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.

BOOK NEWS: Vital collection of newly discovered Woolf correspondence

 The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399507325

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-uncollected-letters-of-virginia-woolf.html

Many previously undiscovered letters from Virginia Woolf have come to light since the original six-volume Collected Letters was published between 1975 and 1980. Over 1,400 are included in this vital new book, illuminating facets of Woolf’s life that have previously been hidden or only glimpsed. Important letters to contemporary writers, such as Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Berta Ruck, have been unearthed from archives, as well as fifty letters to T. S. Eliot. This book also features substantial collections of letters to Lady Colefax, Winifred Holtby, Mary Hutchinson, Christabel McLaren (Lady Aberconway) and Raymond Mortimer, as well as previously unrecorded correspondents. 

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.

Through these letters we see Woolf encouraging would-be authors and negotiating with editors, literary agents and foreign translators in her role as a professional writer. The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf provides extraordinary insight into the variety of acquaintance of one of the most fascinating literary figures of the twentieth century.

"This beautifully designed, sturdy volume... is a colossal work of breathtaking dedication and remarkable scholarship. [...] In this meticulously curated volume, the letters, and our delight in them, will—with their laughter, intrigues and crackling fires—run on and on." – Matthew Macer-Wright, Virginia Woolf Bulletin

"...this late in the game – when [Woolf's] essays and letters have been collected, diaries published (then republished in spiffy new editions) and fiction prefaced, annotated and afterworded ad nauseam – it is rare to get a scholarship-altering book. Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N Clarke have produced just such a volume. [...] This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author." – Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review

"The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf is the most significant contribution to Woolf Studies and the Humanities for decades. This is an immaculate critical work, which is also a major social history, edited by two pre-eminent, expert scholars. The Uncollected Letters sets a gold standard for all such editions in the future." – Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of The Bloomsbury Photographs

 

Stephen Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018. He co-edits, and regularly contributes to, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and in 2018 he gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture "'This Sheet is a Glass': Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters."

Stuart N. Clarke is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin from 1999 to 2022. As well as contributing almost 300 items to the Bulletin, he edited volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993).

BOOK NEWS: How Adrienne Rich's political interests affect her later poetry

Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry: Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

By Alec Marsh

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350466975

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/adrienne-richs-later-poetry-9781350466975/

Reorienting understandings of Adrienne Rich's later work through her interest in Marx and Marxist politics, this book engages with this overlooked part of her oeuvre through considerations of issues such as race, nationhood, and gender.

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.

From 1983 onward, after she visited revolutionary Nicaragua until the end of her life, Rich's political vision can best be described as Marxist-Humanist. Until recently, very little attention has been paid to Rich's “interest” in Marx; there is no in-depth treatment of the effect of Marx's humanistic philosophy on Rich's later work, or even on her unwavering, but altered dedication to Women's Liberation. This book fills this gap, showing how Rich's discovery of Marx's humanism affected her poetry. In doing so, it makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through poetry.

Contents:

Chapter 1: 'I Long Ago Moved On': Adrienne Rich, Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

Chapter 2: Marxist Humanism, Freedom and Raya Dunayevskaya

Chapter 3: Adrienne Rich “Feeling Contradictions” Nicaragua, and Your Native Land, Your Life.

Chapter 4: In Quest of America: The Dialectical Dimensions of “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Chapter 5: Chapter Five: Suffering in the Heart of Capital: Dark Fields of the Republic

Chapter 6: American Innocence, the German 'Guilt Question” and the Oslo Peace Process.

Chapter 7: The End of History and the Forgotten Future: Rich vs. Neoliberalism

Chapter 8: Fox: “Terza Rima” and the End of History

Chapter 9: Salvaging Midnight Salvage

Chapter 10: Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: “Draft #2006” An American Jeremiad

Chapter 11: 9/11 and The School Among the Ruins: “Tendril”

Chapter 12: Rich in the Borderlands: Late Style and Her World of Pain

"Written in an open and eloquent style, this book makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics, and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through the genre." —Steven Matthews, University of Reading

Alec Marsh is professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light (2021), William Carlos Williams and the Prose of Pure Experience (2016), John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (2015), Ezra Pound (2011), and others.

BOOK NEWS: Muriel Spark, the literary shapeshifter

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark

By James Bailey

Princeton UP, June 2026

ISBN: 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691290171/like-a-cat-loves-a-bird

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels—with their plots featuring a cast of elderly characters receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham, and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray—but it is also true of her as a person. As sly, nimble, and elegant as Spark’s own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird offers a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century.

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.

