BOOK NEWS: Reading Irish women's writing through a queer, postcolonial lens

Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399547468

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html

A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing

• Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
• Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
• Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past

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.

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.

BOOK NEWS: Rediscovering misplaced queer history in Irish literature and film

Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature

By Patrick R. Mullen

Syracuse UP, 2026.

ISBN: 9780815612131

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/9432/queer-possessions/

Too often, fleeting moments rooted in queer experience have appeared in popular fiction, only to be little remarked upon, often noted only as a sign of continuing neoliberal social advances. In Queer Possessions: Creative Criticism and Modern Irish Literature, Patrick Mullen makes the case for a more personal analysis of these moments, finding ways for readers to create new meaning and explore closer readings of key texts.

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.

Queer Possessions is divided between close readings of modern Irish novels and films and creative readings of the same texts, to give readers the tools to engage more deeply with the process of analysis and criticism. In the first mode, Mullen examines how modern Irish literature has frequently featured comedy to represent queer sexuality and economic crisis in the twenty-first century. This analysis allows for the second mode, in which the text helps readers to assume a critical role, encouraging their own creative readings of texts and imagining more of the works.

Equal parts critical and playful, Queer Possessions works to rediscover misplaced queer history, encourage new forms of experiencing text, and empower readers to create new interpretations and works.

"What sets this book apart is its innovative approach to critical and creative reading. It doesn’t just offer theoretical insight, but delivers practical strategies for engaging with texts in imaginative, politically attuned, and meaningful ways, which is now more crucial than ever in the classroom. Queer Possessions is invaluable resource for scholars, educators, and students seeking new ways to approach and interpret literature."—Páraic Kerrigan, author of Reeling in the Queers: Tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ Past

Patrick R. Mullen is an associate professor of English at Northeastern University. He is the author of The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History.

BOOK NEWS: Examining ecological care in postcolonial poetry from the 1970s to present

Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment: Place, Precarity and Justice

By Pramod K. Nayar

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350499089

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/postcolonial-poetry-and-the-environment-9781350499089/

Examining a wide variety of poets from the last three decades of the 20th century to the present, from Asian, African, South American and settler colonies such as Canada and Australia, Pramod K. Nayar maps a poetry of ecological care, vulnerability and resilience.

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.

While environmental fiction has been widely studied, environmental poetry has not received the same level of attention. In Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment, Nayar studies the work of over 50 poets from the Global South and the formerly colonized, including John Kinsella, Tanure Ojaide, Linda Hogan, Kofi Awonoor, Okot p'Bitek, Ben Okri, and Sherwin Bitsui. He traces an ecological consciousness that cuts across human and nonhuman, living and non-living domains. This book is interested in the making, unmaking and remaking of worlds and meanings in the age of cataclysmic climate shifts, while aware of the histories that fashioned the planet in unjust and unequal ways, and to which the poets bear witness, as well as proposing alternative ways of seeing and meaning-making.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, and is also Distinguished Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. His most recent books include Vulnerable Earth (2024), Nuclear Cultures (2023) Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), and others. His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, South Asia, Narrative, Celebrity Studies, Asiatic, Prose Studies, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Biography, among others. Nayar also holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.

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.