BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Sylvia Plath's daily life 1955-63

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2: 1955-1963

By Carl Rollyson

UP of Mississippi, 2024

ISBN: 9781496844286

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-2

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience, ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath was also fueled in part by the nature of her death—a suicide while she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, who was himself a noteworthy British poet. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath, projecting an array of points of view about their subject, has appeared over the last fifty-five years.

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.

Now biographer Carl Rollyson, the author of two previous biographical studies of Plath, has surveyed the vast amount of material on Plath, including her biographies, her autobiographical writings, and previously unpublished material, and distilled that data into the two volumes of Sylvia Plath Day by Day. As the follow-up to volume 1, volume 2 commences on February 14, 1955, the day Plath wrote to her mother declaring her intention to study in England, a decision that marked a major turning point in her life. With brief signposts provided by the author, this volume follows Plath through the entirety of her marriage to Hughes, the challenges of simultaneously raising a family and nourishing her own creativity, and the major depressive episodes that ultimately led to her suicide in 1963. By providing new angles and perspectives on the life of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, Sylvia Plath Day by Day offers a comprehensive image of its enigmatic subject.

"Using a journal-style approach, Rollyson documents Plath’s life in exacting and compelling detail. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2 is a must-have addition to the library for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature in general, and Sylvia Plath in particular." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; 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 biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Fresh insights into the 1920s experimental author Mary Butts

Mary Butts: Necessary Contradictions and Feminist Reconstructions

Edited by Joel Hawkes

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501380716

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mary-butts-9781501380716/

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author.

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.

Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these.

This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters cover Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

"Mary Butts wrote marvelous prose—shimmering, intractable, wayward, and piercing. Original in tis range of content as in its design and never sidestepping difficulties, this impressive new collection demonstrates that Butts—trenchant and extreme, bold and generous—has become a voice we need more that ever to reckon with." —Ralph Pite, University of Bristol

Joel Hawkes is a lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is editor of The Collected Essays of Mary Butts (2021) and has published a number of articles and book chapters about Mary Butts. Through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for The Mary Butts Letters Project, with the support of the Butts Estate, he made Butts’s letters available in a print collection and open-access website, marybutts.com.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing feminism's progress in literature and television

Feminism's Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

By Carol Colatrella

SUNY P, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493947

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminism-s-Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

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.

Feminism's Progress builds on more than fifty years of feminist criticism to analyze narrative representations of feminist ideas about women's social roles, gender inequities, and needed reforms. Carol Colatrella argues that popular novels, short stories, and television shows produced in the United States and Britain — from Little Dorrit and Iola Leroy to Call the Midwife and The Closer — foster acceptance of feminism by optimistically illustrating its prospects and promises. Scholars, students, and general readers will appreciate the book's sweeping introduction to a host of concerns in feminist theory while applying a gender lens to a wide range of literature and media from the past two centuries. In exploring how individuals and communities might reduce bias and discrimination and ensure gender equity, these fictions serve as both a measure and a means of feminism's progress.

"This book is a remarkably comprehensive survey of feminocentric novels and television series that offer personal and systemic responses to the continuing oppression of women. Colatrella pulls together dozens of disparate texts to argue that many popular works from the nineteenth century to the present have been promoting feminist principles in ways that must certainly have affected public attitudes toward and understanding of gender discrimination. Feminism's Progress offers a hopeful outlook on the potential for literature and media to bring about positive change in real-world gender politics." — Robyn R. Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

Carol Colatrella is professor of literature and codirector of the Center for Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the coeditor (with Joseph Alkana) of Cohesion and Dissent in America, also published by SUNY Press.

BOOK NEWS: How literary studies can undo carceral epistemologies

 Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice

By Jess A. Goldberg

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781517917890

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917890/abolition-time/

Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.

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.

Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. 

Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.

