BOOK NEWS: Vital collection of newly discovered Woolf correspondence

 The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399507325

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-uncollected-letters-of-virginia-woolf.html

Many previously undiscovered letters from Virginia Woolf have come to light since the original six-volume Collected Letters was published between 1975 and 1980. Over 1,400 are included in this vital new book, illuminating facets of Woolf’s life that have previously been hidden or only glimpsed. Important letters to contemporary writers, such as Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Berta Ruck, have been unearthed from archives, as well as fifty letters to T. S. Eliot. This book also features substantial collections of letters to Lady Colefax, Winifred Holtby, Mary Hutchinson, Christabel McLaren (Lady Aberconway) and Raymond Mortimer, as well as previously unrecorded correspondents. 

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.

Through these letters we see Woolf encouraging would-be authors and negotiating with editors, literary agents and foreign translators in her role as a professional writer. The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf provides extraordinary insight into the variety of acquaintance of one of the most fascinating literary figures of the twentieth century.

"This beautifully designed, sturdy volume... is a colossal work of breathtaking dedication and remarkable scholarship. [...] In this meticulously curated volume, the letters, and our delight in them, will—with their laughter, intrigues and crackling fires—run on and on." – Matthew Macer-Wright, Virginia Woolf Bulletin

"...this late in the game – when [Woolf's] essays and letters have been collected, diaries published (then republished in spiffy new editions) and fiction prefaced, annotated and afterworded ad nauseam – it is rare to get a scholarship-altering book. Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N Clarke have produced just such a volume. [...] This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author." – Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review

"The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf is the most significant contribution to Woolf Studies and the Humanities for decades. This is an immaculate critical work, which is also a major social history, edited by two pre-eminent, expert scholars. The Uncollected Letters sets a gold standard for all such editions in the future." – Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of The Bloomsbury Photographs

 

Stephen Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018. He co-edits, and regularly contributes to, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and in 2018 he gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture "'This Sheet is a Glass': Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters."

Stuart N. Clarke is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin from 1999 to 2022. As well as contributing almost 300 items to the Bulletin, he edited volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993).

BOOK NEWS: How Adrienne Rich's political interests affect her later poetry

Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry: Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

By Alec Marsh

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350466975

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/adrienne-richs-later-poetry-9781350466975/

Reorienting understandings of Adrienne Rich's later work through her interest in Marx and Marxist politics, this book engages with this overlooked part of her oeuvre through considerations of issues such as race, nationhood, and gender.

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.

From 1983 onward, after she visited revolutionary Nicaragua until the end of her life, Rich's political vision can best be described as Marxist-Humanist. Until recently, very little attention has been paid to Rich's “interest” in Marx; there is no in-depth treatment of the effect of Marx's humanistic philosophy on Rich's later work, or even on her unwavering, but altered dedication to Women's Liberation. This book fills this gap, showing how Rich's discovery of Marx's humanism affected her poetry. In doing so, it makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through poetry.

Contents:

Chapter 1: 'I Long Ago Moved On': Adrienne Rich, Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

Chapter 2: Marxist Humanism, Freedom and Raya Dunayevskaya

Chapter 3: Adrienne Rich “Feeling Contradictions” Nicaragua, and Your Native Land, Your Life.

Chapter 4: In Quest of America: The Dialectical Dimensions of “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Chapter 5: Chapter Five: Suffering in the Heart of Capital: Dark Fields of the Republic

Chapter 6: American Innocence, the German 'Guilt Question” and the Oslo Peace Process.

Chapter 7: The End of History and the Forgotten Future: Rich vs. Neoliberalism

Chapter 8: Fox: “Terza Rima” and the End of History

Chapter 9: Salvaging Midnight Salvage

Chapter 10: Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: “Draft #2006” An American Jeremiad

Chapter 11: 9/11 and The School Among the Ruins: “Tendril”

Chapter 12: Rich in the Borderlands: Late Style and Her World of Pain

"Written in an open and eloquent style, this book makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics, and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through the genre." —Steven Matthews, University of Reading

Alec Marsh is professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light (2021), William Carlos Williams and the Prose of Pure Experience (2016), John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (2015), Ezra Pound (2011), and others.

