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).