BOOK NEWS: Transportation technology in Henry James's fiction

Henry James and the Writing of Transport

By Alicia Rix

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781108473170

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/henry-james-and-writing-transport

Few studies of Henry James and travel attend to the act of traveling itself: a formative experience for the author and for his invariably itinerant characters. This book explores the relationship between transport and representation in James's later fiction, examining the ineluctable significance of moving and being moved. Each chapter adopts a particular vehicle: by ship, cab, train, motorcar and bicycle, showing how James makes use of the cyclist's embroilment in media culture, the ocean-traveler's fascination with record, or the cabby's superior knowledge of geographical and sexual relations. 

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.

Drawing on contemporary newspapers, fiction, and guidebooks, Henry James and the Writing of Transport demonstrates how transport is not only contextually crucial to James's fictions but inheres in his style and logic. In particular, it argues, transport ministers to James's complex preoccupation with relationality: a quality which ranges from the intense subjectivity of his fictional worlds to their series of transatlantic encounters.

• Offers new perspective on Henry James's aesthetic as well as engaging with emerging critical trends in literary modernism
• Challenges current understandings of Henry James's writing style
• Supplies new critical readings of relatively unexamined texts by Henry James

Alicia Rix has published in The Henry James Review, Critical Quarterly, Symbiosis, and The Journal of Modern Literature, and appeared on BBC4's "Literary Landscape: The Coast." She also regularly reviews for The Times Literary Supplement.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the rhetoric of ecofacism as a political genre

Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature

By Alexander Menrisky

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN: 978-1-5179-1868-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918682/everyday-ecofascism/

As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.

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.

Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.

Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like COVID-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.

"Everyday Ecofascism boldly exposes the numerous, yet insidiously subtle, narratives in contemporary culture that foster ecofascist ideologies. But perhaps more importantly, Alexander Menrisky also showcases powerful counternarratives that can shape more just futures. This is bracing, timely, and vital work." —Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age

“Alexander Menrisky’s vital and moving book attunes readers to the widely used and yet highly contested term ecofascism. He offers an original perspective on the convergence of environmental crisis and political violence, illuminating the quotidian roles of storytelling and genre in these processes.” —Teresa Shewry, author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature

Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary absurdist poetry, race, and gender

Whiteness, Feminism and the Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry

By Jenna Clake

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781474494342

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-whiteness-feminism-and-the-absurd-in-contemporary-british-and-us-poetry.html

The first study to consider how Whiteness pervades and is challenged in contemporary British and US Absurdist poetry

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.

• Engages with Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and scholarship on the Theatre of the Absurd to update definitions and understandings of contemporary Absurdist British and US poetry
• Argues that poetry provides a space in which to challenge Whiteness, nihilism, and prejudice, and offer positive social change
• Demonstrates the wider influence of Absurdism and popular culture in current British and US poetry, and explores its status as an aesthetic, rather than an organised ‘school’ or movement
• Presents new analyses of poems by Emily Berry, Caroline Bird, and Jennifer L. Knox, with additional analyses of poems by Heather Phillipson, Sam Riviere, Selima Hill, Luke Kennard, Rachael Allen, Crispin Best, Franny Choi, Morgan Parker, Jane Yeh, Anne Boyer and Never Angeline Nørth

In an era of political and social turmoil on both sides of the Atlantic, where issues of gender, race and class are linked with concerns of how to survive in a capitalist society, a new aesthetic of Absurdist poetry has emerged. This aesthetic has a troubled relationship to race, pervaded by issues of representation in avant-garde poetry, and notions of who poetry writers and readers are. Focusing on British and US poets including Rachael Allen, Emily Berry, Crispin Best, Caroline Bird, Franny Choi, Jennifer L. Knox, Morgan Parker and Jane Yeh, Jenna Clake investigates how poets use the Absurd to destabilise ideas about race, gender and class and imagine social change. Bringing together Whiteness studies, socio-political theory, and close readings of poems, Clake examines how the Absurd has developed, how its poets understand privilege and offer prospects of hope and change, and how the Absurd might move away from nihilism.