BOOK NEWS: Muriel Spark, the literary shapeshifter

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark

By James Bailey

Princeton UP, June 2026

ISBN: 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691290171/like-a-cat-loves-a-bird

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels—with their plots featuring a cast of elderly characters receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham, and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray—but it is also true of her as a person. As sly, nimble, and elegant as Spark’s own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird offers a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century.

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.

From Spark’s childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany—via South Africa, London, New York, and Rome—James Bailey traces a light-footed journey around the world and through the novelist’s strange and magnificent books. The result is an irresistible story of transformation, wit, and fierce determination—and a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

“Bailey’s slippery Spark is chaotic, complex, often hilarious, and constantly shapeshifting. His kaleidoscopic portrait illuminates Spark’s life and work from every angle, yet—crucially—allows her the freedom she craved to confound and elude those who would try to pin her down. This is a deeply stylish, astute, and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer.”—Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

“Utterly charming. A book as elegant, sharp-witted, and mischievous as its subject. If you love literary biography, you’ll feel like the cat that got the cream.”—Clare Pollard, author of Delphi: A Novel

James Bailey is a writer and researcher who holds a PhD in literature and is the author of Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction.

BOOK NEWS: Literary perspectives on labor and gender

Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature: New Literary Perspectives on the Times, Spaces and Forms of Women’s Work

Edited by Emily J. Hogg and Charlotte J. Fabricius

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541336

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-feminized-work-and-the-labor-of-literature.html

In a world wherein work is increasingly feminized, historical and contemporary literature can reveal what ‘women’s work’ entails. Reading across different genres, time periods and geographical locations, this book explores gendered working lives through novels, poetry, comics, editorial work and book collecting. It moves from the library of an early modern noblewoman to protest comics in the 2017 Women’s March, from Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and Buchi Emecheta to writing from the 2020s about motherhood and explores topics as various as gossip, poetic scraps and household management as well as gender-based violence and the creation of feminist solidarity. In doing so, it shows how literary perspectives on labor and gender can provide insights into work that is otherwise made invisible and can help us to better understand the challenges of today’s insecure work-lives.

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.

• Explores literary representations of ‘women’s work’ to generate new understandings of contemporary working conditions
• Takes a literary approach to understanding contemporary feminized working conditions
• Develops a transhistorical approach to the study of literature and notions of gendered work
• Surveys literary representations of feminized work across a range of genres and periods, including twentieth and twenty-first century novels, poetry, autofiction, and activist comics, while also considering gendered labor in the production and circulation of literature, including in contemporary publishing, and Early Modern book collecting

"What is the relation between work and books, between women’s labor and women’s writing? And how does women’s work cut across standard divisions of space and time? This collection of case studies, prefaced by an incisive and comprehensive introduction, offers illuminating answers." – Rita Felski, University of Virginia

Emily J. Hogg is associate professor of contemporary anglophone literature at the Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-editor of Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2021).

Charlotte J. Fabricius is a postdoc with the project ‘Feminized: A New Literary History of Women’s Work’ at the Center for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD in cultural studies and works in the intersection of global and digital anglophone literature, comics studies, and feminist critique. She is the author of Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics (2023).

BOOK NEWS: The Resurgence of the Archetypal Feminine

Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature

By April C. Heaslip

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496856968

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Regenerating-the-Feminine

Mythologists work as cultural animateurs, tracking patterns and trends, identifying archetypal and symbolic wounds and remedies. Reading cultural and environmental events via texts and patterns from such a perspective enables dynamic dialogue and action. Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature examines the history of the lost and degraded archetypal feminine of Western cultures, whose resurgence in scholarship, the arts, and social justice practices is now on the rise. Drawing on various methodologies to deepen our understanding of this regenerative phenomenon, author April C. Heaslip charts the significance of interconnected expressions dramatically impacting our sense of self, community, history, health, culture, and creativity.

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 study examines the feminine’s resurgence via emerging imaginal archetypal paradigms in literary fiction, memoir, and cinematic expression. Utilizing literary and film studies, depth psychology, archaeomythology, history, and religious studies to examine the cultural and personal phenomenon of feminine renewal, this book explores how remythologizing regeneration—as well as remapping complex and neglected personal and collective wasteland landscapes—revitalizes the relationship between psyche, culture, and nature.

