK.

BOOK NEWS: The rise of ekphrastic fiction since the 2010s

Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel

By Sofie Behluli

Oxford UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780198954484

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/art-in-contemporary-anglo-american-fiction-9780198954484?cc=us&lang=en&#

This book addresses the recent surge of Anglo-American novels about visual art since the 2010s and interprets it as a coming of age of an old literary sub-genre, which is here termed as the 'ekphrastic novel'. These novels are distinguished by their systematic use of ekphrasis which creatively and critically negotiates the intertwined aesthetics of literature and visual art. By addressing the challenge of representing visual images such as photographs, paintings, and art installations with words, these novels reveal a greater interest in exploring how and why we engage with art, rather than merely depicting the art itself. In this way, ekphrastic novels present themselves as powerful practitioners and critics of contemporary image-making.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The book focuses on four aspects emerging from ekphrastic passages--value, form, affect, and scale--to explore critical questions posed by contemporary ekphrastic novels: Who has the power to assign value today, and at what cost? Which social, political, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions are obscured by certain forms, and how can ekphrasis (re)introduce these aspects into public discourse? What affects do images and artworks elicit, and how do they reinforce or challenge existing value systems? How can narrative scale uncover potential injustices in the interplay between life and art? Moreover, what insights do ekphrastic novels offer into contemporary reading habits and strategies? By tracing a literary tradition from nineteenth-century to contemporary fiction and offering detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels, this book delves into the theoretical and practical intersections of ekphrasis and the novel.

• Explores the intersection of ekphrasis and the novel and introduces a new sub-genre: the 'ekphrastic novel'
• Shows how indebted contemporary novels on art are to their nineteenth-century literary predecessors
• Provides detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels

Sofie Behluli is an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she teaches and conducts research on "Dis/affection in 19th-Century American Literature." Prior to holding this post, she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Behluli is interested in intermediality and ekphrasis studies, affect theory, life writing, gender studies and feminist literature, and theoretical conceptions of the contemporary. Her work has been published in Women: A Cultural Review (2021), Anglia: Journal of English Philology (2022), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2023), as well as in several companions and handbooks.

SPECIAL FEATURE: W.G. Sebald and the Wars in Yugoslavia, A Closer Look at JML 48.4

 

Denis Topalović, in his blog post for Indiana University Press Journals on W. G. Sebald, notes that "When he was once asked what compelled him to write The Rings of Saturn, Sebald didn’t look back to the past; instead, he turned to his own present, and in particular to the Yugoslav Wars (1991-99) that had broken out just as he was beginning to work on his book."

Read the full post HERE.

His Journal of Modern Literature essay on Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is available FREE, linked in the post

NEW ISSUE: JML 48.4 "History and Geography" is now LIVE

 

Journal of Modern Literature 48.4 (Summer 2025) on the theme "History and Geography" is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55722.

Content includes:

James Dutton

A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities’ Unfinishable History

Laura L. Behling

“[T]his trivial and vulgar occasion”: P.R. Stephensen’s Lampoons of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

Andrés Ibarra Cordero

Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

Hannah Loeb

“Like leaves against the sunlight”: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” 

Cilliers van den Berg

Patterns of Meaning and the Claims of History: S.J. Naudé’s The Third Reel

Denis Topalović 

The Rings of Sarajevo: W.G. Sebald and the Bosnian War

FREE!

Aaron Shaheen

The Restitution of Harold Krebs: A Cartographic Reading of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” 

Duncan Hay

Downriver’s Flâneur(s): Space and Representation in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair

Ryan Johnson

Confused Categories: Russia and the East-West Divide in William Plomer’s Sado

Reviews 

Jack Dudley

Methodological Pluralism and the Cause of Progress: A Review Essay of Jesse Wolfe’s Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury

Laura de la Parra Fernández

Postwar Interiorities: Review of The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

Hong Zeng and Ping Zhang

The Impact of Taoist and Zen Literature and Arts on Western Modernism: A Dialogue with Zhaoming Qian

BOOK NEWS: Woolf's first fully realized literary experiment

The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, by Virginia Woolf

Edited by Urmila Seshagiri

Princeton UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780691263137

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263137/the-life-of-violet

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

“A fresh perspective on Woolf’s early ‘literary experiments’ . . . . Suffused with delicate magic and penetrating wit, the stories in The Life of Violet foreground a radical world structured by laughter, magic, women’s friendships, and egalitarian social relations.” —Foreword Reviews

“Fascinating and indispensable.” —Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project 

“What an extraordinary volume! Here we meet newly discovered, revised versions of Virginia Woolf’s early stories based on the life of Violet Dickinson. These tales are laugh-out-loud funny. They are also profound early experiments in the fiction/biography blend that later gave rise to Orlando and the feminist musing about women’s education, marriage, and literary history that infuse A Room of One’s Own. An illuminating preface and afterword by Urmila Seshagiri bring Dickinson’s biography and intellectual contributions into view and deftly analyze the stories and their place within Woolf’s oeuvre. Must reading for lovers of Woolf’s fiction.”—Jessica Berman, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf

Urmila Seshagiri is distinguished professor of humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.