"With inexhaustible energy and focus, Jenna Clake’s work reanimates and illuminates a definitive aesthetic that tends to get overlooked in studies of contemporary poetics. She thereby makes it one of the most vital – and worthy of proper interrogation – forces in modern writing. This is the strongest account I’ve ever read of the Absurd’s curious persistence, a deep analysis of its spirit (whether in defiance or despair) and its increasing relevance to artists, critics, readers and citizens. Immensely enjoyable to read – lucid, fiercely intelligent and conscientious in its outlook and positioning. To be introduced to new writing and appreciate the techniques of well-known poets in a way one hasn’t considered before is a profound pleasure. Whiteness, Feminism and The Absurd in Contemporary British and US Poetry addresses a glaring omission in poetry scholarship, but also diagnoses the core anxieties of our century, and reframes the concerns, vitality and necessity of an emerging body of work. This is essential reading, as much for poets at any stage in their writing as it is for present and future scholars of twenty-first century poetry." – Luke Kennard, University of Birmingham

Jenna Clake is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University. Her debut novel Disturbance was published in 2023 and her poetry collections include Museum of Ice Cream (2021) and Fortune Cookie (2018). She has received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award in 2018.

 

BOOK NEWS: Beckett's ecological thinking

Samuel Beckett and Ecology

Edited by Trish McTighe, Céline Thobois-Gupta, and Nicholas E. Johnson

Methuen Drama, 2025

ISBN: 9781350366022

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/samuel-beckett-and-ecology-9781350366022/

This is the first full-length book to investigate Samuel Beckett's work through contemporary ecological thinking, offering a wide range of artistic and scholarly responses to the ecological crises provoked, mediated or challenged by Beckett's work.

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.

Beckett was not an environmental artist, but his oeuvre, poised between forms of precarity and hope, is a rich territory for the exploration of the most pressing issues of our time: the rift between the human species, its technological and economic advancement and the ecologies that sustain it all.

In recent years, Beckett's name, aphorisms and work have been invoked relative to environmental catastrophe, helping stimulate debates on ecology, the arts and the ecosystemic place of the human. The volume reflects on ecology as a productive term, as well as the varied practices and narratives in Beckettian intermedial ecologies. While some authors offer new insights into the connections between Beckett and the Anthropocene across translation, adaptation, performance and the visual arts, others also explore the potential of Happy Days (1961) for ecological thought and the role it has taken in recent ecodramaturgical experiments in the theatre. Woven throughout the volume are short bursts of writing, 'coups de gong', which testify to the variety of Beckett-inspired local responses to global climate instability.

"This volume us transformation in Beckett studies in its range of global contributors and in the dialogues it sets up between scholars, artists, and activists. This book is an important and compelling addition to Beckett studies, theatre studies, and ecocriticism." --Anna McMullan, University of Reading

Trish McTighe is senior lecturer in Drama at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Her publications include Staging Beckett in Ireland and Northern Ireland and Staging Beckett in Great Britain, both co-edited with David Tucker, and the monographs The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama and Carnivals of Ruin: Beckett, Ireland and the Festival Form. She is theatre reviews editor for the Journal of Beckett Studies.

Céline Thobois-Gupta is an IRC-funded PhD researcher and an adjunct assistantpProfessor in the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, as well as an ECR Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub. She is published in Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, The Beckett Circle, Theatre Journal and Samuel Beckett and Technology. She is also co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on the anthropocene.

Nicholas E. Johnson is associate professor and Head of Drama at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he co-directs the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies. He has published two co-authored monographs, Experimental Beckett: Contemporary Performance Practices (with Jonathan Heron, 2020) and Bertolt Brecht’s David Fragments (1919–1921): An Interdisciplinary Study (Bloomsbury/T & T Clark, with David Shepherd, 2020). He has also co-edited two volumes on Beckett: Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (2021) and Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (2020).

