Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.


Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.



More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Eavesdropping with George Chauncey: A Closer Look at JML 42.3



Take a closer look at JML 42.3 (Spring 2019). Benjamin Kahan discusses his essay that revisits George Chauncey's influential text Gay New York (1994). By expanding the literary archive to include Harlem Renaissance texts, Kahan encounters a series of African-American figures that are absent from Chauncey’s categories.

Read his post HERE.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

A Closer Look at JML 42.3 (Spring 2019): Whence Waste?



Now on the press's blog, author Alexander Adkins discusses the role of disgust in postcolonial fiction explored in his essay, "Neoliberal Disgust in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger." He asks: what purpose did scatology serve in the aftermath of decolonization? What might its recent iterations tell us about the role of satire today?

Read it HERE.

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Sad goodbye to JML advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin

It is with great sorrow that the editors of JML acknowledge the sudden passing of advisory editor Joshua B. Lukin, who was known to all as a good man and a brilliant interlocutor.  We offer our sincerest condolences to his family and friends, and especially his wife Ann Keefer.  He will be missed terribly.

Philadelphia Inquirer obituary

Joshua B. Lukin Biography 

Josh Lukin taught full-time in Temple University’s First-Year Writing Program, where he has earned five Outstanding Teacher citations and been inducted into the Instructors’ Hall of Fame; he has also taught literature courses in the history of criticism, contemporary global fiction, noir film and fiction, and social issues in literature. His scholarly interests included U.S. Fiction since 1945 and Disability Studies. Josh has published articles, reviews, and interviews in such venues as Journal of Modern Literature, MLN, minnesota review, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Encyclopedia of American Disability History. He was the editor of Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), an anthology in which he and six other scholars look at how, in an era where older modes of resistance were discredited, stigmatized, or destroyed, literature illuminated the efforts of marginalized groups to salvage or to reconceptualize their struggles for rights and recognition.

Dr. Lukin served on the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession and on Temple’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Council on Disability. His work has been taught at many schools, among them the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, Purdue North Central, the University of Minnesota, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, Central Michigan University, National Chiao Tung University, the University of Chicago, San Diego State University, Southern Illinois University, and Haverford College. His last projects include a collection of his interviews with feminist authors and Noir Recognitions, a study of identity in the 1950s novels of Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Philip Dick. He lived in Philadelphia and enjoyed dining out, folksinging, classical theater, chamber music, and feline companionship.