BOOK NEWS: How Viktor Shklovsky engaged with new ideas about the body

Viktor Shklovsky’s Involuntary Modernism: Writing and Other Bodily Functions

By Asiya Bulatova 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2026

ISBN: 9781350422612

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/viktor-shklovskys-involuntary-modernism-9781350422612/

One of the founders of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky is a key figure within twentieth-century literary history. This book explores Shklovsky's participation in early-Soviet debates about the relations between agency, volition and bodily functions.

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.

Viktor Shklovsky's Involuntary Modernism shows how his writings engage with new ideas about the body, focusing on those physiological influences that were believed to affect human agency, such as nutrition and metabolism, energy preservation and kinaesthetic economy, reflexes and automatic actions, and hormones associated with reproduction and sexuality.

Drawing on the work Shklovsky published during his exile in Berlin in 1922-1923, this book argues that his immersion in one of the major centres of modernist culture resulted in writing that responded to growing restrictions on freedom of movement by exploring the limits and possibilities of control over the body and its functions. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it uncovers a critical yet neglected area of early-Soviet literary and cultural history. Its in-depth exploration of the centrality of the body represents a new perspective on Shklovsky's work and offers an original contribution to current scholarship on Russian Formalism and its place in the larger context of modernist culture and literary theory.

"Quirky and original, Bulatova's book reinterprets Shklovsky's work of the 1920s by inscribing it in the larger field of Soviet discourses on biopolitics, registering both utopian visions of immortality and everyday psychological coercion. Shklovsky's prose, Bulatova compellingly argues, was part and parcel of this spirit of experimentation that sought—and often failed—to extend the realm of the possible." —Galin Tihanov, Queen Mary University of London

"Bulatova takes a fresh look at Russia's most renowned formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in light of early Soviet biopolitics, from which human bodies might be remolded and remade in the image of the Revolution. Her book makes a major contribution to new understanding of the extraordinary thinker and the culture he was working to create." —Tyrus Miller, University of California, Irvine

 

Asiya Bulatova is a researcher at Södertörn University, Sweden.

BOOK NEWS: Revenge as a theme in the writings of Black and indigenous authors

Murderous Feeling: Gender and Retribution in Black and Indigenous Literature

By Chad Benito Infante

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN: 978-1-5179-1988-7

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919887/murderous-feeling/

From Octavia Butler’s Kindred to The Round House by Louise Erdrich, themes of retribution resound throughout the work of renowned Black and Indigenous women and queer authors. Revealing how the Black Power Movement and the American Indian Movement influenced literature from the 1960s onward, Murderous Feeling explores how these writers employ revenge narratives as a response to white supremacy and colonialism.

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.

Chad Benito Infante shows how, rather than using retributive violence to cultivate a heroic, masculine ideal, Black and Native women and queer writers use revenge as a way to raise philosophical questions about justice and the reclamation of power in the face of white supremacy. Pairing canonical texts—including work by James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Craig Womack, Toni Morrison, and others—he demonstrates how this uniquely queer and feminist literary tradition, the “grammar of interrogation,” allows for generative ambivalence and curiosity about the possibilities and failures of violence.

In highlighting these narratives’ potential to steer anticolonial efforts, Murderous Feeling reconceptualizes literary violence not as an individualized act of cleansing but as a tool for revolutionary inquiry.

"A brilliant look at the uses and possibilities of violence in Black and Indigenous texts, Murderous Feeling offers a provocative window into canonical novels by Walker, Silko, Baldwin, Butler, Momaday, Erdrich, and more. Chad Benito Infante presents a highly original and compelling analysis of violence as an ethic of care. This is a must-read book."—Lisa Tatonetti, author of Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinity

"Using the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality as a barometer for understanding the social and affective structures of identity and supremacy, Chad Benito Infante renders a bold, innovative analysis of how US Indigenous and African American queer and women authors have imagined anticolonial reprisal."—Marlon B. Ross, author of Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

Chad Benito Infante is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

BOOK NEWS: Trans narrators in contemporary fiction

Trans Narrators: First-Person Form and the Gendered Body in Contemporary Literature

By Chiara Pellegrini

Edinburgh UP, 2026

ISBN: 9781399526951

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-trans-narrators.html

• Demonstrates how contemporary trans narrators reshape current understandings of narrative form and gender identity
• Proposes a new methodology that combines trans studies and narratives studies
• Defines and describes a canon of contemporary trans-authored prose
• Enhances studies of first-person voice by expanding their corpus of texts
• Offers readings of popular trans authors (Emezi) as well as lesser-known ones (Gimpelevich)
• Discusses Anglophone trans narratives in a UK context as well as transnationally
• Centers gender in arguing for the political importance of narrative form

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.

Trans Narrators examines a range of trans-authored novels, short stories and autobiographical narratives published after 2015 and develops a new methodology at the intersection of trans studies and narrative studies. The book identifies temporality, embodiment and reliability as key areas of investment for trans authors, and focuses specifically on the first-person narrator, showing how its formal characteristics impact how we understand gender and the body, the act of narrating the self, and the ability of marginalized subjects to speak and be visible. By creating a framework for reading trans narratives, this book responds to the urgency of promoting trans voices in a transnational context in which trans rights are at risk, as well as to a growing understanding of the role of narrative forms in shaping collective thought, politics and material conditions.