"Through close reading, Jess A. Goldberg shows us that ‘justice is not an event’ and that to bring into being a different set of relations, imagining and building must take place at the same time. Clearly and compellingly argued and written, Abolition Time arrives right on time. This book is utterly necessary." —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

"In Abolition Time, Jess A. Goldberg develops an abolitionist reading practice through which readers can find the seeds of collective liberation immanent in creative intellectual work. By emphasizing reading as constructive and imaginative work rather than passive decoding, Goldberg encourages us to reimagine what being human could mean in a world where people were truly free." —Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

Jess A. Goldberg is assistant professor of American literature at New Mexico Highlands University. They are coeditor of Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition, a special issue of GLQ.

BOOK NEWS: How Black women poets' prominence comes at a price

Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition

BY LAURA ELIZABETH VRANA 

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1575-3

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215753.html

From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women’s poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. 

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.

In Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside lesser-known poets, Vrana both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets’ works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.

“Few scholars have so convincingly dissected the logic and the priorities by which awards-granting institutions distribute prestige, and none has done so while also providing the incisive close readings of complex, challenging poetry that Vrana has here. Pitfalls of Prestige is an impressive achievement.” —Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights

“Vrana documents the poetic lineages that Black women construct as they navigate the politics of the contemporary poetry landscape, and pressures the false binary between ‘formalist’ and ‘experimental’ verse. Pitfalls of Prestige is a compelling read that will significantly enhance scholarly understandings of contemporary Black women’s poetry.” —Emily Ruth Rutter, author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry

Laura Elizabeth Vrana is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She coedited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas and has published on contemporary Black poetics, including in the anthologies Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Black women writers embrace Africanist understandings of embodiment and disability

Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing

By Anna LaQuawn Hinton

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496855046

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Refusing-to-Be-Made-Whole

In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black women’s writing but that it also shapes the formal elements characteristic of the Black women’s literary tradition.

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.

Refusing to Be Made Whole analyzes texts published after the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the late 1970s onward when Black women’s writing flourished. Through the lens of writings by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sapphire, and Sarah E. Wright, Hinton addresses prominent critical discourses within Black feminist literary studies. Hinton approaches the intersections of Africanist spirituality, race, gender, class, and disability, conversations about representation, community, motherhood, and sexuality through a Black feminist disability studies framework. Refusing to Be Made Whole embraces the complex and multifaceted nature of Black women’s writing, arguing that through this collision of race, gender, and spirituality, Black women writers speak healing and wellness into their readers’ lives and their own.

"Refusing to Be Made Whole takes seriously the Black feminist reckoning with disability, providing an apt guide to the tradition using the tenets of Black disability studies. This book deftly rereads the Black feminist literary tradition with an eye toward disability, and it was an absolute joy to read. Simply put, this is the book all Black feminist and disability scholars need." - Therí A. Pickens, author of Black Madness: Mad Blackness

"Anna LaQuawn Hinton’s Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing brings together—and extends—theoretical paradigms from disability studies, Black studies, feminist studies and queer studies through careful, innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts written by Black women, demonstrating how the contemporary literature of Black women and the theoretical work of disability studies are mutually transformative when engaged together. This rich and exciting work showcases the author’s deep engagement with (and sense of accountability to) multiple scholarly fields, and anyone writing on any of the authors discussed here—even if they are not a disability scholar—should consult this book in the future." - Julie Avril Minich, author of Radical Health: Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture

 

Anna LaQuawn Hinton is assistant professor of disability studies and Black literature and culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and CLA Journal, as well as The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body and The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature.

BOOK NEWS: Cross-caste romance in W.E.B. Du Bois's fiction

Tales from Du Bois: The Queer Intimacy of Cross-Caste Romance

By Erika Renée Williams

SUNY Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781438488189

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Tales-from-Du-Bois

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

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.

Tales from Du Bois brings together critical race theory, queer studies, philosophy, and genre theory to offer an illuminating new comprehensive study of W. E. B. Du Bois's fiction from 1903–1928. Erika Renée Williams begins by revisiting Du Bois's tale of being rebuffed by a white female classmate in The Souls of Black Folk, identifying it as a failure of what she calls "cross-caste romance"—a sentimental, conjugal, or erotic relation projected across lines of cultural difference. In Du Bois's text, this failure figures as the cause of double consciousness, the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. 