BOOK NEWS: Spatial literary studies, foundations to new approaches

Space and Literary Studies

Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009424240

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/literary-theory/space-and-literary-studies?format=HB

Our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Literature explores and gives expression to the ways in which space impacts human experience. It also powerfully shapes the construction and experience of space. Literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fuelled by feminist and postcolonial insights, the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. This book treats foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside exciting new areas of research, providing a dual emphasis on origins and innovative approaches while maintaining constant attention to how the production and experience of space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.

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.

• Discusses foundational concepts in light of contemporary and emergent research in spatial literary studies
• Examines the intersection of space and literary studies through twenty-one concepts and approaches
• Makes theoretical approaches concrete with reference to a transnational and transhistorical selection of literary texts

Contents

Introduction: space and literary studies, Elizabeth F. Evans

Part I. Origins Revisited:

1. Representation, Andrew Thacker

2. Mapping: cheap maps, spatial politics and England's colonies, Kat Lecky

3. Space, disciplinary power and the novel, Philip Howell

4. Public/private: the spatial form of love and labor in the English novel, Nancy Armstrong and Matthew Taft

5. Urban/Rural, Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee

Part II. Developments:

6. Gender, space and feminist geography, Radost Rangelova

7. Plantation: toward a literary history of race, space, and capital in the Anglo-world, Jared Hickman and Aaron Begg

8. Empire, nation and the question of space. Sandeep Banerjee and Atreyee Majumder

9. Postcolonial space: African literary writing and the articulations of worlding, Madhu Krishnan

10. Borders and the liminal, Mary Pat Brady

11. Encountering the community in third space, Megan Jeanette Myers

12. Literary mobilities and the mobilization of space, Charlotte Mathieson

13. Translocality and translocalism, James Mulholland

14. Psychogeography, Joshua Armstrong

15. Mapping empire's horror: literary gis and colonial spatial logic, Alexander Sherman

Part III. Applications and Extensions:

16. Islands, oceans and the production of spatial theory, Johannes Riquet

17. Other/world(ly): a black ecology of outer space, Stefanie K. Dunning

18. Imaginary space, Siobhan Carroll

19. Digital Space, Peta Mitchell

20. Sensory geographies, Sheila Hones

21. Orientations, Eve Sorum

Elizabeth F. Evans, Wayne State University, Detroit, works on modernism, literary and cultural geography, and the digital humanities. Her first book, Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge UP, 2019), examines gender and space in writing by British and colonial authors.

BOOK NEWS: New perspectives on Ballard's *Crash*

 J. G. Ballard's "Crash"

By Paul March-Russell

Palgrave Macmillan, 2025

ISBN: 978-3-031-73096-2

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-73094-8

J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) remains a byword for transgression in literature: declared "too disgusting for words" upon publication. The basis for David Cronenberg's equally provocative film, Crash has been regarded variously as the apotheosis of New Wave science fiction, the ur-source for postmodernism, a transhumanist manifesto, and a pornographic masterpiece in the tradition of Sade and Bataille. This revisionist account, based on previously unexplored archive material, shatters the myths that have accrued around this tantalizing work whilst also revealing why it continues to inspire writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers in the 21st century. The book vividly reconstructs how Ballard came to write Crash, the cultural landscape in which it was written, the effect of its reception, and the toll it took on its author. New perspectives reveal how Crash reworks surrealist anthropology, evolutionary theory, and pornographic imagery in order to expose a society addicted to the abuse of power, the silencing of others, and its own environmental destruction. As Ballard later admitted, he "must have been mad" to write Crash.

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.

