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. 

Introducing JML's first BOOK, On Beckett, On!

On Beckett, On!, published by Indiana University Press, brings together thirteen Journal of Modern Literature essays on Beckett with two previously unpublished pieces that demonstrate how exciting and productive Samuel Beckett scholarship has become, encompassing philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, contemporary history, and literary theory.

Available HERE in paperback and as an ebook

Contents

Introduction, by Jean-Michel Rabaté

Nothing is Impossible: Bergson, Beckett, and the Pursuit of the Naught, by Jeremy Colangelo

Beckettian Habit and Deictic Exhaustion, by Shuta Kiba

Glitches in Logic in Beckett's Watt: Toward a Sensory Poetics, by Amanda M. Dennis

Beckett's Vessels and the Animation of Containers, by Hunter Dukes

Blanchot in Infinite Conversation(s) with Beckett, by Arleen Ionescu

Beckett, Painting and the Question of "the human", by Kevin Brazil

Art of Impoverishment: Beckett and arte povera, by Erika Mihálycsa

Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception, by Emilie Morin

Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity, by Ruben Borg

Dogging the Subject: Samuel Beckett, Emmanuel Levinas, and Posthumanistic Ethics, by Karalyn Kendall-Morwick

A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation, by Rick De Villiers

Who Hobbles after the Subject: Parables of Writing in The Third Policeman and Molloy, by Yael Levin

" 'Tis my muse will have it so": Four Dimensions of Scatology in Molloy, by Andrew G. Christensen

"Strange laughter": Post-Gothic Questions of Laughter and the Human in Samuel Beckett's Work, by Hannah Simpson

The Illusionless: Adorno and the Afterlife of Laughter in How It Is, by Michelle Rada

BOOK NEWS: How portrait photos serve as literary motifs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf

Reading Portrait Photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf: Modernism, Media and Emotion

By Marit Grøtta

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399526982

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-reading-portrait-photographs-in-proust-kafka-and-woolf.html

Portrait photography increased in popularity during the modernist period and offered new ways of seeing and understanding the human face. This book examines how portrait photographs appeared as literary motifs in the works of three modernist writers with personal experience of the medium: Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. Combining perspectives from literary, visual and media studies, Marit Grøtta discusses these writers’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of technical images in the early twentieth century more generally. In reconsidering the attention paid to analogue photographs in literature, this book throws light on both modernist reactions to portrait photography and on our relationships to photographs today.

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.

• Considers the emotional and relational implications of portrait photographs for three modernist writers
• Offers a comparative study of the motif of reading portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka, and Woolf
• Discusses how portrait photographs prompt feelings of love and gratification as well as feelings of frustration and distress in the beholders
• Discusses the modernists’ ambivalent views on portrait photographs and the uncertain status of such pictures early in the 20th century
• Reconsiders the modernists’ relation to the visual media and the possibilities for contact, communication, and sympathy early in the twentieth century
• Considers how the increased circulation of portrait photographs transformed human relations and the relation between the private and the public spheres

"Marit Grøtta makes us see how Proust, Kafka and Woolf read faces mediated by photography and revealing truth, power and sympathy in this wonderful new physiognomy of modernism." – Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"This illuminating reading of portrait photographs in Proust, Kafka and Woolf offers both a probingly fresh understanding of modernism and a genealogy of our face-infested moment and scrambled private-public boundaries." – John Durham Peters, Yale University

Marit Grøtta is professor of comparative literature at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Baudelaire's Media Aesthetics: The Gaze of the Flâneur and Nineteenth-Century Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and a number of articles on Schlegel, Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Queneau, and Agamben. Her research interests are nineteenth-century and modernist literature, visual culture, media philosophy and aesthetic theory.

BOOK NEWS: Modern literature and the science of sleep

Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 

By Sebastian P. Klinger

Johns Hopkins UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781421450803

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53855/sleep-works

At the turn of the twentieth century, sleep began to be seen not merely as a passive state but as an active, dynamic process crucial to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, cultural historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger explores the intriguing connections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during an era when sleep was both a scientific mystery and a cultural fascination.

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.

Scientists, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of this newfound fascination with sleep: some researchers distinguished sleep from related states such as fatigue and hypnosis, while others investigated sleep disorders and developed treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust grappled with their own sleep disturbances and channeled these experiences into their writing. Through the lens of their discoveries, Klinger reveals the broader implications of sleep for concepts of selfhood and agency.

Tracing the emergence of interdisciplinary sleep science and the cultural production of sleep through literature, Sleep Works weaves together literary analysis, historical context, and research in the archives of the pharmaceutical industry to provide a comprehensive and compelling account of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern era.

"So much has been written on dreams in literature, so little on the experience of sleep itself. Klinger's fascinating book breaks the mould by placing texts by Proust, Valéry, Kafka, Rilke, and Schnitzler in the context of the sleep science of the early 20th century, as well as the burgeoning drug industry. Paying close attention to language and form, it shows how literary works generated new modes for discussing and understanding sleep. A major contribution to literature and science studies." — Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford

"Klinger's book is that rare piece of scholarship that takes up a familiar topic and transforms it into a genuinely new field of inquiry. His incisive analyses introduce us to the poetics of good and bad sleep while showing how literary discourses perform their own sleep experiments." — Jan Mieskowski, Reed College

Sebastian P. Klinger is a researcher and teacher-scholar in the department of German Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

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!

