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).