BOOK NEWS: Tracing Chilean women poets' resistance to neoliberalism

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980–2020

By Bárbara Fernández-Melleda

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541497

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-chilean-women-s-poetry-under-neoliberalism-1980-2020.html

Examines how women poets have expressed resistance against neoliberalism in Chile at times of intense political upheaval

• A 4-decade chronology following on women’s poetry response to neoliberal ideology
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to poetic work engaging with neoliberalism in Chile
• Centers on iconic works by canonical Chilean authors that deserve study in an international setting

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.

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980-2020 explores how the works of 6 women poets interact with the imposition and development of neoliberalism in Chile over 4 decades. The book follows a chronology that joins poetic work that criticizes the model from its inception during dictatorship times (1980s), through a democratic transition that did not live up to its expectations (1990s), until the naturalization of neoliberalism as a new normal that seems not possible to overcome (2000s). Finally, the 2010s show how the great inequalities denounced in the works from the previous 3 decades found concrete resistance through the October 2019 social revolt. This juncture brings new poetry hoping for a refoundation of Chile while also imagining the failure of a revolutionary movement. In the end, the latter came to pass.

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda brilliantly kickstarts her analytical journey when the sweeping violence of the Pinochet dictatorship installed the neoliberal model. Her book highlights various mechanisms of resistance against a repressive and individualistic social system. It also examines the asymmetry affecting Chilean literary production, perpetuating patriarchal practices that reduce or negate the contributions carried by the aesthetics of women writers. – Diamela Eltit, winner of the National Literature Prize of Chile 2018

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda is assistant professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She has published articles on Gabriela Mistral, Elvira Hernández, Carmen Berenguer, and Nadia Prado, among other Chilean poets. She was awarded the Early Career Scheme Grant by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee for her project The Fall of Neoliberalism in the Chilean Post-Dictatorship Novel (2000–2020). Her current research interests delve into Sino-Latin American diplomatic relations, especially through the lives and works of Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Armando Uribe. In 2024, she received the General Research Fund award to begin her 3-year project entitled Pablo Neruda in China.

BOOK NEWS: Youth catalyzing change in stories of Central American migration

Coming of Age(ncy) on the Migrant Trail: Adolescent Journeys in Contemporary Latinx Young Adult Literature

By Susana S. Martínez

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5965-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216026.html

Susana S. Martínez’s Coming of Age(ncy) on the Migrant Trail maps the contours of agency in young adult literature involving Latinx migrant youth—a project that could not be timelier given anti-immigrant hostility, LGBTQ+ book bans, and intense scrutiny of how we teach about race. Martínez leads readers chronologically and geographically from the 1980s Central American civil wars north through Mexico during the war on drugs to the recent experiences of those living undocumented in the United States, showing that YA is an ideal medium through which to tease out those stories of Central American migration that are often subsumed within Latinx studies and to combat stereotypes of young migrants. 

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.

Viewed through the lenses of intersectionality and racialized capitalism’s politics of disposability, the novels in question contribute to timely antiracist pedagogical discussions where youth emerge as catalysts for social change. By including non-Latinx authors who wrote about the Guatemalan and Salvadoran civil conflicts alongside authors from the Central American diaspora—Marcia Argueta Mickelson, Jennifer De Leon, and Bessie Flores Zaldívar among them—Martínez invites us to reflect on solidarity in contentious times.

“While young people, and particularly young people seeking refuge, are at the mercy of oppressive systems, Martínez sheds light on the ways they discover and enact their power. Her nuanced analysis makes visible the ways that global capitalist policies and processes on both sides of the border directly impact people.” —Amina Chaudhri, author of Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature

“Martínez deftly uses data and social scientific research alongside her analysis of young adult novels to contextualize the causes of youth migration and to counter xenophobic ideologies that position migrants as criminal, deportable bodies.” —Cristina Herrera, author of ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy

Susana S. Martínez is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University. Her articles have appeared in Ciberletras, Brújula, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and elsewhere.

A tribute to Rachel Blau Duplessis (1941-2026)

It is with deep sadness we report that Rachel Blau Duplessis died at Penn Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia on September 2 of this year. DuPlessis served as a Journal of Modern Literature co-editor from 2005-2016, and stepped back to advisory editor in 2017. 

A poet, editor, and scholar she earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University. Her special interests were in modern and contemporary poetry, especially issues of gender, the long poem, and cultural poetics. She is one of the foremost critics of her generation, and her works of scholarship include Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (2012), Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (2006), Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), and Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985). As editor, her books include The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) and, with Susan Stanford Friedman, Signets: Reading H.D. (1990). With Peter Quartermain, she coedited The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999) and with Ann Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1998; reprint 2007). 