Far from being unique to Souls, the trope of cross-caste romance, Williams argues, structures much of Du Bois's literary oeuvre. With it, Du Bois queries romance's capacity to ground nationalism, on the one hand, and to foment queer forms of Afro-Diasporic reclamation and kinship, on the other. Beautifully written and deftly argued, Tales from Du Bois analyzes familiar works like Souls and Dark Princess alongside neglected short fiction to make a case for the value of Du Bois's literary writing and its centrality to his thought more broadly.

"Well researched and clearly written, this volume provides a new perspective on Du Bois, calling attention to his less-known writing Williams carefully documents the contexts and sources of the critical discourse surrounding her approach, making this excellent book a reasonable introduction to Du Bois." — CHOICE

"The insights this book offers are sometimes startling but also so convincing that one wonders how earlier scholars had not seen them." — Koritha Mitchell, author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

"Williams's archive and interventions are wide-ranging and far-reaching as she nimbly carries us from queer of color critique to medieval and African folklore to affect theory to Enlightenment formulations that braid aesthetics, morality, and reason. Still, it is not enough to say that this study of double consciousness and its enframement in cross-caste romance will be important to ongoing conversations across multiple disciplines. Rather, Williams invites a re-thinking of the key concepts that moor Black Studies." — Nicole A. Waligora-Davis, author of Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire

Erika Renée Williams is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut.

BOOK NEWS: Black immigrant fiction's rebellious daughters

 Against! Rebellious Daughters in Black Immigrant Fiction in the United States

BY ASHA JEFFERS

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5933-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215791.html

Against! is the first book-length study of Afro-Caribbean and African immigrant and second-generation writing in the United States. In it, Asha Jeffers evaluates the relationship between Blackness and immigranthood in the US as depicted through the recurring theme of rebellious Black immigrant daughters. Considering the work of Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi, Jeffers untangles how rebellion is informed by race, gender, ethnicity, and migration status.

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.

Immigrant and second-generation writers mobilize often complicated familial relationships to comment on a variety of political, social, and psychic contexts. Jeffers argues that rather than categorizing Black migrants as either immediately fully integrated into an African American experience or seeing them as another category altogether that is unbound by race, Marshall, Danticat, Adichie, and Selasi identify the unstable position of Black migrants within the American racial landscape. By highlighting the diverse ways Black migrants and their children negotiate this position amid the dual demands of the respectability politics imposed on African Americans and the model-minority myth imposed on immigrants, Jeffers reveals the unsteady nature of US racial categories.

“Against! balances a necessary critique of families invested in the turning of their offspring into status and profit with a necessary empathy for those ancestors who, themselves, had been so ruthlessly made. Jeffers’s affect work theorizes pain without being fueled by it, able to evade the sentimental and anti-sentimental traps common to symptomatic readings. This is important scholarship and bold literary criticism.” —Erin Khuê Ninh, author of Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities

“Against! makes a significant intervention into gender studies and diasporic literature and redirects the conversation around Caribbean American fiction. Jeffers demonstrates how rebellious immigrant daughter characters push back against ‘respectability’ and organize their subjectivity within and against model-minority discourse.” —Angeletta K.M. Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes: Gender, Sexuality, and Diaspora Identity

“Jeffers offers a theoretically engaged yet accessible presentation of how four diasporic novels explore their African and Afro-Caribbean protagonists’ rebellions against the familial, racial, geographical, cultural, and gendered vortexes that threaten their individuality. Jeffers’s multilayered, densely crafted analysis sets itself apart from the prevailing, stereotypically racial and gendered discussions of four dynamic women writers. This provocative text engagingly advances conversations around—and scholarship of—novels about African and Afro-Caribbean women’s experiences in their ancestral homelands and the diaspora” —Joyce A. Joyce, author of Black Studies as Human Studies: Critical Essays and Interviews

Asha Jeffers is associate professor of English and gender and women’s studies at Dalhousie University. Her research focuses on literature about the children of immigrants across national and ethnic lines. She is coeditor of The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study.

