Book News: The Metrocolony in Modernist Writing

Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature

BY CAITLIN VANDERTOP 

Cambridge UP, 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781108835626

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernism-metrocolony-urban-cultures-empire-twentieth-century-literature?format=HB

While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire's universalizing claims, yet these spaces also contradicted and resisted the impositions of an idealized English culture. Inspired by the uneven landscapes of the urban British empire, a group of twentieth-century writers transformed the visual incongruities and anachronisms on display in the city streets into sources of critique and formal innovation. Showing how these writers responded to empire's metrocolonial complexities and built legacies, Modernism in the Metrocolony traces an alternative, peripheral history of the modernist city.

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.

• Provides examples of interdisciplinary approaches to modernist literature, postcolonial studies and urban history
• Produces an innovative theoretical overview outlining the significance of peripheral urbanism to modernism, drawing primarily on theorists from the global South
• Intervenes in debates over the cultural, political and ecological legacies of colonial urbanism

Caitlin Vandertop is assistant professor at the University of Warwick. A former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and research assistant at the University of Hong Kong, her work on modernism and colonial urban culture has been published in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Novel, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Interventions.

Submission Tips: The Role of a "Cover Letter"

Our "author anonymous" policy on submissions is very often misunderstood. It merely means that the essay you attach to your email should not identify you by name. Your name should not appear in the file name, as a byline, or in headers or footers; any references to your previous publications in the essay should be made in the third person or redacted.

It does NOT mean to send us a cryptic email with the subject line "submission" that has a file attached, but no email body text whatsoever. Such messages are extremely likely to end up in our "spam" folder and because of the volume of spam email a published email address like ours receives, disappear unseen by us within a month. 

One of the best ways to ensure your submission isn't filtered as spam is to write an appropriate covering email. 

Here are some elements to include: 

A salutation 

Emails addressed specifically are less likely to be spam filtered. "Dear Journal of Modern Literature Editors" is better than "Dear Editors." "Dear Ms. Garver" is better than "Dear Managing Editor" or "Dear Editorial Office." 

Vague salutations like "to whom it may concern" may become spam filtered. "Dear Sir" indicates an assumption that the editors are all male, and is therefore offensively sexist and should be avoided. 

A body paragraph

Your email body paragraph should indicate 

• The title of your submission 
• A statement that you are submitting it to be considered for publication in the Journal of Modern Literature. 
• The word count for the ENTIRE submission package including ALL elements (When using the Review > Word Count menu in MS Word, be sure to click the box "include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes.")
• A statement attesting to the fact that the submission is original, that you are the author, that it has not been previously published, and that it is not under review at any other journal at this time.
• An observation of why you think the submission is a fit for us. You might find it helpful to read some back issues on JSTOR or Project Muse, look at tables of contents published on this blog or read some of the "Read for FREE" pieces we link.

Signature

It is essential for our record keeping that we know your name, so please be sure to include it at the close of your letter. Your name is not shared with the editors until after acceptance. They will never be informed of the identity of authors whose works are rejected or returned for revision.

If your culture's naming convention is to use the family name first and the familiar name second, it is helpful if you capitalize the family name, indicating this is how you should be addressed. 

This is also where to let us know your preferred prefix (Dr., Prof., Mr., Ms., Mx.) as well as preferred pronouns, so that we know how to address future correspondence to you. 

Finally, include your academic affiliations, both current and previous, so that we can find objective peer reviewers who are not your colleagues or previous instructors. The COPE guidelines require that double blind reviewers not have conflicts of interest.

Examples:

Regards,

Ms. Jane Doe

(she / her / hers)

PhD Candidate, Stanford University

BA and MA, Penn State University

Sincerely,

Dr. ZHANG Bai

(he / him / his)

Professor of Foreign Literature, Shenzhen University

PhD, Yale University

What NOT to include

We don't need a list of your publications or other accomplishments. Submissions are read double blind on their own merits. When a piece is accepted you will have an opportunity to share this information in a biographical note.

Book News: Embracing the refugee

The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America

BY TIMOTHY K. AUGUST

Temple University Press, 2020

ISBN Paper: 978-1-4399-1531-8

http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009352

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world.

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.

August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.

Arguing that “aesthetics” should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, August shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending on how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

"August presents a compelling and multifaceted analysis of Southeast Asian refugee artistic expression....The Refugee Aesthetic is critical, interdisciplinary, and brings needed humanity to the scholarship of migration.... (August) lays a detailed foundation for envisioning and re-envisioning what it means to be a refugee and exploring what that truer and more complex meaning tells America about itself."