DuPlessis is one of the pioneers of feminist literary study, as essayist/scholar, as a long-time member of the collective that edited the journal Feminist Studies, and as an early contributor to analytic gender studies in the university.  She was the founding editor and the scholarly and acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s series in “Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics” and edited book series on poetry and poetics for the University of Alabama and Iowa presses.

DuPlessis’s major work as a poet is the long poem Drafts, which she began in 1986 and published the final installment of in 2012: Surge: Drafts 96-114. Other books in the project include The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts: Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). Her recent poetry publications include Secular Ex Votos (2026), Life in Handkerchiefs (2023), Daykeeping (2023), Poetic Realism (2020), Around the Day in 80 Worlds (2018), Numbers (2018), and Days and Works (2017). A full list of her publications is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Blau_DuPlessis.

A professor at Temple University for many years, DuPlessis retired in 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland. She has also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

DuPlessis’s many honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize, Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.

We invite JML readers to share a memory at https://peopleforever.com/p/rachel-blau-duplessis.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Mexican counterculture's diverse corpus, 1920-1990

Consuming Citizens: Countercultural Bodies in Twentieth-Century Mexico

By Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9798855802290

https://sunypress.edu/Books/C/Consuming-Citizens

Explores twentieth-century Mexican counterculture through the lens of pleasure, body autonomy, and music and film undergrounds.

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.

Consuming Citizens offers a fresh conception of twentieth-century Mexican cultural production by critically tracing the underside of mestizo modernity. Examining a diverse corpus that includes poetry, song, avant-garde film, and more from the 1920s to '80s, the volume uses queer, feminist, and psychedelic theories to understand counterculture-and especially different acts of consumption-as a way of creating culture and alternative social structures. Practices of consuming media, sex, and drugs become means of generating community among subjects who have been marginalized by the nominally inclusive mestizo nation. Consuming Citizens thus rethinks nationalism, citizenship, and society in relation to, and as creations of, countercultural bodies.

"Consuming Citizens explores the underbelly of mestizo ideology in Mexico, from the 1920s to the late 1980s, when the discourse of neoliberalism solidified. Drawing from a remarkable breadth of primary sources, the book brings together a novel mix of literary and cultural figures under the conceptual umbrella of 'countercultural bodies'—including Cube Bonifant, Nahui Olin, Salvador Novo, Abigael Bohorquez, Margarita Dalton, Parménidez García Saldaña, Fernando del Paso, and Sergio García Michel. Foregrounding pleasure rather than identity as a basis of citizenship, Aguirre shows how countercultural bodies creatively intervene in their environments and how pleasure can serve as an unexpectedly powerful form of dissent." — Viviane Mahieux, author of Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life

Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at the University of California, Riverside.

BOOK NEWS: How modernist writers reading faces reconfigured physiognomy

Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

By Anca Parvulescu

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009599801 Open Access ebook

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/face-and-form/3C155E6711CD5D399C1F20B7DE1B2D24

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. 

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 literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, or difference – and combinations thereof. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority, but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction. The modernist overinvestment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition. 

“Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.” —Katja Haustein, lecturer in Comparative Literature, University of Kent

“Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on “modernist faciality” in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.” —Rochelle Rives, professor of English, City University of New York

Anca Pârvulescu is a scholar of comparative literature specializing in global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatist, migration studies, and East Europe. She is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at the Washington University in St. Louis. Her books include Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT P, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (U of Chicago P, 2014); and with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022).

BOOK NEWS: How literary scent offers new ways of relating

Olfactory Worldmaking

By Hsuan L. Hsu

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-2123-1 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921231/olfactory-worldmaking/ 

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.

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.

Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds.

"By articulating scent as both a multilayered medium and an ethical practice, Hsu’s work situates sensory experience squarely within contemporary debates in societal multimodality while simultaneously challenging the field to grapple with the unresolved frictions, contradictions, and inequalities that attend atmospheric and olfactory relations." —Multimodality & Society

Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics, and Air Conditioning.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing the arbitrary or frivolous whims of four modernist authors

Modernism’s Whims

By Beci Carver

Oxford UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780198950721

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780198950721

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that skeptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.

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.

Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavor to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalized spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.

• Offers hundreds of original close readings of poems and prose passages, which in their turn contribute to a new take on the history of literary whims
• Offers a new lens on modernism, via a hitherto unknown modernist author, Elsie Elizabeth Phare
• The first extended and in-depth treatment of the debt to geometry in William Empson's poems

Beci Carver is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She earned her BA, MPhil, and PhD at Cambridge University,  and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. She took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2016, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter. Her first book is Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014).