BOOK NEWS: The influence of architecture on 20th century American poetry

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms

BY JO GILL

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780198868347

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-american-poetry-and-the-architectural-imagination-9780198868347?cc=us&lang=en

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both.

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 book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as "modern" (and often "international style") architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

• Expands our understanding of poetry and place; poetry and the city; poetry and the arts
• Covers a range of familiar poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens and others who are less widely studied
• Brings architectural and poetic theory, practice, and debates together in unexpected and productive ways
• Opens up the field of twentieth-century American poetry to new interpretations
• Features unpublished archival research

Jo Gill is vice-principal and head of the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in mid-century American literature and culture and has published widely on writers including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

BOOK NEWS: Jean-Luc Nancy's thought and aesthetic modernity

 Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism

EDITED BY COSMIN TOMA

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781501370144

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/understanding-nancy-understanding-modernism-9781501370144/

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of modernity.

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 contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy's signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

"This is a stunning collection that will be a priceless resource for readers of Nancy's work. The essays are ddply knowledgeable and together they chart remarkably clear paths through all the major features of Nancy's world and his thinking of 'world.'" --Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California

"The texts included here demonstrate in incisive ways not only how Nancy's writings open onto understanding modernity but also how questions of modernity offer new and compelling paths for reading Nancy. It is a wonderfully impressive volume." --Philip Armstrong, Ohio State University

Cosmin Toma is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, St Hugh's College, UK. He has primarily published on modern and contemporary French literature, critical theory, music, and aesthetics. His first book, Neutraliser l’absolu. Blanchot, Beckett et la chose littéraire (2019) is an inquiry into what remains of what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe called “the literary absolute” when it is neutralized by modernity. He has also worked extensively as an academic translator.

Remembering Alan Wilde, JML editorial board 1970-2003

 

© Temple University Libraries, Special
Collections Research Center, 1986

We are saddened to report that Alan Wilde, a founding member of the Journal of Modern Literature's editorial board, passed away November 25, 2023, at age 94. He served on the editorial board from the journal's founding in 1970 until 2003.

Wilde earned his BA and PhD from Harvard University, spent a year in Britain on a Fulbright Scholarship, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. He was a professor at Temple University until retiring in 1994. 

His books include: Art and Order: A Study of E.M. Forster (New York UP, 1964); Christopher Isherwood (Twayne Publishers, 1971), Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Ironic Imagination (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981; pb reprint with new preface, U of Pennsylvania P, 1987); Middle Grounds:  Studies in American Fiction (U of Pennsylvania P,1987). Wilde also published as editor a collection of critical essays Critical Essays on E.M. Forster (Twayne Publishers, 1990).

BOOK NEWS: Reconceptualizing Nietzsche’s relationship to Irish modernism

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations 

BY MATTHEW FOGARTY

Liverpool UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781802077223 

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781802077223

Subjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualizes Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes — eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism — it challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most ‘Nietzschean’ of these Irish modernists.

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.

While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more ‘Nietzschean’ than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.

Nietzsche, the Protean philosopher par excellence, must be reinvented by each generation, and yet, in the first decades of the twentieth century, his revolutionary ideas were instrumental in bringing about Irish modernism, here represented by Yeats, Joyce and Beckett. Thanks to Matthew Fogarty’s astute, original, and compelling analyses, we discover an Übermensch speaking with an undeniable Irish accent. —Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Matthew Fogarty is an associate lecturer at Maynooth University and University College Dublin. He has published articles in the Irish Gothic Journal, International Yeats Studies, Modern Drama, and the Journal of Academic Writing. His latest article is forthcoming in the James Joyce Quarterly. His co-edited collection, Ethical Crossroads in Literary Modernism, is forthcoming with Clemson University Press.

BOOK NEWS: Study of Orwell's Ethical Commitments

George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality

BY PETER BRIAN BARRY

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780197627402

https://academic.oup.com/book/46650

George Orwell is sometimes read as being disinterested in if not outright hostile to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell’s work reveals an author whose writing was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell said things of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive philosophical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. 

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.

George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of his corpus, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While he is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and to those philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality is the first monograph written by a philosopher that offers a reading of Orwell informed by historical and contemporary philosophy and promises to better our understanding of him and his work.

Peter Brian Barry is professor of philosophy and the Finkbeiner Endowed Professor in Ethics, Saginaw Valley State University.