“Accessible, thought-provoking and filled with new insights, Paul March Russell’s study of Ballard’s seminal novel is written from a place of finely honed knowledge and contagious enthusiasm. A must-read volume that every Ballardian will want to add to their bookshelf as soon as possible.” --Nina Allan, author of The Rift

“Paul March-Russell writes with an air of quiet authority and moves around the field of Ballard and New Wave science fiction with evident expertise.” --Roger Luckhurst, Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Paul March-Russell is editor of Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and co-founder with Una McCormack of the feminist imprint Gold SF. His previous books include The Short Story: An Introduction (2009), Modernism and Science Fiction (2015), and with Andrew M. Butler, Rendezvous with Arthur C. Clarke: Centenary Essays (2022). 

BOOK NEWS: Totality in contemporary global realist fiction

New Global Realism: Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel

By Gabriele Lazzari 

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781350385672

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/new-global-realism-9781350385672/

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book examines writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India, and Mexico.

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.

By theorizing four modalities of totalization employed by contemporary realist writers, this book explores the current resurgence of realism and challenges critical approaches that consider it naive or formally unsophisticated. Instead, it argues that realist novels offer a self-conscious and serious representation of the world we inhabit while actively envisioning new social designs and political configurations. Through comparative studies of novels by Fernanda Melchor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Vivek Shanbhag, Nicola Lagioia, Igiaba Scego, Yaa Gyasi and Roberto Bolaño, this book further explains why realism can be a powerful antidote to the skepticism about the possibility of making truth-claims in humanist research.

"This is a very exciting book; timely, intellectual, and moving in all the right directions of the future of literary study." --Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick

Gabriele Lazzari is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey, UK.

BOOK NEWS: The rise of ekphrastic fiction since the 2010s

Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel

By Sofie Behluli

Oxford UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780198954484

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/art-in-contemporary-anglo-american-fiction-9780198954484?cc=us&lang=en&#

This book addresses the recent surge of Anglo-American novels about visual art since the 2010s and interprets it as a coming of age of an old literary sub-genre, which is here termed as the 'ekphrastic novel'. These novels are distinguished by their systematic use of ekphrasis which creatively and critically negotiates the intertwined aesthetics of literature and visual art. By addressing the challenge of representing visual images such as photographs, paintings, and art installations with words, these novels reveal a greater interest in exploring how and why we engage with art, rather than merely depicting the art itself. In this way, ekphrastic novels present themselves as powerful practitioners and critics of contemporary image-making.

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 focuses on four aspects emerging from ekphrastic passages--value, form, affect, and scale--to explore critical questions posed by contemporary ekphrastic novels: Who has the power to assign value today, and at what cost? Which social, political, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions are obscured by certain forms, and how can ekphrasis (re)introduce these aspects into public discourse? What affects do images and artworks elicit, and how do they reinforce or challenge existing value systems? How can narrative scale uncover potential injustices in the interplay between life and art? Moreover, what insights do ekphrastic novels offer into contemporary reading habits and strategies? By tracing a literary tradition from nineteenth-century to contemporary fiction and offering detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels, this book delves into the theoretical and practical intersections of ekphrasis and the novel.

• Explores the intersection of ekphrasis and the novel and introduces a new sub-genre: the 'ekphrastic novel'
• Shows how indebted contemporary novels on art are to their nineteenth-century literary predecessors
• Provides detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels

Sofie Behluli is an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she teaches and conducts research on "Dis/affection in 19th-Century American Literature." Prior to holding this post, she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Behluli is interested in intermediality and ekphrasis studies, affect theory, life writing, gender studies and feminist literature, and theoretical conceptions of the contemporary. Her work has been published in Women: A Cultural Review (2021), Anglia: Journal of English Philology (2022), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2023), as well as in several companions and handbooks.

SPECIAL FEATURE: W.G. Sebald and the Wars in Yugoslavia, A Closer Look at JML 48.4

 

Denis Topalović, in his blog post for Indiana University Press Journals on W. G. Sebald, notes that "When he was once asked what compelled him to write The Rings of Saturn, Sebald didn’t look back to the past; instead, he turned to his own present, and in particular to the Yugoslav Wars (1991-99) that had broken out just as he was beginning to work on his book."