From Spark’s childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany—via South Africa, London, New York, and Rome—James Bailey traces a light-footed journey around the world and through the novelist’s strange and magnificent books. The result is an irresistible story of transformation, wit, and fierce determination—and a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

“Bailey’s slippery Spark is chaotic, complex, often hilarious, and constantly shapeshifting. His kaleidoscopic portrait illuminates Spark’s life and work from every angle, yet—crucially—allows her the freedom she craved to confound and elude those who would try to pin her down. This is a deeply stylish, astute, and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer.”—Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

“Utterly charming. A book as elegant, sharp-witted, and mischievous as its subject. If you love literary biography, you’ll feel like the cat that got the cream.”—Clare Pollard, author of Delphi: A Novel

James Bailey is a writer and researcher who holds a PhD in literature and is the author of Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction.

BOOK NEWS: Literary perspectives on labor and gender

Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature: New Literary Perspectives on the Times, Spaces and Forms of Women’s Work

Edited by Emily J. Hogg and Charlotte J. Fabricius

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541336

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-feminized-work-and-the-labor-of-literature.html

In a world wherein work is increasingly feminized, historical and contemporary literature can reveal what ‘women’s work’ entails. Reading across different genres, time periods and geographical locations, this book explores gendered working lives through novels, poetry, comics, editorial work and book collecting. It moves from the library of an early modern noblewoman to protest comics in the 2017 Women’s March, from Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and Buchi Emecheta to writing from the 2020s about motherhood and explores topics as various as gossip, poetic scraps and household management as well as gender-based violence and the creation of feminist solidarity. In doing so, it shows how literary perspectives on labor and gender can provide insights into work that is otherwise made invisible and can help us to better understand the challenges of today’s insecure work-lives.

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.

• Explores literary representations of ‘women’s work’ to generate new understandings of contemporary working conditions
• Takes a literary approach to understanding contemporary feminized working conditions
• Develops a transhistorical approach to the study of literature and notions of gendered work
• Surveys literary representations of feminized work across a range of genres and periods, including twentieth and twenty-first century novels, poetry, autofiction, and activist comics, while also considering gendered labor in the production and circulation of literature, including in contemporary publishing, and Early Modern book collecting

"What is the relation between work and books, between women’s labor and women’s writing? And how does women’s work cut across standard divisions of space and time? This collection of case studies, prefaced by an incisive and comprehensive introduction, offers illuminating answers." – Rita Felski, University of Virginia

Emily J. Hogg is associate professor of contemporary anglophone literature at the Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-editor of Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2021).

Charlotte J. Fabricius is a postdoc with the project ‘Feminized: A New Literary History of Women’s Work’ at the Center for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD in cultural studies and works in the intersection of global and digital anglophone literature, comics studies, and feminist critique. She is the author of Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics (2023).

BOOK NEWS: The Resurgence of the Archetypal Feminine

Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature

By April C. Heaslip

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496856968

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Regenerating-the-Feminine

Mythologists work as cultural animateurs, tracking patterns and trends, identifying archetypal and symbolic wounds and remedies. Reading cultural and environmental events via texts and patterns from such a perspective enables dynamic dialogue and action. Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature examines the history of the lost and degraded archetypal feminine of Western cultures, whose resurgence in scholarship, the arts, and social justice practices is now on the rise. Drawing on various methodologies to deepen our understanding of this regenerative phenomenon, author April C. Heaslip charts the significance of interconnected expressions dramatically impacting our sense of self, community, history, health, culture, and creativity.

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 study examines the feminine’s resurgence via emerging imaginal archetypal paradigms in literary fiction, memoir, and cinematic expression. Utilizing literary and film studies, depth psychology, archaeomythology, history, and religious studies to examine the cultural and personal phenomenon of feminine renewal, this book explores how remythologizing regeneration—as well as remapping complex and neglected personal and collective wasteland landscapes—revitalizes the relationship between psyche, culture, and nature.

Tending to the return of the feminine and the complex cultural and eco wastelands, this post-Jungian inquiry remythologizes notions of wholeness, amplifies feminist revisions of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s” journey, and provides transdisciplinary best practices in support of personal individuation, cultural revitalization, and ecological healing.

"Regenerating the Feminine makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields of women’s studies, popular culture, psychoanalysis, feminist theology, and more. Not only does this book offer original thought to all these areas, but it draws these disciplines together in new, imaginative ways that suggest future avenues of research."  —Susan Rowland, author of Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide

April C. Heaslip is a mythologist, educator, and artist. Her work has been published in journals and edited collections such as Myths Shattered and Restored: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; Evolving God–Images: Essays on Religion, Individuation, and Postmodern Spirituality; and more.