Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.


Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.



More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Thursday, July 17, 2025

SPECIAL FEATURE: Mosquito Narrators and the Subaltern Voice, A Closer Look at JML 48.3



Romy Rajan notes that categorizing the novel The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell "is a challenge for the critic, because of the different genres it inhabits. It is historical fiction, domestic fiction, as well as science fiction, and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020. The generic opacity is no accident—it is at one with the novel’s part-human, part-machine, and part-insect narrator, who also updates the meaning of the subaltern."

Read more here: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/mosquito-narrators-and-the-subaltern-voice-a-closer-look-at-jml-48-3/

His JML 48.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post!

Monday, July 14, 2025

NEW ISSUE: JML 48.3 "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE



Journal of Modern Literature 48.3 (Spring 2025) on the theme "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55227


Content includes

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Editor’s Introduction: Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny


Romy Rajan

Subaltern Mosquitoes and Cyborg Histories in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

FREE


Tracy A. Stephens 

Kinship as a Counter to the Settler Gaze in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians 


Emad Mirmotahari 

Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness—Forty Years Later 


Isabelle Wentworth

Fluid Dynamics of Queer Desire: Ellen van Neerven’s “Water” and Lía Chara’s Agua 


Trevor Westmoreland

Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 


Xiaofan Amy Li

Neo-Surrealism in Hong Kong: The Fiction of Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse


Stanka Radović

Alice in Monsterland: Neocolonial Investigation in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes


Mara Reisman 

Grotesque Spaces and Transformative Nature in Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque 


Tiasa Bal and Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Memory, Uncanny, and Spectrality in Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon 


Umar Shehzad

“[D]elete the face it’s preferable”: Prosopagnosia as an Artistic Practice in Samuel Beckett’s Work


Xiaoshan Hou and Fuying Shen

Puppet and Paralipsis: The Performance of Maria and the Narrator in Joyce’s “Clay”


Derek Ryan 

Review: Abstraction for All


Monday, July 7, 2025

Seeking ecocriticism essays for future issue

 


Journal of Modern Literature seeks to expand a future cluster on ecocriticism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. 

Submissions should comply with our guidelines, available HERE. Please email a Word or Rich Text Format document, formatted according to the guidelines, to jml.editorial (at) gmail.com.

Thursday, July 3, 2025

BOOK NEWS: Practical approaches to decolonial scholarship founded in humility

Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities

By Suzanne Bost



University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN 978-1-5179-1821-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918217/quiet-methodologies/


How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement.

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.

Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications.

Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.

"Suzanne Bost’s book is a powerful exploration of literary criticism during an age of crises, when planetary, human, and other-species futurities are at stake. It privileges a careful, porous reading of texts that center the decolonial and the resistant. Bost offers a nuanced reflexivity that never crosses into navel-gazing—and asks us to reimagine how we make scholarly arguments through a method that is dialogical, critical, and even tender."—Piya Chatterjee, coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent

"Quiet Methodologies showcases post-oppositional approaches to conventional academic scholarship, creating new opportunities for provocative multispecies, cross-temporal conversations and inter-dimensional communities of knowledge creators. Replacing the combative critique that so often dominates contemporary academic life with intellectual humility, radical inclusivity, invitational pedagogies, and alchemical dialogues, Suzanne Bost offers much-needed possibilities for transformation. I can’t wait to share this book with my students!"—AnaLouise Keating, author of The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook


Suzanne Bost is professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of several books, including Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism.