BOOK NEWS: Black women writers rewriting humanism during segregation

Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow

By Mollie Godfrey

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5942-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215296.html

In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation. Through these narratives, they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations of Black feminists. 

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.

By recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, Godfrey also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationships between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.

“Godfrey recasts histories of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and—crucially—the midcentury as much more integrally feminist than previously acknowledged and positions the writers of these earlier generations as a missing link in a longer trajectory of Black subjectivity and its aesthetic representations.” —John K. Young, author of The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism

“Who said close reading is dead? Godfrey’s deft attention to the diverse novels and cultural histories of the likes of Hopkins, Larsen, Hurston, and Petry is thorough and compelling, and her many analytical threads connect back to ongoing conversations about Black women’s writing.” —Howard Rambsy II, author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Mollie Godfrey is professor of English at James Madison University. She is the editor of Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry and Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow.

BOOK NEWS: Fantasy authors of color create alternate visions of morality

Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre

By Joy Sanchez-Taylor

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5949-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215906.html

In Dispelling Fantasies, Joy Sanchez-Taylor examines how authors of color, such as R.F. Kuang, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tasha Suri, Aiden Thomas, Nghi Vo, and Marlon James, among others, offer critical counterpoints to the history of white-dominated, Eurocentric fantasy. 

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 traditional fantasy that these authors are writing against reinforces Christian virtues and colonial, white supremacist structures; Sanchez-Taylor argues that its racial tropes are tied to a history of colonization and Christian missionary practices, with popular fantasy narratives often depicting Indigenous groups as primitive, deviant peoples in need of salvation. Such representations are based on a Western binary of rational versus magical and are influenced by tenets of Christianity, ultimately contributing to depictions of “the dark fantastic” or fantasy worlds where dark and othered characters are implicitly portrayed as evil and irredeemable. 

Organized around four Christian ideals that appear frequently in Western fantasy texts—virtue, envy, patriarchy, and salvation—Dispelling Fantasies demonstrates how non-Eurocentric fantasy worlds offer alternative versions of morality, race, gender, and sexuality and make space for authors to move away from hierarchical, binary systems of good and evil.

“Written in an accessible style....[Dispelling Fantasies] is focused and well organized, and the examples are current and thoughtfully analyzed....Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.” —P. J. Kurtz, CHOICE

“Dispelling Fantasies significantly advances scholarship on works that break from the Western, Eurocentric fantasy tradition, highlighting how Christian virtues and their historical ties to colonialism and white supremacy have shaped fantasy’s bias toward whiteness.” —Taylor Driggers, author of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology

“Sanchez-Taylor introduces a large number of BIPOC authors into the critical arena, engaging with subtleties and variations across different ethnic, religious, and colonialized experiences and revealing how these writers challenge and subvert the fantasy canon. Dispelling Fantasies is creative and insightful.” —Farah Mendlesohn, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy

Joy Sanchez-Taylor is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), where her research addresses intersections between science fiction, fantasy, and critical race studies. She is the author of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction by Authors of Color (2021).

SPECIAL FEATURE: The Garden and the Machine, a Closer Look at JML 49.1

 

In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Robert Fillman discusses William Carlos Williams's unique approach to the pastoral. Read it HERE.

His JML 49.1 essay, "'[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy': William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic," is available to read FREE for a limited time.

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.1 (Fall 2025), "Running Counter" is LIVE!

 

Journal of Modern Literature 49.1 (Fall 2025) on the theme "Running Counter" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56220

Content includes:

Preston Stone 

“She will be right”: Queer Haitian Protest in Roxane Gay’s “Of Ghosts and Shadows”

Laura Lorhan

Turning the Tables on “Bluebeard”: Intertextuality in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox

Dan Dougherty

“[S]trange new air of myth”: Homophony, Narration, and the Modernist Autobiography in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Roy Benjamin

“Unprobables in their poor suit of the improssable”: The Improbability Principle in Joyce

Robert Fillman

“[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy”: William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic

FREE

Dennis Wilson Wise

C.S. Lewis’s Modernist Moment: Taking up the Gauntlet in “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians” 

Jeremy Pomeroy

Reconsidering Moretti’s “rhetoric of innocence”: Ambivalence Toward and Rationalizations of Heroic Violence in Contemporary Epic

Jihuan Yu

A Play on the Post-isms: The Unnamed Narrator’s Quest for Realness in Remainder

Kevin Rulo

Autonomy, Satire, and Parasitic Aesthetics in Wyndham Lewis’s “Joint” and The Apes of God 

Ira Nadel

Lawless Exuberance: Céline and Roth

Reviews

Jean-Michel Rabate

How It Is / Comment C’est / Как ЭTо: Glosses for Beckett’s Darkest Novel

James Mesiti

Samuel Beckett and his Transdisciplinary and Creative Process

Nicole Higgins

“There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE”: A Review of Joseph Pizza’s Dissonant Voices

Joseph Darlington

Little Wilson and Uncle Sam

Bryan Counter

Turning Around Uncertainty

BOOK NEWS: Transportation technology in Henry James's fiction

Henry James and the Writing of Transport

By Alicia Rix

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781108473170

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/henry-james-and-writing-transport

Few studies of Henry James and travel attend to the act of traveling itself: a formative experience for the author and for his invariably itinerant characters. This book explores the relationship between transport and representation in James's later fiction, examining the ineluctable significance of moving and being moved. Each chapter adopts a particular vehicle: by ship, cab, train, motorcar and bicycle, showing how James makes use of the cyclist's embroilment in media culture, the ocean-traveler's fascination with record, or the cabby's superior knowledge of geographical and sexual relations. 

