BOOK NEWS: Exploring the rhetoric of ecofacism as a political genre

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature

By Alexander Menrisky

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-5179-1868-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918682/everyday-ecofascism/

As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.

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.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.

Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like COVID-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.

"Everyday Ecofascism boldly exposes the numerous, yet insidiously subtle, narratives in contemporary culture that foster ecofascist ideologies. But perhaps more importantly, Alexander Menrisky also showcases powerful counternarratives that can shape more just futures. This is bracing, timely, and vital work." —Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

“Alexander Menrisky’s vital and moving book attunes readers to the widely used and yet highly contested term ecofascism. He offers an original perspective on the convergence of environmental crisis and political violence, illuminating the quotidian roles of storytelling and genre in these processes.” —Teresa Shewry, author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary absurdist poetry, race, and gender

Whiteness, Feminism and the Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry

By Jenna Clake

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781474494342

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-whiteness-feminism-and-the-absurd-in-contemporary-british-and-us-poetry.html

The first study to consider how Whiteness pervades and is challenged in contemporary British and US Absurdist poetry

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.

• Engages with Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and scholarship on the Theatre of the Absurd to update definitions and understandings of contemporary Absurdist British and US poetry
• Argues that poetry provides a space in which to challenge Whiteness, nihilism, and prejudice, and offer positive social change
• Demonstrates the wider influence of Absurdism and popular culture in current British and US poetry, and explores its status as an aesthetic, rather than an organised ‘school’ or movement
• Presents new analyses of poems by Emily Berry, Caroline Bird, and Jennifer L. Knox, with additional analyses of poems by Heather Phillipson, Sam Riviere, Selima Hill, Luke Kennard, Rachael Allen, Crispin Best, Franny Choi, Morgan Parker, Jane Yeh, Anne Boyer and Never Angeline Nørth

In an era of political and social turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic, where issues of gender, race and class are linked with concerns of how to survive in a capitalist society, a new aesthetic of Absurdist poetry has emerged. This aesthetic has a troubled relationship to race, pervaded by issues of representation in avant-garde poetry, and notions of who poetry writers and readers are. Focusing on British and US poets including Rachael Allen, Emily Berry, Crispin Best, Caroline Bird, Franny Choi, Jennifer L. Knox, Morgan Parker and Jane Yeh, Jenna Clake investigates how poets use the Absurd to destabilise ideas about race, gender and class and imagine social change. Bringing together Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and close readings of poems, Clake examines how the Absurd has developed, how its poets understand privilege and offer prospects of hope and change, and how the Absurd might move away from nihilism.

"With inexhaustible energy and focus, Jenna Clake’s work reanimates and illuminates a definitive aesthetic that tends to get overlooked in studies of contemporary poetics. She thereby makes it one of the most vital – and worthy of proper interrogation – forces in modern writing. This is the strongest account I’ve ever read of the Absurd’s curious persistence, a deep analysis of its spirit (whether in defiance or despair) and its increasing relevance to artists, critics, readers and citizens. Immensely enjoyable to read – lucid, fiercely intelligent and conscientious in its outlook and positioning. To be introduced to new writing and appreciate the techniques of well-known poets in a way one hasn’t considered before is a profound pleasure. Whiteness, Feminism and The Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry addresses a glaring omission in poetry scholarship, but also diagnoses the core anxieties of our century, and reframes the concerns, vitality and necessity of an emerging body of work. This is essential reading, as much for poets at any stage in their writing as it is for present and future scholars of twenty-first century poetry." – Luke Kennard, University of Birmingham

Jenna Clake is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University. Her debut novel Disturbance was published in 2023 and her poetry collections include Museum of Ice Cream (2021) and Fortune Cookie (2018). She has received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award in 2018.

 

BOOK NEWS: Beckett's ecological thinking

Samuel Beckett and Ecology

Edited by Trish McTighe, Céline Thobois-Gupta, and Nicholas E. Johnson

Methuen Drama, 2025

ISBN: 9781350366022

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/samuel-beckett-and-ecology-9781350366022/

This is the first full-length book to investigate Samuel Beckett's work through contemporary ecological thinking, offering a wide range of artistic and scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated or challenged by Beckett's work.

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.

Beckett was not an environmental artist, but his oeuvre, poised between forms of precarity and hope, is a rich territory for the exploration of the most pressing issues of our time: the rift between the human species, its technological and economic advancement and the ecologies that sustain it all.

In recent years, Beckett's name, aphorisms and work have been invoked relative to environmental catastrophe, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the ecosystemic place of the human. The volume reflects on ecology as a productive term, as well as the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies. While some authors offer new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene across translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts, others also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for ecological thought and the role it has taken in recent ecodramaturgical experiments in the theatre. Woven throughout the volume are short bursts of writing, 'coups de gong', which testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

"This volume us transformation in Beckett studies in its range of global contributors and in the dialogues it sets up between scholars, artists, and activists. This book is an important and compelling addition to Beckett studies, theatre studies, and ecocriticism." --Anna McMullan, University of Reading

Trish McTighe is senior lecturer in Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Her publications include Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland and Staging Beckett in Great Britain, both co-edited with David Tucker, and the monographs The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama and Carnivals of Ruin: Beckett, Ireland and the Festival Form. She is theatre reviews editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies.

Céline Thobois-Gupta is an IRC-funded PhD researcher and an adjunct assistantpProfessor in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, as well as an ECR Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub. She is published in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, The Beckett Circle, Theatre Journal and Samuel Beckett and Technology. She is also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on the anthropocene.

Nicholas E. Johnson is associate professor and Head of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he co-directs the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. He has published two co-authored monographs, Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices (with Jonathan Heron, 2020) and Bertolt Brecht’s David Fragments (1919–1921): An Interdisciplinary Study (Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, with David Shepherd, 2020). He has also co-edited two volumes on Beckett: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (2021) and Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (2020).

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.