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

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.

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.

  

BOOK NEWS: Expansive temporality in queer experience

Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium 

By Kate McCullough

Ohio State UP, 2024.

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1577-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215777.html

Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. 

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.

Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always on Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rifka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium,” and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.

“Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.” —G. Sikorski, CHOICE

“Never on Time, Always in Time is a groundbreaking work in narrative theory. It accomplishes a queer narratology that clearly and coherently connects specific narrative devices with such major concerns of queer theory as temporality, futurity, materiality, affect, and anti-heteronormative resistance. A transformative work.” —Robyn Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

 

Kate McCullough is associate professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914.

BOOK NEWS: Celebrate Bloomsday with new Cambridge edition of Ulysses with notes

The Cambridge Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

By James Joyce

Edited by Catherine Flynn

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009568449

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/irish-literature/cambridge-ulysses-1922-text-essays-and-notes-library-edition?format=HB

James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. This new edition – first published in 2022 to celebrate the centenary of the book's first publication – helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while exploring crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred 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.

• Provides the 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition with Joyce's own errata notes and an essay on the errata and subsequent editions
• Includes maps and contextual images that help readers visualize the events of the book
• Includes a chronology of Joyce's life and contemporaneous events

Catherine Flynn is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the editor of The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before studying literature, she practiced as an architect in Vienna, Austria, and in her native Ireland.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist depictions of "masculine pregnancy"

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

By Aimee Armande Wilson

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438495606

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Masculine-Pregnancies

Examines literary depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism.

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.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations-and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

"…this book does contribute to queer theory, interwar cultural history, and modernist literary studies in a significant way. It will appeal to those who want to explore where these branches of inquiry intersect." — CHOICE

"Masculine Pregnancies opens up important new perspectives on queer reproduction. Drawing on cutting-edge work in queer and trans studies, and carefully considering the entanglements of gender, sexuality, racialization, and class, Wilson reveals the uses, meanings, and contemporary legacies of masculine pregnancy in the modernist period." — Jana Funke, coeditor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

Aimee Armande Wilson is associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control.

BOOK NEWS: How Literary Suicides Expose Biopolitics

The Suicidal State: Race Suicide, Biopower, and the Sexuality of Population
By Madoka Kishi

Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197690079

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-suicidal-state-9780197690079?cc=us&lang=en#

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive-Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century debates over immigration restrictions, “race suicide” suggests white Americans' low birth rate as foretelling an immanent extinction of the white race, prefiguring the contemporary white nationalist discourse, “replacement theory.” While race suicide personified the populational subject--the “race”--as a suicidal individual, Progressive-Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts.

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 Suicidal State argues that suicides in these texts literalize the fear of race suicide as they thwart the biopolitical demands for self-preservation, survival, and reproduction, articulating queer deathways that betray the nation's reproductive imperative. Both in its figuration of race suicide and in literary suicides, self-inflected death is imagined as a uniquely agential act in its destruction of agency, offering a fertile space for the reconceptualization of biopower's subject formation as it traverses individual and social bodies. That is, the book argues that suicide poses a limit case for the biopolitical management over life. Suicide, as it was imagined at the turn of the century, refuses, nullifies, and parries its obligatory relation to both biopower's discipline of the individual and its management of the population, thereby forging new forms of subjectivity and ways of being in the world that sidestep the twin imperatives for preservation and procreation. In tracking these queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new history of sex and race, of the relation between individual and collective, of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”

"Madoka Kishi's new book introduces a truly novel theory of queer biopolitics with an added bonus: the welcome arrival of an incisive intellectual historian. Taking seriously debunked ideologies of 'race suicide'-- and seriously taking them to historical task -- The Suicidal State mixes and mashes up literature, critiques of the state, and difficult questions of agency. With nimble readings of how this derided concept winds its way through fiction by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and other luminaries, Kishi gifts us an exceptional, frequently startling account of reproduction, racialization, and the promising perils of social 'unbeing.'" -- Scott Herring, Yale University

"Madoka Kishi's remarkable new book reads white-supremacist anxieties about the threat of 'racial suicide'- a trope whose fatal echo shapes contemporary anti-immigrant discourse - against the backdrop of early twentieth-century literary suicides. Brilliantly weaving together American constructions of nationality, race, and gender with the pursuit of reproductive domination by persons of white European descent, The Suicidal State makes a dazzling case for viewing the choice of non-being as a response to the brutal political ontology that posits certain racialized subjects both as socially dead and as harbingers of death for the racial order of power on which American society rests. This is a must-read book for our times." -- Lee Edelman, Tufts University