BOOK NEWS: How writers contributed to peace in Northern Ireland

Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland

BY MARILYNN RICHTARIK

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192886408

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/getting-to-good-friday-9780192886408?cc=us&lang=en&#

Getting to Good Friday intertwines literary analysis and narrative history in an accessible account of the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland's divided society that brought thirty years of political violence to a close with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Drawing on decades of reading, researching, and teaching Northern Irish literature and talking and corresponding with Northern Irish writers, Marilynn Richtarik describes literary reactions and contributions to the peace process during the fifteen years preceding the Agreement and in the immediate post-conflict era. Progress in this period hinged on negotiators' ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As poet Michael Longley commented in 1998, "In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across." 

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.

Interpreting selected literary works by Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Deirdre Madden, Seamus Deane, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, and David Park within a detailed historical frame, Richtarik demonstrates the extent to which authors were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations. Getting to Good Friday suggests that literature as literature-that is, in its formal properties in addition to anything it might have to "say" about a given subject-can enrich readers' historical understanding. Through Richtarik's engaging narrative, creative writing emerges as both the medium of and a metaphor for the peace process itself.

• Enhances our understanding of what the peace process achieved and how literary writers contributed to it
• Employs an innovative interdisciplinary approach that smoothly integrates literary analysis and narrative history to illuminate historical phenomena
• Includes analysis informed by the author's personal conversations and correspondence with literary writers, as well as by examination of their unpublished papers
• Offers readers cutting-edge scholarship in a readable format

"Professor Richtarik's book applies her deep knowledge of the psychological and political terrain of Northern Ireland to this empathetic study of a cohort of remarkably talented and closely linked writers. It brings new and arresting insights to the troubled history of the province, its contested cultural paradigms, the pressures which led to the peace process, and the tensions which continue to threaten that achievement." -- R. F. Foster, emeritus professor of Irish History, University of Oxford, and emeritus professor of Irish History and Literature, Queen Mary University of London

"Getting to Good Friday, a profound meditation on historical and political events and the cultural response of writers, confirms that it is by writing that a refinement in character is possible—and that the best self is the self that writes. In Reading in the Dark, published two years before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, Seamus Deane presciently identified the problem of the aftermath: the problem of telling or not telling. Marilynn Richtarik describes the drive towards Good Friday through riveting storytelling, but her detailed attention to creative writers' texts is her finest achievement." -- Anne Devlin, author of After Easter and The Apparitions

"Getting to Good Friday is an important book at a critical time. In arguments about Brexit and the protocol it is sometimes remarked that the people who defend the 1998 agreement never read it ... Getting to Good Friday is a welcome bridge between these sundered generations, made of the words that join them, conditional as they are." -- Nicolas Allen, The Irish Times

Marilynn Richtarik is professor of English at Georgia State University, where she teaches British, Irish, and world literature. She was educated at Harvard University, where she earned an undergraduate degree in American History and Literature, and at Oxford University, which she attended as a Rhodes Scholar. Her previous books include Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (2012), and an edition of Stewart Parker's novel Hopdance (2017). She spent the first half of 2017 researching and teaching at Queen's University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar.

BOOK NEWS: Interviews with Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally

Conversations with Terrence McNally

EDITED BY RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN

UP of Mississippi

ISBN: 9781496843227

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Terrence-McNally

Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place.

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.

Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

"Important and outstanding.... This highly recommended collection will be an essential addition to all libraries with theater collections." - Herbert E. Shapiro, Library Journal

 

Raymond-Jean Frontain is an independent scholar who has published eight books and over 100 scholarly articles on the Bible as literature, gay literature, Renaissance poetry, the Indian novel, and modern drama. His previous works on Terrence McNally include The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater, Muse of Fire (2021). He is currently at work on a study of Tennessee Williams’s sexual ethic.

BOOK NEWS: New critical edition of Larsen's Passing

Passing by Nella Larsen

EDITED BY RAFAEL WALKER

Broadview Press, 2023

ISBN: 9781554815159

https://broadviewpress.com/product/passing/#tab-description

Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group’s greatest obstacles), Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is easily among the most penetrating, skillfully composed explorations of race and gender in the twentieth century. It focuses on two estranged friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who, after years apart, are joltingly thrown back together, their lives transformed radically through one of the most scandalous and intriguing social phenomena of Larsen’s time—racial passing. Today, Larsen is ranked as one of the leading novelists of her generation; this novel, her masterpiece, demonstrates why.

