BOOK NEWS: New insights into the formation and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

BY SUE THOMAS

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350275799

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jean-rhyss-modernist-bearings-and-experimental-aesthetics-9781350275799/

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics.

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 distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

"This book offers a virtuosic and revelatory exploration of Jean Rhys's intertextual and intermedial practice. Sue Thomas not only uncovers the depth and eclecticism on Rhys's allusions to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical cultures, but argues for their centrality to her decolonial and feminist politics and her radical aesthetics." --Anna Snaith, King's College London

Sue Thomas is emeritus professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of, among other books, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of English in Jane Eyre (2008) and Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures (2014). She has published extensively on Jean Rhys, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's writing, feminist theory, postcolonial writers, and Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. She is a member of the editorial boards of Jean Rhys Review, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and Meridian, and an advisory editor of New Literatures Review: Decolonising Literatures.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the feminist spiritualities of Caribbean women writers

Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Resistance in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas

BY JOSHUA R. DECKMAN

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493411

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminist-Spiritualities

Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. 

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.

Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

"Feminist Spiritualities provocatively invites us to sit with the decolonizing potential of Afro‐Caribbean ancestral spiritual practices and how they shape feminist and queer practices of shared love, joy, and pain across difference in the islands and their diasporas. A twist on decolonial thought inspired by the possibilities of other worlds and solidarities emerging from within Afro‐Caribbean creative imaginaries." — Alaí Reyes‐Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Joshua R. Deckman is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Stetson University.

BOOK NEWS: Unique biography examines Sylvia Plath's daily life

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955

BY CARL ROLLYSON

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496835000

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-1

Since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, she has become the subject of a constant stream of books, biographies, and articles. She has been hailed as a groundbreaking poet for her starkly beautiful poems in Ariel and as a brilliant forerunner of the feminist coming-of-age novel in her semiautobiographical The Bell Jar. Each new biography has offered insight and sources with which to measure Plath’s life and influence. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, a two-volume series, offers a distillation of this data without the inherent bias of a narrative.

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.

Volume 1 commences with Plath’s birth in Boston in 1932, records her response to her elementary and high school years, her entry into Smith College, and her breakdown and suicide attempt, and ends on February 14, 1955, the day she wrote to Ruth Cohen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, to accept admission as an “affiliated student at Newnham College to read for the English Tripos.”

Sylvia Plath Day by Day is for readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the woman and her work. The entries are suitable for dipping into and can be read in a minute or an hour. Ranging over several sources, including Plath’s diaries, journals, letters, stories, and other prose and poetry—including new material and archived material rarely seen by readers—a fresh kaleidoscopic view of the writer emerges.

"The details in Rollyson’s Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 are a dream come true for the reader, fan, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. The seeds of so much of her creative writing are present, but Rollyson deftly does not foreshadow how events impact Plath’s life and when she transforms experiences from life to art. He lets each moment stand on its own importance." —Peter K. Steinberg, coeditor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 is a must-have book for any reader interested in Plath. Detailed yet highly readable, it paints a portrait of a young woman who would become, as will be chronicled in volume 2, one of the seminal authors in the twentieth century." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 fills the lacunae of existing biographies and uncovers new insights into its subject, as when Plath writes about her experiences at Smith, hearing ‘nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you, meant for you, to strangle you on the invisible noose of insinuation.’ Or her months in New York at Mademoiselle, which grow less mysterious here. Again, Carl Rollyson has provided us with an indispensable book on Sylvia Plath." —Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life 

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment in Djuna Barnes's work

Djuna Barnes and Theology: Melancholy, Body, Theodicy

BY ZHAO NG

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350256064

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/djuna-barnes-and-theology-9781350256064/

Modernism, religion, and queer bodies come together in this study of Djuna Barnes's writings and art. Examining the role of Barnes's theological imagination in relation to a phenomenology of suffering, joy, and sexed embodiment, this book unfolds an intricate synthesis of theology, psychoanalysis, and narrative theory to interrogate how queerness informs her art.

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.

Providing an original contribution to religious and literary theory, Ng develops a neo-ontological account of melancholy in relation to the myth of the Fall and provides a novel framework for understanding comedy and tragedy in relation to the question of theodicy.

Presented in light of a large body of new archival evidence, Barnes's works are also examined for the first time in relation to a wide range of intertextual and intermedial encounters, including the medieval mysticism of Marguerite Porete, Stravinsky's music, 16th- and 18th-century engravings by Albrecht Dürer and Joseph Ottinger, and French and Russian literature from Baudelaire and Lautréamont to Proust and Dostoevsky.