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.

Drawing on contemporary newspapers, fiction, and guidebooks, Henry James and the Writing of Transport demonstrates how transport is not only contextually crucial to James's fictions but inheres in his style and logic. In particular, it argues, transport ministers to James's complex preoccupation with relationality: a quality which ranges from the intense subjectivity of his fictional worlds to their series of transatlantic encounters.

• Offers new perspective on Henry James's aesthetic as well as engaging with emerging critical trends in literary modernism
• Challenges current understandings of Henry James's writing style
• Supplies new critical readings of relatively unexamined texts by Henry James

Alicia Rix has published in The Henry James Review, Critical Quarterly, Symbiosis, and The Journal of Modern Literature, and appeared on BBC4's "Literary Landscape: The Coast." She also regularly reviews for The Times Literary Supplement.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the rhetoric of ecofacism as a political genre

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature

By Alexander Menrisky

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-5179-1868-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918682/everyday-ecofascism/

As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.

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.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.

Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like COVID-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.

"Everyday Ecofascism boldly exposes the numerous, yet insidiously subtle, narratives in contemporary culture that foster ecofascist ideologies. But perhaps more importantly, Alexander Menrisky also showcases powerful counternarratives that can shape more just futures. This is bracing, timely, and vital work." —Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

“Alexander Menrisky’s vital and moving book attunes readers to the widely used and yet highly contested term ecofascism. He offers an original perspective on the convergence of environmental crisis and political violence, illuminating the quotidian roles of storytelling and genre in these processes.” —Teresa Shewry, author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary absurdist poetry, race, and gender

Whiteness, Feminism and the Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry

By Jenna Clake

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781474494342

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-whiteness-feminism-and-the-absurd-in-contemporary-british-and-us-poetry.html

The first study to consider how Whiteness pervades and is challenged in contemporary British and US Absurdist poetry

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.

• Engages with Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and scholarship on the Theatre of the Absurd to update definitions and understandings of contemporary Absurdist British and US poetry
• Argues that poetry provides a space in which to challenge Whiteness, nihilism, and prejudice, and offer positive social change
• Demonstrates the wider influence of Absurdism and popular culture in current British and US poetry, and explores its status as an aesthetic, rather than an organised ‘school’ or movement
• Presents new analyses of poems by Emily Berry, Caroline Bird, and Jennifer L. Knox, with additional analyses of poems by Heather Phillipson, Sam Riviere, Selima Hill, Luke Kennard, Rachael Allen, Crispin Best, Franny Choi, Morgan Parker, Jane Yeh, Anne Boyer and Never Angeline Nørth

In an era of political and social turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic, where issues of gender, race and class are linked with concerns of how to survive in a capitalist society, a new aesthetic of Absurdist poetry has emerged. This aesthetic has a troubled relationship to race, pervaded by issues of representation in avant-garde poetry, and notions of who poetry writers and readers are. Focusing on British and US poets including Rachael Allen, Emily Berry, Crispin Best, Caroline Bird, Franny Choi, Jennifer L. Knox, Morgan Parker and Jane Yeh, Jenna Clake investigates how poets use the Absurd to destabilise ideas about race, gender and class and imagine social change. Bringing together Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and close readings of poems, Clake examines how the Absurd has developed, how its poets understand privilege and offer prospects of hope and change, and how the Absurd might move away from nihilism.

"With inexhaustible energy and focus, Jenna Clake’s work reanimates and illuminates a definitive aesthetic that tends to get overlooked in studies of contemporary poetics. She thereby makes it one of the most vital – and worthy of proper interrogation – forces in modern writing. This is the strongest account I’ve ever read of the Absurd’s curious persistence, a deep analysis of its spirit (whether in defiance or despair) and its increasing relevance to artists, critics, readers and citizens. Immensely enjoyable to read – lucid, fiercely intelligent and conscientious in its outlook and positioning. To be introduced to new writing and appreciate the techniques of well-known poets in a way one hasn’t considered before is a profound pleasure. Whiteness, Feminism and The Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry addresses a glaring omission in poetry scholarship, but also diagnoses the core anxieties of our century, and reframes the concerns, vitality and necessity of an emerging body of work. This is essential reading, as much for poets at any stage in their writing as it is for present and future scholars of twenty-first century poetry." – Luke Kennard, University of Birmingham

Jenna Clake is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University. Her debut novel Disturbance was published in 2023 and her poetry collections include Museum of Ice Cream (2021) and Fortune Cookie (2018). She has received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award in 2018.