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.

Monday, October 28, 2019

English submissions, please!

A quick clarification: Journal of Modern Literature is an English-language journal. While we consider studies ABOUT literatures in all languages, we do not consider submissions themselves that are not in English. 

All non-English passages you quote must have English translations provided. See MLA 8th edition, section 1.3.8, for formatting details.

See also our detailed submission guidelines here: https://journalofmodernliterature.blogspot.com/p/submission-guidelines.html

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Dangerous epistles in Joyce and Proust: A Closer Look at JML 42.4



Take a closer look at JML 42.4 (Summer 2019). David Spurr discusses how controversial political figures--Dreyfus and Parnell--appear in the fiction of Proust and Joyce, and how the role of forged letters in both cases influence these authors' work.

Read it HERE.

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

JML 42.4, A modernist lineage: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee



JML 42.4 (Summer 2019), on the theme "Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee," is now available!
Read it on JSTOR and Project Muse

The sequence of names heading this issue’s thematic clusters—James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John M. Coetzee—embody an ideal modernist lineage. Indeed, Beckett began his career as Joyce’s unofficial secretary, and he always named Joyce’s devotion to his art as influencing his decision to pursue a literary rather than academic career. Coetzee, who started out as a computer expert and an English professor, wrote an excellent dissertation on the style of Beckett’s Watt, as well as important essays on Beckett. Beckett offered both a repertoire of literary techniques and a model of ethical integrity. This sequence of names suggests that modernism has not yet lost its purchase as an umbrella term. Modernism has not been replaced by the “posts” that have been tried and petered out, one after the other. 

Issue content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté
Editor’s Introduction: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee

David Spurr 
Trials of the Letter in Joyce and Proust

Neil R. Davison
“Ivy Day”: Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce’s Race-Society Colonial Irish Jew 

Georgina Binnie 
“Photo girl he calls her”: Re-Reading Milly in Ulysses 

Elizabeth M. Bonapfel 
Joyce’s Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in Finnegans Wake 

Megan Girdwood
“Danced through its seven phases”: Samuel Beckett, Symbolism, and Stage Choreographies 

Rick de Villiers 
A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation 

Patrick Whitmarsh 
“So it is I who speak”: Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and The Unnamable 

Emilie Morin
Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception

Shannon Forest
Challenging Secularity’s Posthistorical “Destination”: J.M. Coetzee’s Radical Openness in the Jesus Novels

Marc Farrant 
Finitizing Life: Between Reason and Religion in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels

Ian Tan 
Ways into Joycean Silences: Reviewing James Joyce’s Silences 

Michelle Chiang 
Samuel Beckett and Modernist Film Culture: Review of Samuel Beckett and Cinema

Arya Aryan 
The Late Style of Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics 

Erin A. Smith
Modernism for the Middle Class