BOOK NEWS: Tracing the figure of the Asian girl in midcentury and postwar American fiction

Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire

By Sharon N. Tran

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-1986-3 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919863/asian-girlhood-in-the-shadows-of-us-empire/

Representations of the “Asian girl” as lucky objects of humanitarian rescue and rehabilitation have been used to advance America’s imperial ambitions from World War II to the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. In this compelling work, Sharon N. Tran traces the production and instrumentalization of this figure through an examination of state documents, military newspapers, documentary photographs, and other archival materials. Theorizing “Asian girlhood” as a technology of imperial power, Tran exposes how the Asian girl is invoked as a shield that protects the innocence of US empire while she is excluded from innocence herself—relegated instead to a precarious position between child and adult, human and nonhuman, plaything and laborer.

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.

Offering fresh insight into how imperial power operates, Tran analyzes figures such as the Japanese American school-girl in the context of World War II incarceration, the elusive “camptown girl,” and the objectified image of the “Napalm Girl.” Her innovative feminist approach interrogates the tendency to reclaim innocence for the Asian girl or to reframe her as an empowered woman. She engages the work of writers and artists such as Kiku Hughes, Nora Okja Keller, Aimee Phan, and lê thi diem thúy to demonstrate how Asian American literature offers rich theoretical interventions for critiquing the child–adult dichotomy that underpins key structures of imperial domination, illuminating more capacious conceptions of girlhood.

Restoring the dignity and agency of a figure too often denied both, Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire is a groundbreaking intersectional contribution to studies of gender, race, childhood, and state power.

"Ambitious, thoroughly researched, and illuminating, Sharon N. Tran’s brilliant intervention adopts a novel feminist approach to the problematics of race and empire that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire sits in the discomfiting location of the subject who’s silenced, tapping both its potential for critique as well as its capacity for imagining Asian Americanness otherwise."—Daniel Y. Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War

"In Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire, Sharon N. Tran perceptively demonstrates the significant appearance of the Asian girl throughout the archives of US military and imperial enterprise. By examining this figure in twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American literature and culture, Tran offers a persuasive and moving response to this history, theorizing how Asian girlhood obliges us to reckon with the past anew."—Crystal Parikh, author of Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

Sharon N. Tran is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

BOOK NEWS: Examining modern Catholic authors' approach to suicide

Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature

By Martin Lockerd

Cascade Books, 2025

ISBN: 9781666786019

https://wipfandstock.com/9781666786019/suicide-in-modern-catholic-literature/

Suicide plays a major role in modern literature and the philosophy that informs it. For Catholic authors, who have always understood the act within the framework of sin and redemption, it carries a special significance. In the last century, Catholic literary figures as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien and Walker Percy, Robert Hugh Benson and Muriel Spark, J.K. Huysmans and Graham Greene, wrestled with the problem of suicide in their work and produced art that confronts the despair so common in modern existence. As suicide rates continue to increase across the developed world and entire nations embrace and expand legalized assisted suicide, this book draws readers back to Catholic literature as a resource for understanding and perhaps even resisting this trend.

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.

“Martin Lockerd’s book enters with profound compassion into the contemporary problem of suicide and the causes for it, which lie far deeper than a secular therapeutic culture can address. Starting with Michel Houellebecq’s diagnosis of a world suffering hopelessly from the death of God, Lockerd goes on to explore the wisdom of Catholic writers from Greene to Percy who suffer the desolation of the postmodern world and yet find a way to belief and hope.” —Glenn C. Arbery, professor of humanities, Wyoming Catholic College

“Suicide is too serious to be left to the psychologists. ‘Chemical imbalance’ cannot do justice to the deeper meanings of melancholy. Steeped in philosophical foundations and theological revelations that stave off sentimental, presumptive mercies, Martin Lockerd looks to literature lit with a Catholic vision to interrogate, with sustained sympathy, what attracts us to the abyss of self-immolation. Considering a richly eccentric range of authors—from Tolkien to Houellebecq—he weighs what is found wanting in modernity to diagnose a range of causes that tempt too many to jump to their deaths. Even as he grants the gains of good psychology, Lockerd avoids reducing literature to another therapeutic tool. Rather, drawing from literature’s capacity to form our feelings and grant them catharsis, he manifests the distinctive potencies of great and good books to help heal the sickness unto death.” —Joshua Hren, author of the novels Infinite Regress and Blue Walls Falling Down

Martin Lockerd is an associate professor and division dean at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He joined UST in 2022 to help guide a renewed core curriculum in the Catholic liberal arts tradition. Dr. Lockerd received his BA from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, the Yeats/Eliot Review, Mythlore, and Logos. His first monograph, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism, was published in 2020.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary ecopoetry connecting nature's creation processes and composition

Experimental American Poetry and the New Organic Form

By João Paulo Guimaraes

Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

ISBN: 9781350414891

https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/experimental-american-poetry-and-the-new-organic-form-9781350414891/

Arguing that the nineteenth century concept of “living form” (the idea that, like an organism, a poem develops itself from within, according to an internal logic) is not, as some critics have argued, anathema to avant-garde writing, this book contends that the concept survived and flourished in the work of a number of contemporary experimental poets.

