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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.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Book News: Japanese Modernism's roots in Buddhism

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction:
Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism

BY MICHIHIRO AMA



SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8141-8 hardback

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8142-5 paperback

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7022-the-awakening-of-modern-japanes.aspx


The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction is the first book to treat the literary practices of certain major modern Japanese writers as Buddhist practices, and to read their work as Buddhist literature. Its distinctive contribution is its focus on modern literature and, importantly, modern Buddhism, which Michihiro Ama presents both as existing in continuity with the historical Buddhist tradition and as having unique features of its own. Ama corrects the dominant perception in which the Christian practice of confession has been accepted as the primary informing source of modern Japanese prose literature, arguing instead that the practice has always been a part of Shin Buddhist 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.

Focusing on personal fiction, this volume explores the works of literary figures and Buddhist priests who, challenged by the modern development of Japan, turned to Buddhism in a variety of ways and used literature as a vehicle for transforming their sense of selfhood. Writers discussed include Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Shiga Naoya, Kiyozawa Manshi, and Akegarasu Haya. By bringing Buddhism out of the shadows of early twentieth-century Japanese literature and elucidating its presence in both individual authors’ lives and the genre of autobiographical fiction, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of the role of Buddhism in the development of Japanese modernity.

Michihiro Ama is Karashima Tsukasa Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at the University of Montana. He is the author of Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898–1941.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Book News: Reappraising Muriel Spark's early works

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form

BY JAMES BAILEY



Edinburgh UP, March 2021

ISBN: 9781474475969 hardback

9781474475990 ePub

9781474475983 PDF

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muriel-spark-s-early-fiction.html


A compelling reappraisal of Spark’s approach to literary experimentation

  • Offers a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, which challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing
  • Interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique
  • Presents nuanced re-readings of some of Spark’s major works, as well as lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories
  • Draws upon detailed archival research to offer a unique insight into the social contexts and personal preoccupations that informed Spark’s writing

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction.

Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction is a magnificent achievement, bursting with revealing and original insights into Spark’s fiction and the enduring preoccupations and working methods of this most singular author. The result is a welcome addition to the process Spark scholars have embarked upon in recent years: extricating (or ‘desegregating’) the author from the various literary-critical categories that once confined her. Bailey’s approach is flexible and multi-faceted by contrast, and draws on an impressively extensive use of previously unexamined archival material. The reader is provided with illuminating explorations of ‘instances of narrative daring’ during the first two decades of Spark’s career which range from under-examined early short stories to key texts such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Driver’s Seat, and place the emphasis on her enduring commitment to highlight the ways women become inscribed in oppressive cultural narratives. It is a rich and readable monograph which lives up to its ambition to establish a more complex and appropriate framework to discuss Spark in our current critical era, and will therefore be essential reading for those embarking on future studies of one of the most brilliant and unusual writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

– Bran Nicol, University of Surrey

James Bailey is honorary research fellow in English literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-editor, with Emma Young, of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) as well as author of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing and European Journal of English Studies.

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Mars

 


JML author Steve Gronert Ellerhoff discusses the background of his research on Ray Bradbury's anti-racism at work in two science fiction short stories, in a post for Indiana University Press, available HERE.

Ellerhoff's essay is now a read for FREE feature:

"White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury's Afrofuturist Stories of Mars." Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 44, no. 4, Summer 2021, pp. 1-18.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

JML 44.4 (Summer 2021) is LIVE!

 



JML 44.4 (Summer 2021) is now available. Find it on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-4 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/46333


Crossing the boundaries of race and culture


Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

White Supremacy and the Multicultural Imagination in Ray Bradbury’s Afrofuturist Stories of Mars

FREE!


Victoria Googasian 

Zora Neale Hurston and the Limits of the Will to Humanize


Suzanne Manizza Roszak

Intersectional Feminism, Black Love, and the Transnational Turn: Rereading Guillén, Hughes, and Roumain 


Chiaki Kayaba

Inadequate Compensation: Economic Agency against the Plantation System in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses 


T.J. Boynton

“The man’s a man if he is black”: Conrad, Modernism, and Race (Again)


Nicole Winsor

“Like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies”: Katherine Mansfield’s and Una Marson’s Modernist Fantasies of Objecthood


Paul Allen Miller

On Borders, Race, and Infinite Hospitality: Foucault, Derrida, and Camus


Aled Rees

The Hispanic World in the Multilingual Fiction of Colm Tóibín


Jeffrey Mather

Rising Stars and Fallen Women: Writing Lives in Emily Hahn’s China


Angelia Poon

Re-invention in a Globalized World: (Mis)reading and Metafictional Strategies in Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire 


Qingyuan Jiang

Scaling Holy Mountains: Mountaineering, Religion, and the Politics of Literature in Auden and Empson 


Charles Lock

Negotiating the eruv


Friday, October 1, 2021

The Emergences of Media Ecology and the Modern American Poetry Event

 BY DANIEL T. O'HARA

Temple University


Review of

Edward Allen. Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 281 pp. $99.99 hardcover.



Any reader wanting to trace the parallels between modern American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and the emergence of new media technology —telephone, radio, phonograph, and sound (musical) film documentary (such as Black Magic: A Pictorial History of The African-American in the Performing Arts [1967] and Black Nativity: Gospel on Broadway [1962])— will find Edward Allen’s Modernist Invention useful, informative, and fluent in communication and critical analysis as well as in theories of literary and cultural import. A good example is the reading of Wallace Stevens’s late poem “The Sick Man” (1950; pp.126-130). Allen parallels each poet he samples to an emergent media technology; Stevens’s media muse is the radio. 