Tending to the return of the feminine and the complex cultural and eco wastelands, this post-Jungian inquiry remythologizes notions of wholeness, amplifies feminist revisions of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s” journey, and provides transdisciplinary best practices in support of personal individuation, cultural revitalization, and ecological healing.

"Regenerating the Feminine makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields of women’s studies, popular culture, psychoanalysis, feminist theology, and more. Not only does this book offer original thought to all these areas, but it draws these disciplines together in new, imaginative ways that suggest future avenues of research."  —Susan Rowland, author of Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide

April C. Heaslip is a mythologist, educator, and artist. Her work has been published in journals and edited collections such as Myths Shattered and Restored: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; Evolving God–Images: Essays on Religion, Individuation, and Postmodern Spirituality; and more.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the influences on Claude McKay's writing

Real and Imagined Worlds: Claude McKay’s Poetry and Prose

By Charles Scruggs

University Press of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496860392

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Real-and-Imagined-Worlds

Claude McKay (1890–1948) was a versatile Jamaican American writer and poet and a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to two autobiographies and a documentary study of Harlem, McKay wrote poetry, novels (Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, Banjo, Harlem Glory, Amiable with Big Teeth—the latter portraying a dystopia that foreshadows Orwell), the short story collection Gingertown, and a screenplay disguised as a novel, Romance in Marseille.

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.

McKay was deeply influenced by various literary and artistic sources that shaped his poetry and prose. As an artist, he saw himself as a “classicist,” but his favorite poet was John Keats, the acclaimed Romantic. The books he read in the library of his mentor Walter Jekyll were primarily Victorian and had a profound influence on him. However, the artists he encountered after he left Jamaica were mostly all modernists: Charlie Chaplin, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Ernest Hemingway. Popular culture also inspired him, especially the cinematic traditions of both Hollywood and Europe. These dual influences reflected his complicated intellectual and artistic life. Real and Imagined Worlds: Claude McKay’s Poetry and Prose attempts to make sense of the poet’s deep engagement with the literary and artistic influences that inspired his own writing.

Charles Scruggs is professor emeritus of American literature at the University of Arizona. He is author of four books and published articles on Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Jessie Fauset, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, John Fowles, Raymond Chandler, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, and on American film noir.

BOOK NEWS: The evolution of Black speculative fiction and philosophy

Afrofuturism and World Order 

By Reynaldo Anderson 

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5955-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215944.html

In Afrofuturism and World Order, Reynaldo Anderson delves into the evolution of Black speculative thought and Afrofuturism from the early twentieth century to the present day. By locating Afrofuturism within an African geography of reason, he situates the past, present, and future of people of African descent at the intersection of speculative philosophy, science fiction, futurology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and geopolitics. Historically, Afrofuturism theorized futures for Black Americans through merging their lived experiences with science fiction, technology, music, and art. 

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 from adaptations in Black culture and speculative thought during the Cold War, Anderson addresses the shifting focus of the genre from American to transnational, as well as the implications of modern existential threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. By tracing the Black speculative tradition from its overlaps with Africana esotericism and certain African diaspora regions, to its intersections with astroculture and modernism, to the works of Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Octavia Butler, to the aesthetic politics of the Black Speculative Arts movement, and beyond, Anderson illuminates how Afrofuturism participates in an increasingly multipolar world.

“Anderson situates Afrofuturism within the long history of African philosophy, going beyond traditional literary studies to offer new ways to consider questions of justice, equality, and liberation. A must-read for anyone interested in understanding the intellectual power and political depth of the Black speculative imagination.” —Alex Zamalin, author of Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism

“Anderson locates the limitations of modernism as a European ideology and then uses established principles of Africology to propose new approaches to both critical and creative analysis. Afrofuturism and World Order is essential reading for Black and African studies scholars and will become a bedrock text for graduate instruction.” —Walter D. Greason, Dewitt Wallace Professor of History, Macalester College

Reynaldo Anderson is associate professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University and coeditor of, among others, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art + Design, and Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent. He is also the editor of The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies.

