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, April 9, 2020

Call for Papers for "1922 and After: A Centenary of Modernism and World Literature"


Drawing upon anthropological, psychological, and philosophical knowledge as well as personal experiences, the high modernists wrote their now-famous classics, including The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob's Room, among many others, in the expanded context of a post-War generation facing the larger world via the influences upon them and the influences they and their works would create. These interrelationships among European, British, and American modernism (so-called international modernism), and the emergence of World Literature, provide the framework for the issue. 

How does 1922 speak to us today, after a century of ever-increasing globalization, regarding "literature in a globalized world," the understanding of the "comparative," Global South studies, the emergence and variation of World Literature? What does it achieve proleptically in a kind of analytic arc that takes the entire century into its consciousness and resets its existence within certain mores and modes of contemporary thinking and discourses? How does 1922 speak into our times and discourses rather than speak back? How do we re-consider history, tradition, notion of the contemporary, and literature today, a hundred years hence? 1922 has its own world-forming potentials –- the potencies to "world" radical ways of thinking and understanding within the disciplinary and epistemic complexities of 2022. Articles tracing this complex literary dialogue and genealogy via close attention to important but possibly neglected texts, expanding, re-aligning, or critiquing them, defines the broad outlines of the issue.  

Submissions should conform to MLA 8th edition style for documentation and manuscript formatting, and should include a 100-150 word abstract and 3-5 keywords. Submissions must be under 9,000 words for the entire submission package, including the abstract, notes, and works cited. No simultaneous submissions or previously published material. 

Deadline: October 15, 2020. 

Submit manuscripts as a Word or RTF attachment to special coordinator Ranjan Ghosh at weransum@yahoo.co.in.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Fossil Fuel Modernities: A Closer Look at JML 43.2


Now on the IU Press Blog: Nathaniel Otjen discusses how attending to energy concerns in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds yields new understandings of fin de siècle anxieties about the end of western modernity.

Read the post HERE.

Otjen's essay, "Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds" is a special "Read for FREE" featured piece on JSTOR. 

Find it HERE