Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
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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.
JML 45.3 (Spring 2022) on the theme "New Materialisms" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48204
Content includes:
Jennifer Yusin
FREE!
Marit Grøtta
Showing Seeing: The Study of Faces and Portrait Photographs in Virginia Woolf’s Early Novels
Rachel Murray
Things that Cling: Marine Attachments in Eliot
FREE!
Emma Felin
Faith and Fabrication in To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf’s Table-Cloth(s)
Olga Zolotareva
The Image Responds: Photographic Aura in Aleksandr Ivanov’s “Stereoscope”
Matt Prout
Art or Shit: Value, Sincerity, and the Avant-garde in David Foster Wallace
Zackary Vernon
Faulkner’s Charismatic Megaflora: Critical Plant Studies and the US South
Quan Zhou and Qiping Liu
Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Aaron McCullough
Sheaths, Molds, and Shards: The Formation of an Anthropological Aesthetics in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark
Alyson Brickey
“Fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth”: Object-Oriented Lists in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
James Draney
W.G. Sebald’s Paper Universe: Austerlitz and the Poetics of Media Obsolescence
Zachary Kinsella
Becoming Bewildered
Tim Clarke
Modernist Women’s Writing and the Gift of Literature
Karina Jakubowicz
From Waste Lands to Farmhands: T.S. Eliot and the Organic Husbandry Movement
Jeffrey Careyva
The Evanescence of Lyric: A Review of John Wilkinson’s Lyric in Its Times: Temporalities in Verse, Breath, and Stone
BY ANNALISE GRICE
Edinburgh UP, 2021
ISBN: 9781474458009
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-d-h-lawrence-and-the-literary-marketplace.html
Despite the materialist turn in modernist studies, the extent and depth of D. H. Lawrence’s engagement with the literary marketplace has not been considered. The labelling of him as a working class ‘genius’ has concealed the question of how he became a published writer. Analyzing the literary marketplace of the long Edwardian period, this book assesses the circumstances for becoming an author at this time, examining Lawrence’s changing conceptions of what kind of writer he wanted to be and who he wanted to write for. It reconsiders the significance of Lawrence’s literary mentors Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett and recovers several figures (including Violet Hunt and Ezra Pound) whose significance for Lawrence’s career has been underestimated. The book evaluates how Lawrence’s work was marketed and received by the reading public in Britain and America, examining publishing houses (including Heinemann, Duckworth, T. Fisher Unwin and Mitchell Kennerley) and literary journals and magazines (such as the New Age, the English Review, Madame and Forum).
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.
"Grice provides a finely-tuned assessment of how Lawrence shaped his identity as a writer early on, through strategies and negotiations, and assistance from professional and social networks. For a comprehensive account of how Lawrence developed his talents and attained legitimacy in the literary marketplace, this book is key." – Judith Ruderman, Duke University
Annalise Grice is senior lecturer in English literature at Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in the work of D. H. Lawrence and the literary marketplace during the long twentieth century; her research interests extend to the professionalization of women’s writing, the Edwardian and early modernist sex novel, literary censorship, May Sinclair and Violet Hunt, Marie Stopes and literary representations of women's reproductive rights.
JML will not be processing new submissions received after 2 p.m. EDT on July 12 through July 18, due to staff vacation. We recommend that you delay submissions until after that time period.
BY FENG DONG
LSU Press, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8071-7611-5
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/desire-and-infinity-in-w-s-merwins-poetry/
In the first monograph on W. S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls "the other side of despair," the opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies. Feng finds these presences in Merwin's evocations of what lingers on the edge of constantly updated socio-symbolic frameworks: surreal encounters, spiritual ecstasies, and abyssal freedoms. By examining Merwin's lifelong engagement with psychic fantasies, anonymous holiness, entities both natural and supernatural, and ghostly ancestors, Feng uncovers a precarious relation with the unarticulated, unrealized side of existence.
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.
Drawing on theories from Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Heidegger, Desire and Infinity in W.S. Merwin's Poetry reads a metaphysical possibility into the poet's work at the intersection between contemporary poetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
"As he considers the ever-evolving dynamic between notions of finitude and oblivion in Merwin's poems, Feng Dong reveals not only the consequences of Merwin's genius, but also the sources of his melancholy."—Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University
“It is no surprise to discover a Lacanian poet in W. S. Merwin, for whoever has glanced at his towering mass of poems will have noted the relevance of terms like the Thing, the Real outside language, or an Other jouissance, but what is truly surprising is to see how subtly and lightly, how deftly and deeply these concepts can limn an entire body of work. Feng Dong’s brilliant synthesis conjures up the figure of an American Hölderlin who avoided visionary madness by realizing an erotic ecology, by making one with his sexual paradise.”—Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, author of Lacan in America
“As he traces the dynamic of propulsion toward the infinite—followed by necessary withdrawal—Feng reveals the nuances of Merwin’s profound grief and yet relentless mysticism. Like Merwin’s decade-spanning poetry, Feng’s work is a gift: it’s focused, and yet expansive; it’s a much-needed inflection point in Merwin scholarship; and though it is not a primary aim, Feng provides one of the most illuminatory ways of seeing Merwin’s ecopoetics to date.”—Aaron M. Moe, author of Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus
FENG DONG is associate professor of English at Qingdao University in China. His essays and reviews have appeared in College Literature, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Modern Literature, and other journals.
