BOOK NEWS: Human monstrosity in Black horror fiction

 Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction 

BY JERRY RAFIKI JENKINS

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5905-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215364.html

In Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction, Jerry RafikiJenkins examines four types of human monsters that frequently appear in Black American horror fiction—the monsters of White rage, respectability, not-ness, and serial killing—arguing that such monsters represent specific ideologies of American anti-Blackness. Jenkins examines a variety of these monstrous forms in Tananarive Due’s The Between, Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and many other works. While these monsters and the texts that they populate ask us to think about the role that anti-Blackness plays in being or becoming American, they also offer intellectual resources that Black and non-Black people might use to combat the everyday versions of human monstrosity.

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.

“Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is a necessary work that emphasizes the sanity and rationality of monstrous figures. Jenkins persuasively contends that combining Afropessimism and affirmation of Black life in fiction can provide resistance to the deadliness of the racial reality of anti-Blackness.” —Keith Byerman, author of Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction

“Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction is sharp and intellectually daring. Jenkins’s treatment of violence and prospects of Black counter-violence make it a timely resource for Black studies scholars and social and cultural critics of all kinds.” —Greg Thomas, author of Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh: Power, Knowledge, and Pleasure in Lil’ Kim’s Lyricism

Jerry Rafiki Jenkins is a professor in the Departments of English and Humanities, and Multicultural Studies at Palomar College and the author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction.

Welcome new JML co-editor Jessica Burstein

 

Jessica Burstein has been promoted from advisory editor to co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Burstein has had a long career in editing, learning while serving as a lackey (the term “editorial assistant” had yet to be invented, and those chosen did not appear on the masthead) at Critical Inquiry; then serving as the first founding managing editor of Modernism/modernity, beginning in a room with a chair, a phone, and a rolodex, and putting together its early issues. 

As an associate professor in the Department of English and adjunct in the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, Burstein currently serves on the editorial boards of Modern Language Quarterly, as well as the advisory editorial board of Modernism/modernity. Their own critical work focuses on fashion and modernism; but they nurse a residual fondness for the history of sciences, and contemporary fiction. Burstein’s novel What It Was Like Not To Sleep With You has yet to find a press; meanwhile you can find Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art in an art history library near you.

Forster's musical Lucy Churchill and proto-nuclear aesthetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.4

In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, author Ryan James McGuckin discusses female musicality in A Room with a View, and sees in the novel's inconclusive romance—as well as in Forster's 1958 essay "A View without a Room"—hints that the fear of nuclear annihilation forecloses hope about the future. Read it at https://iupress.org/connect/blog/e-m-forsters-nuclear-aesthetics-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-4/

McGuckin's JML 47.4 essay, “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View,” is available to read for FREE.

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) is now LIVE!

 

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) with clusters on Virginia Woolf and literary misfits is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53384

Content includes:

Woolf

Kate M. Nash

The Ecology of Virginia Woolf’s London Scene

 

Gabriel Quigley

Moments of Rupture: Woolf, Whitehead, Deleuze 

Timothy O’Leary

Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux 

Misfits

Abhipsa Chakraborty

Vernacular Acoustics: Caste, Embodiment, and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935)

Carly Overfelt 

“To Suggest the Sound”: Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Long Fiction 

Lillianna G. Wright

“A Fascination, Strange and Compelling”: Marriage as the Prevention of Queerness in Nella Larsen’s Passing 

Ryan James McGuckin 

E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View 

FREE

Tim Clarke

The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante’s Ask the Dust 

Susan Poursanati and Maryam Neyestani

Sisyphean or Medusan: The Absurd Hero in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea  

Reviews  

Anna Nygren

Rewriting the Narrative of Modernisms 

Andrew Hui

The Once and Always Baroque

Benjamin Schreier

How to Be a Critic

Afterword

Daniel T. O’Hara

Memorial Tributes

BOOK NEWS: Spirit forces in global contemporary novels

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel 

BY HILARY THOMPSON

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350373815

https://www.bloomsbury.com/worldly-spirits-extrahuman-dimensions-and-the-global-anglophone-novel-9781350373815/

Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings—were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses—as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of "magical realism," Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds.

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.

Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction.

A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Hilary Thompson is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium (2018) and has published multiple articles on Amitav Ghosh and on global anglophone literature, biopolitics, and the Anthropocene.

BOOK NEWS: The struggle to make novels matter 1965-99

 Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999

BY EVAN BRIER

U of Iowa P, 2024

ISBN: 9781609389390

https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-competition

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

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.

“Novel Competition is a beautifully written institutional history of the literary novel in the United States from 1965 to 1999. Placing the novel in a larger cultural field—in competition with journalism, popular music, and films for cultural prestige—Brier illuminates not only novels, but their readers, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers.”—Erin A. Smith, University of Texas at Dallas

“Novel Competition confronts a fascinating and important subject: an examination of how the novel came to matter differently over the last third of the twentieth century. This decline is something that scholars of the novel have bemoaned for some time, and Brier offers a useful approach to making sense of it without resorting to well-trod and over-simplified answers. It is an engaging and important book.”—Emily Johansen, author of Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Life

“As a longtime Evan Brier fan, I’ve been eagerly waiting this book, his account of the American novel’s response to its declining fortunes. Brier dazzles with a virtuosic reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that takes us through the culture of The New Yorker, the Kansas literati, and the first stirrings of publishing’s conglomeration. He delivers an extraordinary investigation into Toni Morrison’s career as an editor—culminating in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters—and her publication of The Black Book. We follow Philip Roth to Eastern Europe and Cynthia Ozick’s and Saul Bellow’s characters into diaspora. Minimalism, rock and roll, New Hollywood, Rushdie’s fatwa, the American West—an astounding account of Larry McMurtry’s career—the memoir boom. Brier touches it all. Brier quietly transcends the limitations of dominant norms in the practices of literary history and the sociology of literature to give us an nth-dimensional view of American literature since 1965: how the novel became residual. He tells us what it means to believe—or disbelieve—in the power of fiction. It’s no less than thrilling.”—Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Evan Brier is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is author of A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

BOOK NEWS: Literary vegetarians

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century

BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009287265

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vegetarianism-and-veganism-in-literature-from-the-ancients-to-the-twentyfirst-century/E5332A2457468C0DFD58C561CF957055

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasizes that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

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.

Content includes:

Chapter 1 - ‘everybody eating everyone else’

Chapter 2 - Pythagoreans; or, Vegetarians before ‘Vegetarianism’

Chapter 3 - Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel

Chapter 4 - Vegetarianism as Religion

Chapter 5 - Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women’s Liberation

Chapter 6 - Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene

Chapter 7 - ‘Pity the meat!’: Ideology, Metaphor, Violence

"What we have here is a monograph in food studies that transforms the field as a whole. The scope of this project is expansive, the analysis is consistently delightful, and the argument is original, making an important contribution to literary histories of vegetarianism." —Gitanjali Shahani, San Francisco State University

Theophilus Savvas is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He works on postmodernist American writing and the interconnections between history and fiction as well as literature and ecology.