Read the full post HERE.

His Journal of Modern Literature essay on Sebald's The Rings of Saturn is available FREE, linked in the post

NEW ISSUE: JML 48.4 "History and Geography" is now LIVE

 

Journal of Modern Literature 48.4 (Summer 2025) on the theme "History and Geography" is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55722.

Content includes:

James Dutton

A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities’ Unfinishable History

Laura L. Behling

“[T]his trivial and vulgar occasion”: P.R. Stephensen’s Lampoons of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

Andrés Ibarra Cordero

Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

Hannah Loeb

“Like leaves against the sunlight”: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” 

Cilliers van den Berg

Patterns of Meaning and the Claims of History: S.J. Naudé’s The Third Reel

Denis Topalović 

The Rings of Sarajevo: W.G. Sebald and the Bosnian War

FREE!

Aaron Shaheen

The Restitution of Harold Krebs: A Cartographic Reading of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” 

Duncan Hay

Downriver’s Flâneur(s): Space and Representation in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair

Ryan Johnson

Confused Categories: Russia and the East-West Divide in William Plomer’s Sado

Reviews 

Jack Dudley

Methodological Pluralism and the Cause of Progress: A Review Essay of Jesse Wolfe’s Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury

Laura de la Parra Fernández

Postwar Interiorities: Review of The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

Hong Zeng and Ping Zhang

The Impact of Taoist and Zen Literature and Arts on Western Modernism: A Dialogue with Zhaoming Qian

BOOK NEWS: Woolf's first fully realized literary experiment

The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories, by Virginia Woolf

Edited by Urmila Seshagiri

Princeton UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780691263137

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691263137/the-life-of-violet

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

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 these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

“A fresh perspective on Woolf’s early ‘literary experiments’ . . . . Suffused with delicate magic and penetrating wit, the stories in The Life of Violet foreground a radical world structured by laughter, magic, women’s friendships, and egalitarian social relations.” —Foreword Reviews

“Fascinating and indispensable.” —Terry Potter, The Letterpress Project 

“What an extraordinary volume! Here we meet newly discovered, revised versions of Virginia Woolf’s early stories based on the life of Violet Dickinson. These tales are laugh-out-loud funny. They are also profound early experiments in the fiction/biography blend that later gave rise to Orlando and the feminist musing about women’s education, marriage, and literary history that infuse A Room of One’s Own. An illuminating preface and afterword by Urmila Seshagiri bring Dickinson’s biography and intellectual contributions into view and deftly analyze the stories and their place within Woolf’s oeuvre. Must reading for lovers of Woolf’s fiction.”—Jessica Berman, editor of A Companion to Virginia Woolf

Urmila Seshagiri is distinguished professor of humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

BOOK NEWS: Updated edition of Forster's *A Room with a View*

 A Room with a View By E.M. Forster

Randi Saloman, editor

Broadview Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781554814473

https://broadviewpress.com/product/a-room-with-a-view/#tab-description

This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them—but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his 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.

Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.

“Readers being introduced (or re-introduced) to E.M. Forster’s Room with a View are treated by Randi Saloman to a beautiful volume, with a deeply informative and accessible introduction that guides us through Forster’s career; illuminating footnotes throughout the novel; and a feast of delights in the appendices. Literary and biographical-minded readers will learn from Forster’s letters, journals, and essays, whereas the visual-minded can linger on images from a contemporary travel guide; stills from the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel; and photographs of Forster, both as a sensitive young novelist and as an éminence grise of English letters.” — Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Stanislaus

“This edition of A Room with a View is the most sensitive, comprehensive, and suggestive that I can imagine. It provides the student with a clear sense of the text’s history and social context, elucidates complex knots of culture lucidly, and vivifies the central issue of sexual knowledge and consent in Forster’s time and ours. The appended materials are excellent in both selection and scope, providing many new avenues into the text and its adaptations.” — Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

“A wonderful and elegant annotated edition that provides incisive analysis and support to the reader without crowding the core text. Saloman’s judicious use of notes is supremely effective and greatly enhances the experience of reading this classic novel. Broadview’s edition will appeal not only to students, but to curious readers of all stripes.” — Bob Davidson, University of Toronto

Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.