Submission tips: multiple submission limits

The editors of the Journal of Modern Literature have instituted a new policy on multiple submissions by the same author, limiting submissions to one per author per 12-month period.

That is, once an author has submitted a piece, they may not submit any others for our consideration for a period of 12 months. We will automatically decline any submission not in compliance with this policy.

JML 48.1 (Fall 2024) on Stein and Continental Modernism, is now LIVE!

 

JML 48.1 (Fall 2024), with clusters on Gertrude Stein and Continental Modernism, is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54157

Content Includes:

Editorial News: Welcome New Co-Editor Jessica Burstein

Stein

Rei Asaba

“You Ain’t Ever Got Any Way to Remember Right”: Black Affectivity, Insistent Style, and Cross-Racial Transference in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” 

Nicole Gantz

Becoming a Minor Literature: Supposing in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons 

Kelly Krumrie

“Not Unordered”: Gertrude Stein’s Numbers

Chris Raczkowski

“The Man Being Dead”: Stein, Modernism and Detective Stories 

Continental Modernism

Thomas Waller

Confessional Desire: Censorship and Repression in Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s A Confissão de Lúcio 

Fredrik Tydal

“A Man Without Scruples”: The Swedish Judgment of Jay Gatsby 

Edward Waysband

The Politics of Childhood in Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Infancy” 

James Martell 

Modernism’s Totalities: From the Marquis de Sade to Titus-Carmel 

Feng Dong 

Overcoming Gravity: Celan, Nietzsche, and Nihilism

Ken R. Hanssen

W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz and the Problems of Representation 

Reviews

Philipp Wolf

Mimesis: A Protean Concept

Amalia Cotoi

How Philosophy Turns up Its Nose at Smell: A Review of Simon Hajdini’s What’s That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory 

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Dada's roots in East-Central Europe

Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe

Edited by  Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina M. Denischenko, Gábor Dobó, and Merse Pál Szeredi

Brill, 2024

ISBN: 978-90-04-52673-0

https://brill.com/display/title/63526?language=en&contents=editorial-content

This rich, in-depth exploration of Dada’s roots in East-Central Europe is a vital addition to existing research on Dada and the avant-garde. Through deeply researched case studies and employing novel theoretical approaches, the volume rewrites the history of Dada as a story of cultural and political hybridity, border-crossings, transitions, and transgressions, across political, class and gender lines. Dismantling prevailing notions of Dada as a “Western” movement, the contributors to this volume present East-Central Europe as the locus of Dada activity and techniques. The articles explore how artists from the region pre-figured Dada as well as actively “cannibalized”, that is, reabsorbed and further hybridized, a range of avant-garde techniques, thus challenging “Western” cultural hegemony.

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.

Cannibalizing the Canon has the merit of shedding light on under-researched territories and overlooked issues in avant-garde historiography, restoring the contributions of those artists who did not figure in the canonical constructions of Dadaism and incorporating ephemeral art forms. Using new theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks, the volume challenges the singularity of Dadaism and its founding myths. The focus on the connections between local avant-gardes, employing transmedial and transnational perspectives, corrects and nuances some directions from avant-garde histories, contesting the hegemony of the West and a hierarchical system. Thus, the volume brings a significant contribution to the Dada movement and to the research of the avant-garde.

Oliver Botar is a professor of art history and associate director of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses on early 20th-century Central European Modernism, particularly the work of Moholy-Nagy, with concentrations on art in alternative media, and “Biocentrism” and Modernism in early-to-mid 20th-century art.

Irina Denischenko is an assistant professor at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century literature and visual art--especially the avant-garde, on critical theory, as well as on women’s contributions to avant-garde and modernist aesthetics in Central and Eastern Europe.

Gábor Dobó is a research fellow at the Kassák Museum in Budapest. He is the principal investigator of a project focusing on the artist couple Lajos Kassák and Jolán Simon. In 2022, he was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University.

Merse Pál Szeredi is department head at the Kassák Museum. His research focuses on Hungarian avant-garde art and the history of Lajos Kassák’s magazine Ma in Vienna between 1920 and 1925, with special emphasis on its international networks.