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.

BOOK NEWS: Updated edition of Forster's *A Room with a View*

 A Room with a View By E.M. Forster

Randi Saloman, editor

Broadview Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781554814473

https://broadviewpress.com/product/a-room-with-a-view/#tab-description

This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them—but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his narrative.

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.

Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.

“Readers being introduced (or re-introduced) to E.M. Forster’s Room with a View are treated by Randi Saloman to a beautiful volume, with a deeply informative and accessible introduction that guides us through Forster’s career; illuminating footnotes throughout the novel; and a feast of delights in the appendices. Literary and biographical-minded readers will learn from Forster’s letters, journals, and essays, whereas the visual-minded can linger on images from a contemporary travel guide; stills from the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel; and photographs of Forster, both as a sensitive young novelist and as an éminence grise of English letters.” — Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Stanislaus

“This edition of A Room with a View is the most sensitive, comprehensive, and suggestive that I can imagine. It provides the student with a clear sense of the text’s history and social context, elucidates complex knots of culture lucidly, and vivifies the central issue of sexual knowledge and consent in Forster’s time and ours. The appended materials are excellent in both selection and scope, providing many new avenues into the text and its adaptations.” — Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

“A wonderful and elegant annotated edition that provides incisive analysis and support to the reader without crowding the core text. Saloman’s judicious use of notes is supremely effective and greatly enhances the experience of reading this classic novel. Broadview’s edition will appeal not only to students, but to curious readers of all stripes.” — Bob Davidson, University of Toronto

Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.

BOOK NEWS: Seeking true equality via literary moments of resistance

Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature

By Matthew Scully

Fordham UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781531507077

https://fordhampress.com/democratic-anarchy-hb-9781531507060.html

Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?

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.

Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.

By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strate­gies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation. —Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons

All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence. —Anglia: Journal of English Philology

Matthew Scully is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.

BOOK NEWS: Critical reflections on the work of Luis J. Rodríguez

The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run

Edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguin

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399520591

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-life-literature-and-legacy-of-luis-j-rodriguez.html

Luis Rodríguez is a prominent Latinx poet, memoirist and activist renowned for his candid visceral accounts of urban working-class life that includes youth gang violence, incarceration and drug abuse, gruelling factory work and union organising activities and collective approaches to redemption and political empowerment, which have resonated across multiple communities in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, whilst Rodríguez has been the focus of some critical scholarship, huge segments of his life, work and legacy remain unexamined. This anthology has commissioned new and unique critical essays and reflections on Rodríguez’s life and works, putting forward new ideas about bringing the voices of 'barrio organic intellectuals' to the fore. The anthology deliberately includes traditional academics as well as more public intellectuals and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas to reflect Rodriguez’s own diverse outputs as a prisoner author and activist.

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.

This book is an authoritative anthology on Luis Rodríguez’s life and works that

• Offers a range of perspectives on multiple aspects of his many different accomplishments and activities that can be used in secondary and university curricula
• Gathers peer author reflections that offer insights on Rodriguez’s aesthetics for readers and writers to study and use, thus filling a gap between academic oriented scholarship and popular journalism about Rodriguez and his work
• Introduces new unpublished works by Rodriguez himself and archival materials relating to his career for further use in teaching and research as well as general interest

"The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run is the most comprehensive overview, critical assessment and sustained study of the renowned former gang member, pinto author, barrio intellectual and critical humanist-philosopher. It encompasses perspectives that account for the significance of his literary impact, his praxis-oriented politics, critical reflections on him by people who’ve known Luis for decades, analysis of the transformation of his once hyper masculinist worldview, pedagogical approaches to Rodriguez’s life story and prison literature, his impact as a publisher, and original new work. In the depth and range of critical perspectives included here, Metcalf and Olguín make a major contribution and set a new standard for US literary history and author studies, community studies and intellectual biographies." – Louis Mendoza, Arizona State University

"Luis J. Rodríguez’s work offers a playbook for how to engage in resistance in these troubled times. This collection of scholarly and literary essays reveals his activism as that of a Chicano 'organic intellectual' in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci who challenges the US’s political, cultural and material hegemony." – Avelardo Valdez, University of Southern California

Josephine Metcalf is a senior lecturer in American studies and criminology at the University of Hull, UK where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre. Her research focuses on the representation of prisons and street gangs in literature and other pop-culture forms and the ways these have been received by audiences. She has published on prison memoirs by authors such as Stanley Tookie Williams and Shaun Attwood and wrote a foreword for an anniversary edition of Joseph Bathanti’s award-winning prison novel, Coventry.

Ben V. Olguín is the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding director of the UCSB Global Latinidades Centre. In addition to articles published in Cultural Critique, American Literary History, Aztlán, Frontiers, Biography, MELUS, and Nepantla, Olguín is the author of La Pinta: Chicana/o History, Culture, and Politics (2010) and Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature (2021). He also is a published poet, and author of Red Leather Gloves (2014) and At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre (2014).