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.

Indebted to nineteenth century science, the notion of a “living form” endured throughout the twentieth century and the poetic vanguard's word games and collages mirrored the disjunctive frameworks that redefined how scientists made sense of life in the age of networks and non-linear systems.

Featuring readings of texts from poets including Ed Dorn, A.M.J. Crawford, P. Inman, Chris Vitiello, and Christian Bök, this book shows how a number of vanguardist poets explores the commonalities they detected between nature's processes of creation and their own methods of composition. In doing so, it highlights devices like punning, paragrammatic play, metamorphic figuration and memetic repetition, mechanisms these poets find at work in the cybernetic, genetic and digital systems they investigate in their poems.

"An excellent contribution to scholarship on poetry and the natural sciences, persuasively linking recent innovative poetics to changing ideas of living systems. Splendid readings of the poetry of Vitiello, Inman, Crawford, and Dorn, as well as an overview of new direction in biopoetry and a glance backward at Moore as a modernist precursor reshaping models of life via language. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in nonhuman poetry, ecopoetry, or Romanticism's evolving legacy" --Susan Venerborg, University of South Carolina

João Paulo Guimarães is an FCT full-time researcher at the Comparative Literature Institute of the University of Porto.

A Closer Look at JML 49.2: What Happens When Regionalism Takes Animals Seriously?

 

In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Nir Evron discusses how Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, like other regionalist writers, depicts animals as individualized beings with distinctive experiences and inner lives that demand recognition and interpretation. Read it HERE.

His JML 49.2 essay, "Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction," is available to read FREE for a limited time.

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.2, “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance”

JML 49.2 (Winter 2026), edited by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, on the theme “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance” is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56630.

Content includes:

Nir Evron

Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction

FREE

Claire Marie Class

X-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher’s Detective Fiction 

Ian Tan

Narrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth’s Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange 

Meindert Peters

No Creature of Habit? Gregor’s Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita’s Adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis 

Megan Girdwood

“As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only”: Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) 

Jena DiMaggio

Abortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature 

Julyan Oldham

“Preserved Through Childbirth”: Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway’s Virginity 

Chris Coffman

H.D.’s Nonbinary Poetics

Daniel Swain

Frank O'Hara Has Collapsed! 

Julia C. Obert

Queering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road 

Reviews 

Grant Matthew Jenkins

“This Is Your Brain on Poetry” 

Aaron Stone

How to Do the History of Queer American Literature

BOOK NEWS: Examining maternal love and power in American fiction

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative: Maternality in US Literature

By Mary Jo Bona

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9798855801996

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mothers-Mobility-Narrative

Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.

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.

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

"By placing literary texts by women from multiple ethnic cultures in conversation, Mary Jo Bona makes a much-needed intervention into motherhood studies. In Bona's reading, these texts demonstrate how women singularly construct practices of motherhood that resist social scripts. Among other things, the book offers a fresh, timely look at the AIDS health crisis and its impact on the LGBTQ community over decades and across genders, drawing on the work of Audre Lorde to explore literary representations of queer maternality among caretakers." — A Yęmisi Jimoh, coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship

Mary Jo Bona is distinguished SUNY professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.

BOOK NEWS: Expanding the metamodernist lens via feminist narrative theories

Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology 

By Katherine J. Weese

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1599-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215999.html

In Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology, Katherine J. Weese explores intersections among rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist narrative theories and post-postmodern theory to argue that an expanded rhetorical poetics offers the most comprehensive model for illuminating recent works that employ unnatural devices for feminist purposes. This pluralist narratological framework is a vital counterpoint to theorists’ tendency to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels through a post-postmodernist or metamodernist lens that overlooks unnatural, feminist, and rhetorical narrative theories.

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.

Examining Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Hotel World, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins and Life after Life, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Weese demonstrates how various narratological theories inform rather than compete with one another. Through an expanded rhetorical poetics, including a refined version of James Phelan’s MTS (mimetic, thematic, synthetic) model, she reframes post-postmodern theorists’ concerns with communicative function through a narratological lens to make the case that exploring the rhetorical function of unnatural devices challenges and extends the claims of narrow metamodern readings.

“With enormous skill, Weese shows how an antimimetic narrative can address issues of power and injustice in the real world. She succeeds at a bold and original integration of feminist, rhetorical, and unnatural theories, mapping how they—explicitly or implicitly—interrelate.” —Ellen Peel, author of Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction

“Weese provides a salutary intervention into current debates over the nature and history of ‘post-postmodern’ fiction and a timely contribution to narrative theory as she synthesizes several key strands of rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist approaches. An essential book for students and scholars of narrative.” —Brian Richardson, author of A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century

Katherine J. Weese is venable professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College. Her research has appeared in Storyworlds, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, and Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.