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.

Appendices include material on the novel’s composition and reception, as well as legal documents relating to mixed-race individuals and a selection of recent critical work on the novel’s afterlife and the 2021 film adaptation.

“This new edition of Nella Larsen’s now-classic novel, with Rafael Walker’s excellent introduction and chronology, along with relevant reviews and contemporary documents about passing, is the best we have, perfect for classroom use and the general reader alike.” — George Hutchinson, Cornell University, author of In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line

“Rafael Walker’s introduction, along with the edition’s appendices, offers important historical contextualization for Larsen’s life and novels. These materials enhance, rather than cover over, the proliferation of meanings and contradictions that emerge not only from reviews and criticism but also from biographies and accounts that detail the archival fragments of who Larsen was. Nella Larsen was a formidable novelist and social figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but Walker creates a pathway for students and educators alike to confidently approach the magnitude of her being.” — Haylee Harrell, University of Houston

Rafael Walker is assistant professor of English, Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics).

Animal Becoming Human: A Closer Look at JML 46.4

 

Cory Austin Knudson discusses how Georges Bataille’s notion of “animality” can help us understand Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, in this post for the Indiana University Press blog: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/the-beast-turning-human-a-closer-look-at-jml-46-4/

His essay is available FREE for a limited time, linked in the post.

Woolf’s The Waves and tormented public-school boys: A Closer Look at JML 46.4

Patricia Morgne Cramer explains how Woolf indicts British public-school culture for harming gifted men through her depiction of Bernard, Louis, and Neville in The Waves. Read it HERE.

Her JML 46.4 essay is FREE for a limited time, linked in the post.

JML 46.4 (Summer 2023) is now LIVE!

JML 46.4 (Summer 2023), "Evocations of Intimacy," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51258

Content includes:

Anca Parvulescu

The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Patty Argyrides

Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works 

Patricia Morgne Cramer

“Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion”: The Waves as a Modernist Symposium 

FREE!

Cory Austin Knudson

Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille

FREE!

Farah Ali

The Invisible Flesh: Mimesis in Jean Genet’s The Maids

Molly B. Lewis

The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard’s Drama 

Sina Movaghati

A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man

Yi-chin Shih

Senses of Place: The Black Community in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band

Hsiao-wen Chen

Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Celiese Lypka

“I Look Straight into His Eyes … For the Last Time”: Intimacy and Indifference in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight 

Reviews

Karalyn Kendall-Morwick

Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives 

Caroline Hovanec 

The Modernist Dog 

BOOK NEWS: New insights into Fitzgerald's relation to silent film

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film

BY MARTINA MASTRANDREA

Brill, 2022

ISBN: 978-90-04-51037-1 

https://brill.com/display/title/58680

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film recalibrates the celebrated author’s early career and brings fresh understanding to the life of one of America’s truly great literary figures. Scholars have previously focused on Fitzgerald’s connection with Hollywood when he worked in Tinseltown as a screenwriter in the 1930s. However, this ground-breaking research reveals the key role that Silent Hollywood played in establishing Fitzgerald’s burgeoning reputation in the early to mid-1920s. Vividly written and drawing on a wealth of new sources, this book documents Martina Mastandrea’s exciting discovery of the first film ever adapted from a work by Fitzgerald.

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.

"Mastandrea’s methodology aligns with current scholarship, which looks at Fitzgerald’s work through interdisciplinary perspectives. She ambitiously and ably interweaves textual, visual, multimodal, and multilingual materials, many of which have been previously overlooked [...]. In her investigation, Mastandrea conveys the excitement that can accompany the detective work in the researcher’s process [...]. Gender roles and how the adaptations adjusted them due to conventions, censorship, and intended audiences are recurring subjects in Mastandrea’s study [...]. Her interpretations of the sheer number and variety of sources explored are convincing and, more importantly, create a more nuanced picture of Fitzgerald’s relationship to film and of the way his stories and characters took shape in this medium. Mastandrea’s restoration of the silent cinema adaptations provides scholars with new material to explore her discussion of their impact on the presentation and reception of a newly established author should encourage a reevaluation of these films and of this early period in Fitzgerald’s life and work." – Lara Rodríguez Sieweke, Umeå University

Martina Mastandrea, PhD, SAS, University of London, is an independent scholar and English teacher in Venice, Italy. She has published articles and reviews on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Louisa May Alcott. She is the winner of the 2020 Blake Emerging Scholar Award and the joint award winner of the 2021 EAAS Rob Kroes Award.