Zhao Ng is a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Her articles have been published by or are forthcoming with English Literary History, Twentieth-Century Literature, symploke, Literature and Theology, and Religion & Literature.

BOOK NEWS: Caribbean women fictionalize the past

Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past 

BY TEGAN ZIMMERMAN

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496846358

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Matria-Redux

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women.

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 development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses.

Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

"The first sustained study of Caribbean historical fiction by diasporic women." —Jennifer Donahue, author of Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

"A tour de force, Matria Redux offers readers the most recent analytical literary frameworks for decolonizing Caribbean women’s subjecthood as portrayed in the historical and material realms of the past."  —Valérie K. Orlando, author of Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean

 

Tegan Zimmerman is adjunct professor in women and gender studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her work has been published in such journals as Feminist Theory; MELUS; Journal of Romance Studies; Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice.

BOOK NEWS: Probing gender and sexuality in spy fiction

Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage: Spying Undercover(s)

EDITED BY ANN REA 

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350271364

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sexuality-and-gender-in-fictions-of-espionage-9781350271364/

An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. 

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.

Covering texts such as the Bond novels, John Le Carré's oeuvre (and their notable adaptations) and works by Helen MacInnes, Christopher Isherwood and Mick Herron, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage takes stock of spy fiction written by women, female protagonists written by men, and probes the representations of masculinity generated by male authors. Offering a counterpoint to a genre traditionally viewed as male-centric, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage proposes a revision of masculinity, femininity, queer identities and gendered concepts such as domesticity, and relates them to notions of nationality and the defense work conducted at crucial moments in history.

Contents:

1. "Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (Megan Faragher, Wright State University, Ohio)
2. "Vanished Ladies: Using Helen MacInnes's Above Suspicion to Look at Women in Spy Fiction" (Kyle Smith, Perth College UHI, Scotland)
3. "While Still We Live: Gender, Secret Agents, and National Ethics" (Michael T. Williamson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
4. "'Some Other Man Who Would Have to be Set Aside:' Burgess, Maclean, and the Adversarial Spy in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love" (Oliver Buckton, Florida Atlantic University)
5. "Bond, Colonialism and the 'Other'" (Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth)
6. "'Learn, Babies, Learn': Race, Representation, and John Birch Society Activists Julia Brown and Lola Belle Holmes" (Veronica Wilson, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
7. "'A New Domesticity' and Masculinity in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Len Deighton's The Ipcress File" (Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
8. "A Queer Thing: The Older Woman Spy" (Rosie White, Northumbria University)
9. "'What's the character?' Adapting Agency and Gender in The Little Drummer Girl" (Rachel Hoag, West Virginia University)
10. "'Extolling the Virtues of Alpaca Cloth or Buttons Made of Tagua Nut': The Influence of Douglas Hayward and Tailoring in John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama (Llewella Chapman, University of East Anglia)
11. "'Darling Men, Lover Boys and Rogues:' Connie Sachs, Molly Doran and the Precarity of of Institutional Memory in John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mick Herron's Dead Lions" (Paul Lohneis, University of West London)
12. Coda: Ann Rea, Stella Rimington, "The 'Open Secret' and the 'Mission to Inform'”

Ann Rea is professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. She is co-editor of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series with Nick Hubbleand she also edited the essay collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse in 2015.

BOOK NEWS: Stein's responses to the politics of authorship

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

BY ISABELLE PARKINSON

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474484329

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-gertrude-stein-and-the-politics-of-participation.html

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation offers a new way of reading Stein’s key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation

• Tackles the problem of Stein’s politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein’s writing as ‘democratic’ by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracy
• Explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation
• Explores the way discourses of biological sciences and pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, as well as those of politics, law and education are mediated in literary conceptions of authorship

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 explores the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception. It examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein’s right to participate in modernist authorship provide an instructive example of the way literary culture reflected contemporary political discussion. This study explores how representations of Stein that figured her either as barely human or as the ultimate democratic subject reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended.

"Isabelle Parkinson provides keen-eyed reappraisals of Stein's political writing, and of the political claims made by others about Stein's writing. Gertude Stein and the Politics of Participation is a sober, multidimensional guide to some of the most vexing problems of modernism and mass democracy." – Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University

Isabelle Parkinson is a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on Gertrude Stein’s authorial identity and on the role of the anthology in constructing an avant-garde canon. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Cultures, and Bloomsbury’s Historicising Modernism series.