After establishing the general media climate or ecology at the time, here via a rehearsal of Stevens’s correspondence with his friends the Churches—especially the widow Barbara Church, in which the poet’s reluctant but finally full-throated love affair with the radio becomes clear— Allen reads the selected example in this specific media context. At first glance, “The Sick Man” does not automatically register as a sick man’s experience of tuning and listening to his radio during the middle of the night. Instead, the poem, as Allen cites it, does make the visible a little harder literally to see, if more imaginatively suggestive for meditation: 


Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the South, bands of thousands of black men, 
Playing mouth-organs in the night, or, now, guitars.
Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.
And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals . . . (Stevens qtd. in 127)


Allen fills in the most likely context as being the old ill poet listening to and tuning his radio, and first hearing drifting along the air waves bands of black men playing their harmonicas and guitars, and then men—as if being white is the full human state—sounding their wordless chorals dissolving in the air. These massive constitutive American opposite symbols form, for the sick man, “the unison of the music” he creatively imagines and eloquently articulates:

The words of winter in which these two will come together, In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies, The listener, listening in the shadows, seeing them, Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him. Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail, The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken. (Stevens qtd. in 129)

Allen resourcefully illuminates these late allusions to Stevens’s own earlier poems, themes, figures, favorite tropesincluding the figure of the listener, the winter climate, the well-tuned guitar-accompanied words. Even as we see the new addition, the explicitly self-hailing practice of poetic composition that Stevens joinsand would fully exemplify as he eventually faces the ultimate quiet coming ever closer. Like his poetic father, Walt Whitman, Stevens conceives all his poems as songs of the self, ever courting and yet holding off, the final dark embrace. The only vision of unison held open yet together, at the end. 

With Frost, Allen reads the long narrative dialogue “Snow” from Mountain Interval (1917). Frost stages strategically the use of the telephone, in which a couple listening to their party line discloses what they do not see, another couple’s poignant domestic crisis that Frost reveals wryly for the observant reader via this new media device . Similarly, Allen traces Marianne Moore’s engagements with recording her poetry, especially in connection with Caedmon Records after WWII. But it is the last chapter, on Langston Hughes and how his early and continuing study of cinematic techniques, especially montage, leads him not only to develop documentaries of Black musicals but also to expand the limits of lyric poetry, including his own most celebrated lyric, as in the epic late poem Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). 

Modernist Invention is most successful in integrating its media technology and American poetry halves in an inventive way every bit worthy of the title adjective modernist in this final chapter on Hughes. While entertaining the established critiques of this late experiment Montage of a Dream Deferred—its repetitive nature, its often-lame colloquial expressions, its epic ambitions overshooting the poet’s own lyrical moments of creativity—Allen instead demonstrates this poem’s self-conscious, even self-parodic intentionality, startling its creator by sudden imaginative surprises in the course of pursuing a jazz improvisational method. Allen devotes nine pages to its analysis, which is why I will conclude with an example from the end of the Hughes chapter. The brief obscure lyric “Advice to Cullud Movie Actors” ends the chapter, as its self-parodic depiction of tinsel-town Black actors’ required method of dramatic portrayal:


If you’ve got to play a native
Play a native good—
Play him like
Your Uncle Tom would.
. . . .
If you’ve got to be a Porgy
Be a Porgy in full
And give Mr. Goldwyn
Plenty of bull.
. . . .
Why I say all this
(You ought to know, son)
Is I’m just mad ‘cause
I didn’t get none (Hughes qtd. in 247-248)


Allen masterfully concludes: “It’s an unforgiving poem, but one that should leave us in no doubt that Goldwyn’s industry had got well and truly under the poet’s skin” (248). This conclusion is fitting all around. 

Framing the book’s analyses is a long Introduction (pp.1-36) and a half the size Coda (pp. 249-261 entitled “Synchronicity.” Allen launches his book under the flagship 1987 paper by Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?” The established account of modernism in Anglo-American literary history is punctuated by sacred dates, none more important than the miraculous year 1922, when Ulysses and The Waste Land were published in book form. Modernism tends in this perspective to be represented as a post-WWI development, or better, reaction. The literary innovations of modernism are seen thereby as rather simply reactions to the catastrophe of war and its aftermath. 

Williams’s point, however, is to underscore how modernism is first of all broader than any one or two national bases and also a historical happening with many different moments. In fact, as Williams suggests, modernism was a historical socio-political emergence or series of emergences not limited in time or place, except in the broadest possible terms, and not only associated with literature and the other arts, but widespread in popular forms as well as transnational, global in its impact, and associated with objects and practices we have only begun to plumb (in 1987). 

Allen’s book plows in this field. But unlike the developmental logic of established cultural histories, it would bring together in synchronous fashion the art-forms, elite and popular, American and international, attached less to these elite forms and more to the popular practices and techniques, which blossom as new inventions to shape and reshape the modernist world, moment by moment. Such emergences of this universal modernist event form the ambitious horizon still beckoning, as we leave Allen’s view of Hughes in the throes of his quick-cut montages, thereby suggesting the equally fine books to come.

----

Daniel T. O’Hara, emeritus professor of English and humanities at Temple University, is the author of nine books, including Virginia Woolf and The Modern Sublime: Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2015), and editor or co-editor of six collections, most recently Humanistic Criticism: A William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern UP, 2015).