BOOK NEWS: Examining the influence of Western consumerism on Chinese literature

Modernist Poetics in China: Consumerist Economics and Chinese Literary Modernism

BY TIAO WANG AND RONALD SCHLEIFER

Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

ISBN: 978-3-031-00915-0

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-00913-6

Modernist Poetics in China examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world works. 

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.

Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner.  Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption. 

“In the last generation in China, we have lived through one of the most miraculous transformations of culture and experience in human history, with opportunities of enhanced well-being, knowledge, and possibilities of life open to many people throughout our country. In Modernist Poetics in China, a Chinese scholar and an American scholar, working together, trace these transformations in our poetry and fiction, notably in the work of Shi Zhi, Qian Zhongshu, and our Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan. Written in English, the book carefully unpacks the rich meanings of our Chinese language in order to introduce Chinese literary modernism to the world.” –Yu Jianhua, senior professor, Shanghai International Studies University 

“Modernist Poetics in China is a must read for those hoping to better understand the transpacific estuary of Chinese and English Modernism, shot through with the brackish undercurrents of entrepreneurial, corporate and consumer capitalism. By revealing striking parallels between the jarring economic changes facing English modernists in the early twentieth century and Chinese poets writing in the last decades of the twentieth century, Tiao Wang and Ronald Schleifer unsettle many under-theorized dichotomies and narratives of American or Chinese exceptionalism. By doing so, they have opened a new and essential space to (re)think the global economic and material conditions of Chinese poetics today.”  –Jonathan Stalling, Newman Chair of US-China Issues and professor of international studies, University of Oklahoma

“Modernist Poetics in China fills a gap in the existing scholarship on modernism and it does so exceptionally well. The book has many strengths. The conjoining of canonic Western modernist writers and their Chinese counterparts adds an important new chapter to the evolving study of modernism as a global phenomenon. The investigation of the political economy of modernism in its cultural manifestations beyond the Euro-American focus of most scholarship opens many new avenues in our understanding of modernism in China and beyond. This demonstrates that modernism as we know it in the West is “a complex of epistemological, social, and affective engagements” in any post-traditional society that chooses the path of corporate-consumerist economics. This is a capital step forward. It not only allows us to understand the Chinese experience since Deng Xiaoping but also offers analytical ways and means for understanding any society that follows the same historical evolution.” –John Xiros Cooper, professor emeritus, University of British Columbia  

Tiao Wang is associate professor of English Language and Literature at the School of Foreign Languages, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. She has published 23 articles, 9 of which are in English, focused on American and European modernism.  She is also co-translator of Yong Bao Teng Tong (2017), a translation of Pain and Suffering by Ronald Schleifer (2014). 

Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor and adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma.  His publications in literary modernism include Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930  (2000), Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class (2018). 

BOOK NEWS: The Beats' negotiations with academia

The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation

EDITED BY ERIK MORTENSON AND TONY TRIGILIO 

Clemson UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781638040514

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781638040514

The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy. 

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 Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference presentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and English faculty member at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project. Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.

Tony Trigilio is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, Craft: A Memoir (forthcoming, Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is the author of Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012 [paper] and 2007 [cloth]) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers UP, 2008). He is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association.

BOOK NEWS: Subversion of convention in Irish noir fiction

Finders: Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction

BY ANJILI BABBAR

Syracuse UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780815611578

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5582/finders/

Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.

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.

Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of “finder”—a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form—Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.

"Babbar's rigorous, serious, and insightful Finders is the most comprehensive study into the exciting phenomenon of Northern Irish crime fiction. A must-read for literary scholars and the casual fan of the most explosive sub genre of Celtic Noir."—Adrian McKinty, author of The Chain

"This is an astonishing achievement. . . . Historically rich and geographically expansive, Babbar’s study, in smooth, erudite prose, casts an astute eye over the complexities and distinctiveness of Irish crime fiction."—Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast

"Babbar provides a wonderfully comprehensive survey of the major authors in the contemporary Irish noir field. She accomplishes a minor miracle in synthesizing so many texts in an interesting, provocative, and engaging way."—Andrew Kincaid, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

"Babbar’s hopeful readings broaden the critical lens in distinctive and valuable ways by exploring Irish crime fiction’s acute insights about the thorniest matters of community faith and self."—Brian Cliff, coeditor of Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction

Anjili Babbar is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County. She has published on topics ranging from Irish crime fiction to representations of Irish folklore in popular culture.

