BOOK NEWS: Literary vegetarians

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century

BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009287265

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vegetarianism-and-veganism-in-literature-from-the-ancients-to-the-twentyfirst-century/E5332A2457468C0DFD58C561CF957055

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasizes that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

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.

Content includes:

Chapter 1 - ‘everybody eating everyone else’

Chapter 2 - Pythagoreans; or, Vegetarians before ‘Vegetarianism’

Chapter 3 - Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel

Chapter 4 - Vegetarianism as Religion

Chapter 5 - Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women’s Liberation

Chapter 6 - Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene

Chapter 7 - ‘Pity the meat!’: Ideology, Metaphor, Violence

"What we have here is a monograph in food studies that transforms the field as a whole. The scope of this project is expansive, the analysis is consistently delightful, and the argument is original, making an important contribution to literary histories of vegetarianism." —Gitanjali Shahani, San Francisco State University

Theophilus Savvas is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He works on postmodernist American writing and the interconnections between history and fiction as well as literature and ecology.

BOOK NEWS: Psychic connection and porous selves in British fiction

Psychic Connection and the Twentieth-Century British Novel: From Telepathy to the Network Novel

BY MARK TAYLOR

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399524483

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-psychic-connection-and-the-twentieth-century-british-novel.html

Criticism of the novel routinely starts with the assumption that characters must think, develop, and strive for self-fulfillment as individuals. This book challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium. It describes how major writers throughout the twentieth century—many convinced by the supposed findings of parapsychology—rejected the idea of the discrete character. Treating the self as porous, they offered novels structured around the development of communities and ideas rather than individuals. By focusing on D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and Doris Lessing, Mark Taylor demonstrates the need to broaden our approach to character when addressing the novel of the twentieth century and beyond.

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.

• Contends that the twentieth century novel’s approach to character fundamentally shifted in response to contemporaneous theories of psychic connection
• Challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium
• Charts an unmapped trajectory in the novel’s development away from individualism
• Accessibly outlines how psychic speculation informs the conception of character in major twentieth century novels
• Offers valuable tools for analyzing literature without treating the individuated character as a necessary unit

"Taylor’s book offers a fascinating alternative history of the twentieth-century British novel. While the novel form is often seen as the definitive narrative of individualism, Psychic Connection tracks a different path through telepathy, panpsychism, and visions of collective selves, working through D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, and ending with a generative reading of the contemporary ‘network novels’ of David Mitchell. A cogent and consistently compelling counter-narrative." —Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College

Mark Taylor is a specialist in twentieth-century British literature, most recently working as assistant professor in English Literature at HSE University, Moscow. His research focuses on notions of individual and collective selfhood in British literature of the previous century. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic and Science Fiction Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Bolaño's and Pynchon's hyperbolic style

Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon's and Bolaño's Late Maximalist Fiction

BY SAMIR SELLAMI

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501360497

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hyperbolic-realism-9781501360497/

What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. 

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.

Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

"Samir Sellami writes with brilliant clarity and makes difficult arguments easy to follow. Philosophers and critical theorists should study his techniques." —Kathryn Hume, Pennsylvania State University

Samir Sellami is a literary critic and, together with Tobias Haberkorn, founding editor of the Berlin Review. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and media studies from the University of Perpignan and the Federal Fluminense University in Nitéroi, Brazil. His research interests include post-avantgarde writing in the Americas, critiques of strong narrativity, aesthetic autodidacticism, and the intersectionality of genre, affect, and form.