"The Suicidal State shows us how the state came to long for the erotics of death in the Progressive Era: at the moment when self-murder became suicide and the body politic became the social body, race crossed with sex to deliver and imperil white reproduction. Kishi's arguments are a series of lapidary cuts that expose new desires that glitter with what they cut away, and each chapter presents a revelatory reading of a life canted toward collective death -- New England neurasthenic, Creole flirt, totemic Teuton, and the excretory American. The final turn to ill-fated Butterfly lashes this era to our present, and Kishi's understanding here -- brilliantly limpid and profoundly felt -- demonstrates, in her words, 'how to live on in a suicidal state.'" -- Josephine Park, University of Pennsylvania

Madoka Kishi is a professional in residence in English at Louisiana State University. She has translated Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling (2022), and co-translated Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2024) and Judith Butler's Parting Ways (2019) into Japanese. She has published essays in the Journal of American Studies, The Henry James Review, and the Journal of Modern Literature.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring artistic resistance in writing from and about India

Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance

BY JUDITH BROWN

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009505246

https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernism-and-idea-india-art-passive-resistance?format=AR

In his 1909 manifesto Hind Swaraj, Gandhi made an impassioned call for passive resistance that he soon retracted. 'Passive resistance' didn't, in the end, serve his overarching aims, but was troubled on multiple grounds from its use of the English phrase to the weakness implied by passivity. 

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.

Modernism and the Idea of India: The Art of Passive Resistance claims that the difficulty embedded in the phrase 'passive resistance,' from its seeming internal contradiction to the troubling category of passivity itself, transforms in artistic expression, where its dynamism, ambivalence, and receptivity enable art's capacity to create new forms of meaning. India provides the ground and the fantasy for writers and artists including Rabindranath Tagore, R.K. Narayan, Ahmed Ali, Amrita Sher-Gil, G.V. Desani, Virginia Woolf, and Le Corbusier. These artists and writers explore the capacities of passive resistance inspired by Gandhi's treatise, but move beyond its call for activism into new languages of art.

• Provides inter-disciplinary reading of Indian modernism
• Introduces new authors and artists to readers of modernist studies
• Shows how Gandhi's idea of passive resistance is most relevant to Indian arts and literature

Judith Brown is associate professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing the love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures

Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life

By Seulghee Lee

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1509-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215098.html

In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West.

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 assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices.

“Animated by theoretical erudition and historical attunement, Other Lovings is timely and perennial. Lee’s sensitive exploration of the overlapping frontiers between Afro-American and Asian American literatures, the romance of coalition and the labor of solidarity, and love’s fragility and sociality’s renewal is an extraordinary achievement.” —Fred Moten, author of All That Beauty

“Other Lovings centers the ‘love bonds’ that make up Black and Asian American sociality. Lee thematizes the strongholds of racial melancholia, Afropessimism, and queer negativity in contemporary thought and offers a dazzling theory of the loving, ‘intramural mega-sociality’ of Asian American racial ontology and AfroAsian life.” —Vivian L. Huang, author of Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability

Seulghee Lee (he/him) is assistant professor of African American Studies and English at the University of South Carolina. He is coeditor, with Rebecca Kumar, of Queer and Femme Gazes in AfroAsian American Visual Culture.

BOOK NEWS: First major critical survey of Australian poetry

 

The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry

Edited by Ann Vickery

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009470230

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/european-and-world-literature-general-interest/cambridge-companion-australian-poetry?format=HB

An invaluable resource for faculty and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment. 

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.

Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.

Contents:

"Introduction" Ann Vickery

I. Change and Renewal

1. "Models of poet and nation" Philip Mead

2. "War, crisis and identity in Australian poetry" Dan Disney

3. "Cultivating Australian poetry through periodicals" John Hawke

II. Networks

4. "Above and below: sublime and gothic relations in nineteenth century Australian poetry" Michael Farrell

5. "Romanticism, sensibility, and colonial women poets" Katie Hansord

6. "Experiment and adaptation in Australia's modernist poetry" Aidan Coleman

7. "The postwar 'golden generation' (1945–1965)" Toby Davidson

8. "Generation of '68 and a culture of revolution" Corey Wakeling

III. Authors

9. "High delicate outline: the poetry of Judith Wright" Nicholas Birns

10. "Burning Sappho: Gwen Harwood's Incendiary verse" Ann-Marie Priest

11. "Les Murray: ancient and modern" David McCooey

12. "Lionel Fogarty's poetics of address and negative lyric" Dashiell Moore

IV. Embodied Poetics

13. "'The strength of us as women': A Poetics of relationality and reckoning" Natalie Harkin and Jeanine Leane

14. "'Country snarled/ in borders': spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetry" Kim Cheng Boey

15. "Australian poets in the countries of others'" Louis Klee

16. "Writing the Body" Orchid Tierney

17. "Not the poem: in media res" John Kinsella

V. Expanding Form

18. "Hybrid Forms: the verse novel, prose poetry, and poetic biographies" Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington

19. "Electronic, visual and sound poetries in Australia" A. J. Carruthers

Ann Vickery is professor of writing and literature at Deakin University. She is the Author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000) and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics of Australian Women's Poetry ((2007)). She is also the co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys into Private Papers (with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman, 2009).