BOOK NEWS: WWI poetry from a global perspective

 A History of World War One Poetry

EDITED BY JANE POTTER 

Cambridge UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781009100649

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/history-world-war-one-poetry?format=HB

Situating First World War poetry in a truly global context, this book reaches beyond the British soldier-poet canon. A History of World War One Poetry examines popular and literary, ephemeral and enduring poems that the cataclysm of 1914-1918 inspired. 

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.

Across Europe, poets wrestled with the same problem: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology, involving millions of combatants and countless civilians. For literary scholars this has meant discovering and engaging with the work of men and women writing in other languages, on other fronts, and from different national perspectives. Poems are presented in their original languages and in English translations, some for the very first time, while a Coda reflects on the study and significance of First World War poetry in the wake of the Centenary. A History of World War One Poetry offers a new perspective on the literary and human experience of 1914-1918.

• Provides examples of transnational poetic creation in time of global conflict to demonstrates how the canon of First World War Poetry, largely based around the British soldier-poetry, needs to be widened and diversified by presenting the poetry of the war in its global environment
• Analyzes a range of First World War poetry in the original language and in English translation in an accessible and scholarly manner
• Considers poetry from diverse perspectives, including artistic movements, individual poets and nations, and publishing history

Jane Potter is Reader in Arts at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing, Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War (2005), Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (2014), and with Carol Acton, Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in War Zones (2015).

Book News: Welty's use of crime fiction conventions

Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight

EDITED BY JACOB AGNER AND HARRIET POLLACK

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496842718

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Eudora-Welty-and-Mystery

Eudora Welty’s ingenious play with readers’ expectations made her a cunning writer, a paramount modernist, a short story artist of the first rank, and a remarkable literary innovator. In her signature puzzle-texts, she habitually engages with familiar genres and then delights readers with her transformations and nonfulfillment of conventions. Eudora Welty and Mystery: Hidden in Plain Sight reveals how often that play is with mystery, crime, and detective fiction genres, popular fiction forms often condescended to in literary studies, but unabashedly beloved by Welty throughout her lifetime.

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.

Put another way, Welty often creates her stories’ secrets by both evoking and displacing crime fiction conventions. Instead of restoring order with a culminating reveal, her story-puzzles characteristically allow mystery to linger and thicken. The mystery pursued becomes mystery elsewhere. The essays in this collection shift attention from narratives, characters, and plots as they have previously been understood by unearthing enigmas hidden within those constructions.

Some of these new readings continue Welty’s investigation of hegemonic whiteness and southern narratives of race—outlining these in chalk as outright crime stories. Other essays show how Welty anticipated the regendering of the form now so characteristic of contemporary women mystery writers. Her tender and widely ranging personal correspondence with the hard-boiled American crime writer Ross Macdonald is also discussed. Together these essays make the case that across her career, Eudora Welty was arguably one of the genre’s greatest double agents, and, to apply the titles of Macdonald’s novels to her inventiveness with the form, she is its “underground woman,” its unexpected “sleeping beauty.”

"Eudora Welty and Mystery constitutes an unexpected, surprising, but productive approach to the works of a major American twentieth-century writer." - David McWhirter, professor of English at Texas A&M University

"Focusing on the influence exerted by the mystery/detective fiction genre on Welty's writing, Eudora Welty and Mystery unambiguously opens an overlooked and original avenue of inquiry. The essays powerfully evoke Welty, the late modernist caught in a postmodernist pose, and showcase some of her best critics patiently and cleverly teasing out various textual refractions and echoes." - Stephen M. Fuller, author of Eudora Welty and Surrealism

"The prose is accessible throughout. . . . Welty scholars will enjoy these well-argued pieces." - Publishers Weekly

Jacob Agner is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Mississippi. As a recipient of the Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, funded by the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, he has examined the writer’s correspondence for connections to film history.

Harriet Pollack, College of Charleston, is author of Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman and editor of New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race; Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race; Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (with Christopher Metress); Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? (with Suzanne Marrs); and Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America. She now serves as editor of University Press of Mississippi’s book series Critical Perspectives on Eudora Welty. She has twice served as president of the Eudora Welty Society, has directed three international Welty conferences including the 2009 Centennial, and in 2008 received the Phoenix Award for outstanding contributions to Welty scholarship.