BOOK NEWS: Seeking true equality via literary moments of resistance

Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature

By Matthew Scully

Fordham UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781531507077

https://fordhampress.com/democratic-anarchy-hb-9781531507060.html

Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can “the people” be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?

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.

Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.

By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strate­gies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation. —Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons

All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence. —Anglia: Journal of English Philology

Matthew Scully is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.

BOOK NEWS: Critical reflections on the work of Luis J. Rodríguez

The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run

Edited by Josephine Metcalf and Ben Olguin

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399520591

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-life-literature-and-legacy-of-luis-j-rodriguez.html

Luis Rodríguez is a prominent Latinx poet, memoirist and activist renowned for his candid visceral accounts of urban working-class life that includes youth gang violence, incarceration and drug abuse, gruelling factory work and union organising activities and collective approaches to redemption and political empowerment, which have resonated across multiple communities in the United States and abroad. Accordingly, whilst Rodríguez has been the focus of some critical scholarship, huge segments of his life, work and legacy remain unexamined. This anthology has commissioned new and unique critical essays and reflections on Rodríguez’s life and works, putting forward new ideas about bringing the voices of 'barrio organic intellectuals' to the fore. The anthology deliberately includes traditional academics as well as more public intellectuals and creative writers from across Europe and the Americas to reflect Rodriguez’s own diverse outputs as a prisoner author and activist.

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 is an authoritative anthology on Luis Rodríguez’s life and works that

• Offers a range of perspectives on multiple aspects of his many different accomplishments and activities that can be used in secondary and university curricula
• Gathers peer author reflections that offer insights on Rodriguez’s aesthetics for readers and writers to study and use, thus filling a gap between academic oriented scholarship and popular journalism about Rodriguez and his work
• Introduces new unpublished works by Rodriguez himself and archival materials relating to his career for further use in teaching and research as well as general interest

"The Life, Literature and Legacy of Luis J. Rodríguez: In the Long Run is the most comprehensive overview, critical assessment and sustained study of the renowned former gang member, pinto author, barrio intellectual and critical humanist-philosopher. It encompasses perspectives that account for the significance of his literary impact, his praxis-oriented politics, critical reflections on him by people who’ve known Luis for decades, analysis of the transformation of his once hyper masculinist worldview, pedagogical approaches to Rodriguez’s life story and prison literature, his impact as a publisher, and original new work. In the depth and range of critical perspectives included here, Metcalf and Olguín make a major contribution and set a new standard for US literary history and author studies, community studies and intellectual biographies." – Louis Mendoza, Arizona State University

"Luis J. Rodríguez’s work offers a playbook for how to engage in resistance in these troubled times. This collection of scholarly and literary essays reveals his activism as that of a Chicano 'organic intellectual' in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci who challenges the US’s political, cultural and material hegemony." – Avelardo Valdez, University of Southern California

Josephine Metcalf is a senior lecturer in American studies and criminology at the University of Hull, UK where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre. Her research focuses on the representation of prisons and street gangs in literature and other pop-culture forms and the ways these have been received by audiences. She has published on prison memoirs by authors such as Stanley Tookie Williams and Shaun Attwood and wrote a foreword for an anniversary edition of Joseph Bathanti’s award-winning prison novel, Coventry.

