Book News: Opinion Polls in Interwar British Literature

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn

BY MEGAN FARAGHER 

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780192898975

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/public-opinion-polling-in-mid-century-british-literature-9780192898975?cc=us&lang=en&#

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when "psychography," a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new "material" turn so often associated with interwar writing.

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 a cultural genealogy of public opinion polling in canonical and non-canonical literary works from the 1920s to the 1940s
• Demonstrates the propensity for sociologically inflected literature to flatten distinctions between high and low cultures by including experimental fiction, science fiction, detective fiction, and war fiction
• Presents the first history of polling as a cultural phenomenon as well as an institutionalized practice, which builds on growing interest in the complex relationship between modernism and institutionalism
• Adds to scholarly discussions of aesthetic transformation in the interwar period by introducing group psychology as a dominant cultural influence
• Integrates archival research from Home Intelligence Reports, Mass Observation Surveys, Wartime Social Survey Research, and BBC Listener Research Reports
• Provides interdisciplinary avenues for understanding changing cultural representations of psychological interiority that extend beyond literary modernism

Megan Faragher is an associate professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus. She received her PhD in English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012, where she specialized in twentieth-century English and Irish literature. She joined Wright State University Lake Campus in 2013 after completing a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at East Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture.

Book News: How do minds work?

Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative

BY TORSA GHOSAL

Ohio State UP, 2021

ISBN:  978-0-8142-1482-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214824.html

What is the relationship between aesthetic presentation of thought and scientific conceptions of cognition? Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative answers this question by offering incisive commentary on a range of contemporary fictions that combine language, maps, photographs, and other images to portray thought. Situating literature within groundbreaking debates on memory, perception, abstraction, and computation, Ghosal shows how stories not only reflect historical beliefs about how minds work but also participate in their reappraisal. 

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.

Out of Mind makes a compelling case for understanding narrative forms and cognitive-scientific frameworks as co-emergent and cross-pollinating. To this end, Ghosal harnesses narrative theory, multimodality studies, cognitive sciences, and disability studies to track competing perspectives on remembering, reading, and sense of place and self. Through new readings of the works of Kamila Shamsie, Aleksandar Hemon, Mark Haddon, Lance Olsen, Steve Tomasula, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others,  Out of Mind generates unique insights into literary imagination’s influence on how we think and perceive amid twenty-first-century social, technological, and environmental changes.

Listen to author Torsa Ghosal discuss "What Contemporary Literature and Science Tell Us about Forgetting" on The Academic Minute: https://academicminute.org/2021/09/torsa-ghosal-california-state-university-sacramento-what-contemporary-literature-and-science-tell-us-about-forgetting/

“Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind urges us to be more open-minded (pun intended) and embrace explanatory pluralism for how minds work.” —Sue Kim, author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative

“As cognitive literary studies moves more adeptly across narrative media, Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind admirably takes media-conscious, multimodal fictions into the fold, exploring the ways in which narrative fiction culturally and historically encodes what we think we are doing when we perceive, map, remember, and forget our own lived experiences.” —David Ciccoricco, author of Reading Network Fiction

Torsa Ghosal is assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.

Book News: Sisters writing post-independence Jamaica

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard: Folklore and Culture in Jamaica

BY VIOLET HARRINGTON BRYAN

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 9781496836212

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Erna-Brodber-and-Velma-Pollard

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica.

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.

The sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community.

Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.

"Placing the lesser-known Velma Pollard in conversation with Erna Brodber, Violet Harrington Bryan illustrates how local and presumably provincial environments (such as Woodside, Jamaica) are the sites of rich creativity and postcolonial politics. The first comparison of Brodber and Pollard, this book is a key contribution to scholarship on post-independence Jamaican literature. " -- Imani D. Owens, assistant professor of English, Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Violet Harrington Bryan is professor emerita of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is author of The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender, and her work has appeared in such journals as American Scholar, College Language Association Journal, and Louisiana Literature.

Book News: Literary modernism and the environment

Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism

EDITED BY JEREMY DIAPER

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97985-5

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54594/

This volume of critical essays provides the first major guide to ecology, environment and nature in literary modernism. It explores the environmental turn and green consciousness in modernist criticism and broadens the boundaries and scope of current ecocritical enquiry. In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism. In the rapidly burgeoning field of environmental studies, it will serve as a vital touchstone for scholars and students alike to explore the major areas and crucial themes in ecocritical modernism.

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.

CONTENTS

“Ecocriticism and Modernism”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“Modernism and the Rural Novel”

Dominic Head

“Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalisation of Nature Poetry”

Elizabeth Black

 

“‘No poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy”

Elizabeth O’Connor

 

“‘Has it begun to sprout?’: The Ecological Life of Modernist Corpses”

Julia E. Daniel

“Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetics”

Sharla Hutchinson

 

“Modernism’s Insect Sense”

Rachel Murray

“Eco-consciousness and Eco-poetics in Modernist Writing”

Fiona Becket

 

“‘The Parched Eviscerate Soil’: Environmental Thought in Eliot’s Poetry and Prose”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“The Law of Hoes and Rakes”: Wallace Stevens’s Agrarian Poetics

Jasmine McCrory

 

“‘Grain by grain’: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene”

Caitlin McIntyre

 

“‘There All The Time Without You’: Modernism and the Anthropocene”

Peter Adkins

Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles and chapters on T.S. Eliot's agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement. His essays have appeared in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, the Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society UK, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Literature & History. He recently edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on "Modernism and the Environment." 

Book News: Literary studies' engagement with #MeToo

#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

EDITED BY MARY K. HOLLAND AND HEATHER HEWETT

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781501372735

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/metoo-and-literary-studies-9781501372735/

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.

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.

#MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

This collection of timely, wide-ranging, and diverse essays demonstrates the power of #MeToo to reframe prior debates and silences in literary studies. The editors make a compelling case for #MeToo storytelling as part of a long history of representing sexual violence in literature. The essays interweave literary studies, social activism, and pedagogy in generative new readings. #MeToo and Literary Studies is essential reading and invaluable equipment for scholars, teachers, and students engaging with rape culture, misogyny, and literature. 

--Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives

Mary K. Holland is professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Heather Hewett is associate professor and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of the English Department at The State University of New York, New Paltz. Her work on feminism, gender, and contemporary literature has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well as mainstream and literary publications.