—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“In the space between dominant American rhetorics of condescension or benevolence and emergent voices of authors who turn the release of information into artful acts of negotiation, Timothy August locates what he argues as the politics of the refugee aesthetic. Written with sensitivity to bring attention to subjective nuances of pain, belonging, reflexivity, and hope in numerous Southeast Asian American narratives and artworks, this book is a compelling testament to a stigmatized population’s admirably creative uses of discursive forms.”

—Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

“This erudite yet admirably lucid book brings to bear on refugee writing a new and productive set of theoretical frameworks that particularly emphasizes aesthetics and the visual. It offers fresh, compelling readings of works from Thi Bui’s graphic Narrative, The Best We Could Do, to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer. As a result, The Refugee Aesthetic immediately proves its worth to a wide audience, from readers interested in race and U.S. literature to those seeking guidance to the contemporary literary scene.”

—Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.

JML 44.2 (Winter 2021) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.2 (Winter 2021) 
"Modern Chinese Literature in the Context of World Literature"
guest edited by Wang Ning and Peng Qinglong
is now live on JSTOR and Project Muse

Content includes:

Wang Ning

Editor’s Introduction: Modern Chinese Literature from Local to Global

Reflections on Theories and Literary Trends

Wang Ning

Transvaluing the New Culture Movement: Toward the Construction of a Cosmo-Humanism

Yang Mingming and Yang Xin

Modern Chinese Literature under the Russian-Soviet Influence

Xiaohong Zhang and Jiazhao Lin

Between Modern and Postmodern: Contemporary Chinese Poetry from Outside in

Chengzhou He

Drama as Political Commentary: Women and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement in Cao Yu’s Plays

Tong King Lee

Hong Kong Literature: Colonialism, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption 

Interpretations of Writers and Their Works

Ming Dong Gu

Lu Xun and Modern Chinese Literature in the Context of World Literature

Zou Li 

Toward a New Narrative About China’s Anti-Japanese War: Reading Bodily Anxiety in Ba Jin’s Cold Nights

Weihua He

Fortress Besieged: Cynicism and Qian Zhongshu’s Narrative of the Modern Chinese “Self”

Peng Qinglong 

The National and Cosmopolitan Significance of Jia Pingwa’s Fiction

Lu Shao

The Rationale of Realism in Yu Hua’s To Live (1993) 

Afterword

Theo D’haen 

Modern Chinese Literature and World Literature from a European Perspective

Reviews

Feng Dong 

The Unbearable Affects of Being

James Belflower

Emerging Improvisations: A Review of Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital

Catherine Flynn

Modernism at the Bar: Robert Spoo’s Modernism and the Law

Tanfer Emin Tunc 

Rethinking Modernism, Sex and Gender

Patrick Anson

The Work of Art and the Art of Work

Book News: Novels navigating new media

 Out of Print: Mediating Information in the Novel and the Book

BY JULIA PANKO

Paperback: 9781625345608

Hardcover: 9781625345592

University of Massachusetts Press, December 2020

https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345608/out-of-print/

Through technological experiments, readers have seen the concept of the book change over the years, and the novel reflects these experiments, acting as a kind of archive for information. Out of Print reveals that the novel continues to shape popular understandings of information culture, even as it adapts to engage with new media and new practices of mediating information in the digital age.

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.

This innovative study chronicles how the print book has fared as both novelists and the burgeoning profession of information science have grappled with unprecedented quantities of data across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the novel’s archival project took a critical turn from realism to an investigation of the structures, possibilities, and ideologies of information media, novelists have considered ideas about how data can best be collected and stored. Julia Panko pairs case studies from information history with close readings of modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and contemporary novels from Jonathan Safran Foer, Stephen King, and Mark Z. Danielewski that emphasize their own informational qualities and experiment with the aesthetic potential of the print book.

"This is a complex and fascinating book that has illuminating things to say about the novel as a genre; about the future of the book, the future of the novel, and the future of literary reading; about the form of information and the category of form itself; and about the information ecology of the digital world. It is lucidly and elegantly written, and its scholarship is impressively detailed and rigorous."—John Frow, author of Character and Person

 

"Out of Print explores the continued importance and power of the book in a digital age of increased big data. It draws from many important works of scholarship across the interdisciplinary fields of new media, book history, and literary studies. This weaving together of scholarship and literary texts, from modernism and contemporary literature, is a valuable contribution."—Jessica Pressman, author of Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age

JULIA PANKO is associate professor of English at Weber State University.