Ben V. Olguín is the Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding director of the UCSB Global Latinidades Centre. In addition to articles published in Cultural Critique, American Literary History, Aztlán, Frontiers, Biography, MELUS, and Nepantla, Olguín is the author of La Pinta: Chicana/o History, Culture, and Politics (2010) and Violentologies: Violence, Identity, and Ideology in Latina/o Literature (2021). He also is a published poet, and author of Red Leather Gloves (2014) and At the Risk of Seeming Ridiculous: Poems from Cuba Libre (2014).

BOOK NEWS: Analyzing contemporary Nahuatl-Spanish poetry

The Serpent's Plumes: Contemporary Nahua Flowered Words in Movement

By Adam W. Coon

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438497785

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Serpent-s-Plumes2

Draws on Nahua concepts to explore Nahua literary production and contributions to cultural activism from the 1980s to the present.

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 Serpent's Plumes analyzes contemporary Nahua cultural production, principally bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish xochitlajtoli, or "poetry," written from the 1980s to the present. Adam W. Coon draws on Nahua perspectives as a decolonizing theoretical framework to argue that Nahua writers deploy unique worldviews-namely, ixtlamatilistli ("knowledge with the face," which highlights the value of personal experiences); yoltlajlamikilistli ("knowledge with the heart," which underscores the importance of affective intelligence); and tlaixpan ("that which is in front," which presents the past as lying ahead of a subject rather than behind). The views of ixtlamatilistli, yoltlajlamikilistli, and tlaixpan are key in Nahua struggles and effectively challenge those who attempt to marginalize Native knowledge production.

"The Serpent's Plumes makes an important intervention in Indigenous literary studies as well as cultural studies Highly recommended." — CHOICE

"Written in a luminous and engaging style, The Serpent's Plumes provides an extraordinary survey of poetry and prose works by contemporary Nahua writers in Mexico and the United States. While many readers know Nahua poetry through colonial works (such as Cantares Mexicanos), this book reminds us of the relevance of works by contemporary Nahua authors not merely as heirs to an admired literary tradition but as highly accomplished artists who bravely confront racism, discrimination, historical oblivion, and patriarchal hegemony in their work." — David Tavárez, author of Rethinking Zapotec Time: Cosmology, Ritual, and Resistance in Colonial Mexico

Adam W. Coon is associate professor of Latin American Studies and Spanish at the University of Minnesota Morris.

BOOK NEWS: Engaging critically with Sandra Cisneros's oeuvre

¡Ay Tú!: Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros

Edited by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano

U of Texas P, 2024

ISBN: 9781477329900

https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477329900/

Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. ¡Ay Tú! is the first book to engage critically with her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new long-form interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.

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.

As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.

"¡Ay Tú! brings together a stellar ensemble of Latina/x and Chicana/x literary scholars and essays devoted to the writing of Sandra Cisneros, one of the most prolific writers of our time. This tremendous collection is a gift to every professor and student of literature and cultural studies." ~Deborah R. Vargas, Yale University, author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda

"¡Brava! The coeditors of ¡Ay Tú! have gathered a wealth of scholarly perspectives that students, scholars, and general readers are sure to find illuminating. Insightful and thought-provoking, every chapter opens a door into Cisneros’s familiar and well-loved literary works. Whether you are new to Cisneros or have read and reread favorites, you are sure to find new insights and approaches to her work in this magnificent collection." ~Norma E. Cantú, Trinity University, coeditor of ¡Somos Tejanas! Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Sonia Saldívar-Hull is a professor emerita of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Literature and Politics.

Geneva M. Gano is a professor of English at Texas State University and the author of The Little Art Colony and US Modernism.

BOOK NEWS: Disrupting racist security regimes

Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State

By Roberta Wolfson

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-8354-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215692.html

In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. 

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.

Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.

