Welcome new JML co-editors!

Longtime JML co-editor Paula Marantz Cohen stepped down from her position this winter due to her heavy responsibilities as dean of the Pennoni Honors College at Drexel University. We have published a farewell tribute in JML 45.3.

Three former JML advisory editors have been promoted to co-editor:

Caren Irr is professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of three monographs--most recently Toward the Geopolitical Novel: American Fiction in the 21st Century (Columbia 2013). She has also edited five collections. Her latest books,  Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity and Adorno's Minima Moralia in the 21st Century: Fascism, Work and Ecology, both appeared in late 2021.  

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He served as director of the Latino Studies Program at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) from 2002 to 2012. He is the author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico (2009), which won honorable mention at the 2009 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latino and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies, and most recently of The White Trash Menace and Hemispheric Fiction (2020). His essays have appeared in American Literary History, Atlantic Studies, Modern Language Notes, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, and Textual Practice. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Schomburg Foundation, Dr. Nuala McGann Drescher Research Fellowship, the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, the UB Humanities Institute, and the UIUC Humanities Research Institute.  His most recent book manuscript, tentatively titled Neobugarron: Latina/o American Sexual Practice in the Age of Neoliberalism, is forthcoming.

Robert T. Tally Jr. is professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (2022); Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013); and, as editor, Spatial Literary Studies (2020), Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018); and The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017). Tally is also the general editor of “Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,” a Palgrave Macmillan book series.

These new editors join Robert Caserio, Penn State University; Janet Lyon, Penn State University; Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University; Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania; and Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University. 

Take a closer look at JML 45.2: E.M. Forster's fictional sisters

 

Take a closer look at JML 45.2. Author Rachel Gaubinger, in her post on the Indiana UP blog, explains how she came to see the Schlegel sisters' bond in Howards End as a key to understanding the text: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/on-e-m-forsters-doubt-and-my-own-a-closer-look-at-jml-45-2/. Her essay  “The ‘Voiceless Language’ of Sisters: Queer Possibility in E.M. Forster’s Howards End,” is a read-for-FREE feature, available HERE.

Book News: Graham Greene's aesthetics and form

Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

BY MARTYN SAMPSON

Fordham UP, 2021
ISBN: 9780823294671
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294671/between-form-and-faith/

What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.

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.

• Using a provocative blend of literary theory and recent Christian theology, this book upholds the radical intersection of the religious and the secular in the fiction of Graham Greene, one of England's finest writers.
• Explores Greene according to issues of form and content in an in-depth and radically new way. While much critical attention has focused on the thematics of Greene’s fiction, whether religious or secular, its form has not received sustained analysis.
• Demonstrates and dramatizes how Greene can actually have a significant impact on polarized critical methodologies. This serves to raise the status not only of Greene, but also potentially that of other religious writers, too.
• Deconstructs different kinds of prejudice among critics and readers whose dispositions are secular or religious in nature, Catholic and otherwise by considering how fiction relates not only to broad intellectual debates, but also to the minutiae of human relationships.

"Martyn Sampson expands our understanding of both Graham Greene’s Catholic imagination and the status of theological aesthetics by focusing on the formal dimensions of Greene’s literary production over the easily abstracted theological content of his work. Sampson uses the term ‘impulses’ to interrogate the imaginative pressures of faith, belief, and doubt that drove Greene’s work throughout his long literary career. He argues, in the end, that Greene’s conception of what a Catholic novel might be is more about a genre that brings the secular and the religious closer than apart, an embrace of possibility and risk at the heart of the human condition. What is remarkable in this study is Sampson’s deep reading of the discourses of critical theory placed in conversation with the vast range of Greene’s scholarship over the past decade. Between Form and Faith is an impressive achievement" — Mark Bosco, S.J., Georgetown University, author of Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination

"Here is a book of genuine intellectual heft. In his analysis of Graham Greene, Martyn Sampson brings together the insights of contemporary critical theory with those of modern theology to turn the notion of a ‘Catholic Novel’ on its head, treating faith not as a body of beliefs external to the fictions and so to be affirmed or denied, but as a dimension of the novels’ imagined worlds. This insightful and innovative book should become essential reading for literary and theological scholars." — Richard Greene, University of Toronto

Martyn Sampson earned his PhD from the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he taught English. He served as director of the 2018 and 2019 Graham Greene International Festivals.

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) is LIVE!

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) on the theme "Reclaiming Tradition and Contingency" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47651.

Contents

Charlotte Fox 

“Reclaiming” tradition: An exploration of literary influence in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk 

K. Joudry

The Gospel According to Bolo 

Emily Anderson

An “unseemly joke”: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

Rachel Gaubinger 

The “Voiceless Language” of Sisters: Queer Possibility in E.M. Forster’s Howards End 

FREE

Niklas Cyril Fischer 

E.M. Forster, Realism, and the Style of Progressive Nostalgia

Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Philip Roth’s Politics of Freedom in the American Trilogy 

Caroline Gelmi 

Vachel Lindsay and the Primitive Singing of the New Poetry

André Furlani

Walking toward Genre: The Pedestrian Excursus

Jack Quirk 

The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts” 

John Attridge

Contingent Sociality and Same-sex Desire in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu 

Reviews

Jake O’Leary

Politics and Literature in Interwar Britain’s Only Women-Controlled Weekly Review

Robert Harris

Making Him New: Ezra Pound in the Twenty-First Century

Chen Lin

The “wholeness” of T.S. Eliot: A Review of T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination

Book News: Analyzing the understudied women playwrights of the US South

Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender

BY CASEY KAYSER

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 978-1-4968-3591-8

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Marginalized

Winner of the 2021 Eudora Welty Prize

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region.

Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

“Nuanced and tempered throughout, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender is a provocative study that greatly extends our understanding of the various minefields that southern women writers navigate when they write for the stage.”

—Will Brantley, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston

"Its greatest contribution, I think, is its advice to critics, readers, and consumers of American theatre: the American South is not a monolith, indivisible and uniform, and southern women’s plays should neither be overlooked nor misread. They are far too smart for that."

—Amy R. Martin, Southern Review of Books

CASEY KAYSER is assistant professor at University of Arkansas. She is coeditor of Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century and Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Pedagogy, Mississippi Quarterly, and Midwestern Folklore.