Book News: 1980 interview with Borges now in print

An Interview with Borges / Una entrevista a Borges 

BY FABIAN SPAGNOLI AND JORGE LUIS BORGES

Introduction by Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, translation by Jillian Tomm

 

Adolf Hoffmeister, Jorge Luis Borges, 1965

Damocle Edizioni, Venezia (Italy), 2023

ISBN: 978-88-32163-35-3

https://damocleedizioni.com/2023/04/28/fabian-spagnoli-una-entrevista-a-borges-an-interview-with-borges/

This previously unpublished interview of Jorge Luis Borges taken in 1980 by Fabian Spagnoli represents a great literary revelation.

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.

Aspiring to become a journalist, Fabian Spagnoli was a high school student when he decided to interview Borges. Right after calling him for the first time, Spagnoli barely had the time to grab a recorder when he was immediately invited to speak with Borges in his apartment in Calle Maipú (Buenos Aires). The two extensively discussed Spagnoli’s interests in literature and foreign languages, as well as his future aspirations. This occasion led Borges to share personal memories from his life, his teaching experience in the United States, and his time in Geneva. Despite such accomplishment, Spagnoli never published the interview.

The interview is now published by Damocle Edizioni, a Venetian independent publishing house, in a double Spanish-English version. Transcribed and translated by Jillian Tomm and introduced by Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, the text is enriched with several footnotes which help to contextualize references to Borges’s works, relationships, and circumstances discussed in the interview.

Presented 37 years after Borges’s death, this interview represents a unique document for Borges scholars and all those interested in his literary work and life.

Book News: The Nordic Avant Garde, 1925-50

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950

Edited by Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, and Tania Ørum

Brill, 2022

ISBN: 978-90-04-52011-0

https://brill.com/display/title/38041?language=en

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It includes 138 color illustrations.

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.

It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Of interest to teachers and students of modernism and the avant-garde, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, art history, literature, cultural history, discourse and ideology of the interwar period.

Benedikt Hjartarson is professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Iceland. He has written and edited a number of books and articles on the European avant-garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.

Andrea Kollnitz is associate professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has published a monograph on nationalist agendas in Swedish art criticism 1908-34 and edited a collection on Fashion and Modernism as well as published research on fashion caricatures, nationalist fashion and art discourses, the avant-garde artist’s role and artistic self-fashioning.

Per Stounbjerg is DPhil in Scandinavian literature and head of the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He has published on August Strindberg, genre studies, avant-garde, modernism and the aesthetics of the ugly.

Tania Ørum is professor emerita at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is general editor of the volumes of A Cultural History of the Avant Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill | Rodopi)

Book News: A provocative perspective on Pound and Pasolini

Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis

BY SEAN MARK

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

ISBN: 978-3-030-91947-4

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91948-1

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? 

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 book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.   

“Sean Mark’s Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis expounds incisively on Pasolini’s interview of Pound in 1967 to align two poets from opposite political camps, thus exposing the complex tension between poetry and ideology in both authors’ work. Mark’s acute and sophisticated readings result in a significant revision to our understanding of Pound’s and Pasolini’s respective poetics and places in contemporary culture. This is a distinguished and important book.” 

—Alessia Ricciardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

“As Sean Mark’s magistral comparative study brings together the antithetical poles of 20th-century poetry, it illuminates both corpuses: the later Pound turns into a Pasolini character, and the poetic myth he provided allows Pasolini to reshape his religious communism. Pound and Pasolini kept their faith in human creativity and redemption and thus remain true ‘educators,’ their dialogue a source of inspiration in times of crisis.” 

—Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

“Sean Mark’s fascinating study of Pound and Pasolini ranges from their actual contacts – most notably Pasolini’s 1967 interview with Pound – to detailed consideration of their contrasting aesthetic and political approaches, culminating in unexpected parallels in the methodology of the fragmentary and late work in The Cantos and Petrolio. Mark adds new dimensions to our understanding of both the Italian Pound and the American Pasolini, and sets an example of how contemporary comparative scholarship can work.” 

—David Ayers, Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory, University of Kent

Sean Mark is associate professor in literature and translation at Université Catholique de Lille, France.

A Closer Look at JML 46.3: Maps and Traps in Joyce's Ulysses

In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, Sarah Coogan explores the webs of financial and familial obligations in Joyce's Ulysses and challenges typical assumptions about these debts. Read it HERE.

Her JML 46.3 essay is available for FREE; see link in the post.