“Whereas many books merely critique the security state, Refiguring Race and Risk reframes risk management in terms of care and community, rather than trauma and racialization, looking to literature and culture as repositories not only of critiques of power but also of potential remedies.” —David Vázquez, author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity

“Making compelling connections among surveillance, identity, and aesthetics, Wolfson illuminates an exciting archive of works by writers of color, including immigrant writers, to bring together critical race studies, comparative literature, critical security studies, art and aesthetics, and political studies.” —Kumarini Silva, author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State

Roberta Wolfson is lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her articles have appeared in College Literature, American Literature, and MELUS.

BOOK NEWS: Examining domestic servants in contemporary South Asian fiction

Postcolonial Servitude: Domestic Servants in Global South Asian English Literature  

By Ambreen Hai

Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197698006

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/postcolonial-servitude-9780197698006?cc=us&lang=en&#

Postcolonial Servitude explores how a new generation of contemporary global, transnational, award-winning writers with origins in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh engages with the complexities of domestic servitude as a problem for the nation and for the novel. Servitude, to be distinguished from slavery, is a distinctive and pervasive phenomenon in South Asia, with a long history. Unprotected by labor laws, subject to exploitation and dehumanization, members of the lower classes provide essential services to employers whose homes become the servants' workplace. South Asian literature has always featured servants, usually as marginal or instrumental. This book focuses on writers who make servants and servitude central, and craft new narrative forms to achieve their goals. Identifying a blind spot in contemporary postcolonial studies, this is the first full-length study to focus on domestic servants in Anglophone postcolonial or South Asian literature and to examine their political, thematic, and formal significance.

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.

Offering fresh readings of well-known early to mid-20th-century writers, this book shows how South Asian English fiction conventionally keeps servants in the background, peripheral but necessary to the constitution of an elite or middle class. It analyzes closely the formal strategies, interventions, and modes of representation of five younger writers (Daniyal Mueenuddin, Romesh Gunesekera, Aravind Adiga, Thrity Umrigar, and Kiran Desai), who, it argues, pull servants and servitude into the foreground, humanizing servants as protagonists with agency, complex subjectivities, and stories of their own. Postcolonial Servitude reveals a cultural shift in the twenty-first century postcolonial novel, a new attentiveness, self-implication, and ethics, linked with a new poetics.

"In this examination of the ubiquitous figure of the domestic servant in South Asian fiction spanning the twentieth and twenty-first century, Hai illuminates the politics and aesthetics of representation with insight, rigor and compassion. This book will forever transform our understanding of the complexities of servitude fiction." -- Deepika Bahri, Emory University

"We have long needed a sensitive account of domestic servitude and its imbrication with the inadequately realized promise of decolonization. Postcolonial Servitude delivers that as well as a theorization of the violent structuring of intimacy in postcolonial life, while it makes a case for the capacity of fiction to reveal the complexities of these social relations at the same time as it performs the ability of criticism to deepen our understanding." -- Sadia Abbas, Rutgers University, Newark

Ambreen Hai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor and Chair of English Language and Literature, and Director of South Asian Studies at Smith College. She is affiliated faculty in the program in the Study of Women and Gender. Specializing in Anglophone postcolonial literature from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and 19th-20th century literature of the British Empire, she has published widely on postcolonial and transnational writing, with a focus on South Asia and its diaspora.

BOOK NEWS: A critique of "true feeling" in late-twentieth-century fiction

The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth

By Nicholas Manning

Edinburg UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399508001

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-artifice-of-affect.html

Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.

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.

• Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Proposes a wide-ranging literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, especially relevant to the United States’s current sociopolitical climate
• Represents the first book-length study using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Argues that twentieth-century American realism is not a conservative genre, but rebels in surprising ways against restrictive notions of authenticity
• Links key concepts in current affect theory with writers such as Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Paula Fox or Philip Roth, who have never been analyzed using these tools
• Models a new transdisciplinary interaction between affect theory and literature, with literary texts used to reveal the ever-present artifice of corporal processes
• Combines methods from affect theory, literary studies, and the medical humanities

"An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings." – Adam J. Frank, University of British Columbia

Nicholas Manning is professor of American literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.