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.

Friday, September 18, 2020

Deadlines approaching for two JML Calls for Papers

 DEADLINE: 25 September 2020

Underrepresented Women's Voices in Modern Literature (conference session)


 

Call for Papers

JML session for NeMLA annual convention, March 11-14, 2021

Philadelphia, PA (hybrid format)

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html


The Northeastern Modern Language Association convention session, led by the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Literature, will focus on reading under-represented women's voices in light of the Me-Too Movement.  For the last several years, the Me-Too Movement has worked to give voice to women and all sexually disenfranchised persons a platform to speak their trauma.  While this movement of revolution and healing has been a great development of the twenty-first century, women have been using writing as both a means of working through their own traumas and giving a space of catharsis to those who have no such opportunity.  The session will explore the political, social, economic and cultural positions of women creating and women featured in Modernist literature, with particular attention to the ways in which the disenfranchised voice uses writing to gain political and social power.  Presentations will focus the positions and reactions of women characters and authors faced with a lack of sexual autonomy.  There will be special attention paid, in this session, to under-represented groups of women, including but not limited to, women of color, women of non-binary orientation, and immigrant women.

Proposals--abstracts for a 15-minute conference presentation--should be sent to JML advisory editor Gina MacKenzie at gmackenzie@holyfamily.edu by 25 September 2020.


 DEADLINE: 15 October 2020

1922 and After: A Centenary of Modernism and World Literature (JML special cluster)



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. 

Submit manuscripts as a Word or RTF attachment to special coordinator Ranjan Ghosh at weransum@yahoo.co.in by 15 October 2020.



Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Book News: The small, grand, incendiary manifesto

The Manifesto Handbook: 95 Theses on an Incendiary Form

By JULIAN HANNA

Zero Books, 2020; Paperback: $19.95

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/manifesto-handbook



The Manifesto Handbook describes the hidden life of an undervalued genre: the conduit for declarations of principle, advertisements for new “isms,” and provocations in pamphlet form. Often physically slight and small in scale, the manifesto is always grand in style and ambition. A bold, charismatic genre, it has founded some of the most important and revolutionary movements in modern history, from the declaration of wars and the birth of nations to the launch of countless social, political and artistic movements worldwide. 

Julian Hanna provides a brief genealogy of the genre, analyzes its complex speaking position, traces the material process of manifesto making from production to dissemination, unpacks its extremist underbelly, and follows the twenty-first century resurgence of the manifesto as a re-politicized and reinvigorated digital form. The book's visually striking, manifesto-like structure is divided into 95 theses, each with a short title introducing the topic (e.g. Performance, Lists, Feminist Futures). In terms of style, the book is as inventive and provocative as the genre it describes: blending sharp fragments, riveting anecdotes, a broad historical overview, and tips for manifesto writers of all kinds, it is always fresh, engaging and challenging.

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.


"A full-length book like this is long overdue, and it couldn't be better timed with the current climate of polarizing rhetoric, post-truth, Antifa, engaged art, etc. The brief history plus how-to lesson is a winning combination." 

-- Mark Yakich, Gregory F. Curtin, S.J., Distinguished Professor of English, Loyola University New Orleans


"The Manifesto Handbook is something like a meta-manifesto, which proclaims the joy and necessity of the manifesto form. Julian Hanna shows us how to both read them and write them, to have some fun and maybe change the world. Read this book, find your people, expose the enemy of the good life - and write your own!" 

-- McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media, The New School



JULIAN HANNA is assistant professor of Culture Studies at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

Thursday, September 10, 2020

Call for Papers: Amplifying voices of under-represented women in modern literature


 

Call for Papers

JML session for NeMLA annual convention, March 11-14, 2021

Philadelphia, PA (hybrid format)

http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html


The Northeastern Modern Language Association convention session, led by the editorial board of the Journal of Modern Literature, will focus on reading under-represented women's voices in light of the Me-Too Movement.  For the last several years, the Me-Too Movement has worked to give voice to women and all sexually disenfranchised persons a platform to speak their trauma.  While this movement of revolution and healing has been a great development of the twenty-first century, women have been using writing as both a means of working through their own traumas and giving a space of catharsis to those who have no such opportunity.  The session will explore the political, social, economic and cultural positions of women creating and women featured in Modernist literature, with particular attention to the ways in which the disenfranchised voice uses writing to gain political and social power.  Presentations will focus the positions and reactions of women characters and authors faced with a lack of sexual autonomy.  There will be special attention paid, in this session, to under-represented groups of women, including but not limited to, women of color, women of non-binary orientation, and immigrant women.

Proposals--abstracts for a 15-minute conference presentation--should be sent to JML advisory editor Gina MacKenzie at gmackenzie@holyfamily.edu.

DEADLINE: 25 September 2020

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Book News: Joanna Scott in conversation

Conversations with Joanna Scott

EDITED BY MICHAEL LACKEY

UP of Mississippi, 2020

Hardcover: 9781496829320, $99

Paperback: 9781496829337, $25

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Joanna-Scott


Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America’s leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of numerous prestigious awards, Scott’s unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented.

Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott’s off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott’s fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy.

Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.

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.

Michael Lackey is professor of English and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He has authored and edited nine books, mostly about the origins and evolution of the genre of biofiction.