In illuminating the formal practices and social challenges of narrating trans lives in both fiction and autobiography, Trans Narrators offers brilliant new ways of thinking about all narrative acts. Deeply thoughtful and richly capacious, Pellegrini’s pathbreaking book is a milestone not only for trans studies but for narratology tout court. – Susan S. Lanser, Brandeis University

Chiara Pellegrini completed her PhD at Newcastle University in 2022 and currently works as an independent researcher and as an Equity and Inclusion Adviser at Canterbury Christ Church University. She has published articles and book chapters on queer theory and film adaptation, contemporary trans memoirs and novels, queer temporalities in film and television, the body in intersex narratives, and feminism and popular culture. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Narrative entitled ‘Trans/forming Narrative Studies’ (2024).

BOOK NEWS: Creative explorations of reproductive justice, 1959-73

The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973

By Sophie A. Jones

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781474433303

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-reproductive-politics-of-american-literature-and-film-1959-1973.html

In the long 1960s, struggles for the rights to abortion, contraception, and reproduction itself gathered momentum. This book explores reproduction in American literature and film produced between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, and argues that writers and filmmakers of this period engaged with the social horizons of pregnancy by reflecting on their own creative practices. In an era that witnessed a renewed emphasis on planned pregnancy and population control, authors and filmmakers were often preoccupied with the ways reproduction – both cultural and biological – might escape the drive to predict and plan. Tracing this preoccupation in key works of drama, film, poetry and prose, Sophie A. Jones argues that these works mobilize the concept of contingency to address the relationships of race, disability and reproductive freedom. Offering fresh perspectives on canonical and lesser-known works, the book makes a case for the central role of culture in forging new approaches to reproductive justice.

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.

• Develops a new approach to the politics of reproduction in literature and film
• Uncovers new connections between literature, film, and the politics of reproduction
• Offers fresh approaches to a wide range of work by figures including Lorraine Hansberry, Stan Brakhage, Richard Yates and Sylvia Plath
• Develops the concept of ‘reproductive contingency’ to illuminate the cultural politics of reproduction in the long 1960s

"Remarkable in its insight, Sophie A. Jones’s The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973 investigates a range of texts from the long 1960s to demonstrate the role of reproductive contingency in cultural and biological reproduction. This timely analysis offers an original contribution to American literary and cultural studies." – Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

Sophie A. Jones is lecturer in contemporary literature and gender studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Floating Cities and Amphibious Engineers, A Closer Look at JML 49.4

 David A. Vivian considers how Caribbean science fiction might resist the common climate-fiction plot of a lone savior or lone technological solution. Read more HERE 

His JML 49.4 article, "Reimagining Urban Ecology through Caribbean Science Fiction: Reading the Green Cities of Tobias Buckell and Stephanie Saulter," linked in the post, is available FREE

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.4 (Summer 2026) "Ecocriticism / Anti-Imperialism" is now LIVE!

Journal of Modern Literature 49.4 (Summer 2026), "Ecocriticism / Anti-Imperialism," edited by Edited by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57714

Content includes:

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo 

Literature on a Hot Planet: An Introduction to Ecocriticism/Anti-Imperialism

FREE!

Ecocriticism

David A. Vivian

Reimagining Urban Ecology through Caribbean Science Fiction: Reading the Green Cities of Tobias Buckell and Stephanie Saulter

FREE!

Jie Chen and Quan Wang

Steaming into a Postcolonial Utopia: Reimagining Energy Futures in N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine” 

Kuhelika Ghosh

Caribbean Blooms: The Invisible Hands of Tropical Gardens in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book)

Huiming Liu

Financial Colonialism and Ecological Echoes in The Waste Land 

Hadas Wagner

“Let it Blaze”: Burning Leaves, Recycling, and Reform in Virginia Woolf’s Late Writing 

Joe Larios

Escape from Humanity: Subjective Constraint and the Non-Human in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves 

Anti-Imperialism

Leo Kadokura

Amidst the Wreckage: Joseph Conrad’s Epistemology of Englishness and Empire

Holly Eva Allen

One Tangle of Shadows: Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, and a Message Against Nationalism and Traditional Translation

Yiran Xu

Reimagining the Occupation in the 1990s: Postwar Butterfly, Disillusionment, and Historical Legacies in Shimada Masahiko’s Suisei no Jūnin 

Reviews 

Alyson Favilla

Leave No Trace: A Review of Gina Caison’s Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance

Rory Michael Hutchings

Theorizing Like a Rat

Nataša Tučev

Conrad’s Spatial Narratives

Sarah Dowling

Language Questions and Language Answers

BOOK NEWS: The poetic innovations of the Noigandres group

Noigandres: Poetry Made New in Brazil

By Antonio Sergio Bessa

Fordham UP, 2026

ISBN: 9781531513689

https://fordhampress.com/noigandres-hb-9781531513672.html

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the “verbivocovisual,” to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.

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.

Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called “heroic phase” of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.

Bessa persuasively situates the Noigandres group—the missing link between Modernism and the poetics of our digital age—within an artistic and philosophical lineage. Providing an accessible and incisive summary of the theoretical background and the particular cultural conditions of post-war Brazil, Bessa’s book is the ideal guide for understanding this novel, challenging, and important poetry.—Craig Dworkin, author of The Sound of Thinking: A Listener's Companion to Conceptual Music

Bessa renews our understanding of the Noigandres poets. His readings, with an eye on contemporary concerns, will introduce the movement to new generation of scholars.—Marília Librandi, author of Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel

Antonio Sergio Bessa is a scholar of concrete poetry and the author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (2008). He has edited several volumes on concrete poetry including Haroldo de Campos’s Novas: Selected Writings (with Odile Cisneros, 2007), and Mary Ellen Solt: Toward a Theory of Concrete Poetry (2010).