BOOK NEWS: The entwined relationship of movement and writing for Black women authors

The Souths in Her: Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation

By Nicole M. Morris Johnson

Columbia UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780231219686

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-souths-in-her/9780231219686/

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

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 The Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

"The Souths in Her offers an important exploration of how Black women artists have used self-expression to counter misperceptions about them and their legacies in the South. Through rich analysis of Black women writers and choreographers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Maryse Condé, Ntozake Shange, and Jamaica Kincaid, alongside contemporary artists like Allison Janae Hamilton, Urban Bush Women, and Akwaeke Emezi, this book showcases how they achieve new “expressive horizons” and chart new territory to move freely." —Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

"Taking her title from Ntozake Shange, Nicole M. Morris Johnson explores various Souths: the worlds that Black women artists, primarily writers and choreographers, made to counter silencing. Authoritative and beautifully written, The Souths in Her understands Black women’s art as emancipatory in its broadest and bravest forms, delving into feminist cultural expression out of the Middle Passage to illuminate its creative power and impressive diasporic reach." —Thadious M. Davis, author of Understanding Alice Walker

"The Souths in Her is a brilliantly conceptualized examination of women writers and artists of African descent from the Caribbean and the United States whose contributions boldly confront confining narratives that have typically centered Black masculinity. Morris Johnson's beautifully written book refines and expands these methodologies to center Black women, Africa, and its diasporas. An outstanding and exciting achievement in Southern studies." —Riché Richardson, author of Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body

Nicole M. Morris Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

BOOK NEWS: The role of African and Caribbean newspapers in shaping Black political thought

The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935–1960

By Leslie James

Harvard UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780674279414

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674279414

A revelatory account of Black Atlantic political thought in the era of decolonization, revealing how West African and Caribbean newspapers invigorated debates about imperialism, capitalism, and Black freedom.

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 the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people.

"Leslie James’s exceptional study of print culture in the Anglophone Caribbean and West Africa deepens our understanding of the central role newspapers played in the politics of decolonization. Crisscrossing the Atlantic, The Moving Word expands the cast of characters associated with Black anticolonial thought, tracks the dynamic public sphere constituted by newspapers, and documents the diminished place of periodicals after national independence. This is a must read." —Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire

Leslie James is Reader in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 1939–1959.

BOOK NEWS: Black women writers rewriting humanism during segregation

Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow

By Mollie Godfrey

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5942-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215296.html

In Brave Humanism, Mollie Godfrey argues that long before the post-1960s critiques of Western humanism emerged, an earlier generation of Black women writers were committed to reclaiming and redefining the human on their own terms. For the writers under study here—Pauline Hopkins, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Lorraine Hansberry—narrative forms offered intellectual space to challenge the white supremacist and patriarchal logics of Western humanism that underwrote de jure segregation. Through these narratives, they worked toward their own visions of humanity and human freedom—visions that would come to inspire later generations of Black feminists. 

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 recovering Jane Crow–era Black women writers’ undervalued intellectual work of critique and creation, Godfrey also intervenes in critical conversations about the relationships between Black creative work, Black women’s intellectual work, and our ideas about human agency and collectivity. In recovering this hidden intellectual genealogy, this book offers a more nuanced history of Black women’s engagement with the idea of the human and places a longer history of Black women’s writing at the heart of humanist and posthumanist study.

“Godfrey recasts histories of the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and—crucially—the midcentury as much more integrally feminist than previously acknowledged and positions the writers of these earlier generations as a missing link in a longer trajectory of Black subjectivity and its aesthetic representations.” —John K. Young, author of The Roots of Cane: Jean Toomer and American Magazine Modernism

“Who said close reading is dead? Godfrey’s deft attention to the diverse novels and cultural histories of the likes of Hopkins, Larsen, Hurston, and Petry is thorough and compelling, and her many analytical threads connect back to ongoing conversations about Black women’s writing.” —Howard Rambsy II, author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Mollie Godfrey is professor of English at James Madison University. She is the editor of Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry and Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow.

BOOK NEWS: Fantasy authors of color create alternate visions of morality

Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre

By Joy Sanchez-Taylor

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5949-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215906.html

In Dispelling Fantasies, Joy Sanchez-Taylor examines how authors of color, such as R.F. Kuang, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Tasha Suri, Aiden Thomas, Nghi Vo, and Marlon James, among others, offer critical counterpoints to the history of white-dominated, Eurocentric fantasy. 

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 traditional fantasy that these authors are writing against reinforces Christian virtues and colonial, white supremacist structures; Sanchez-Taylor argues that its racial tropes are tied to a history of colonization and Christian missionary practices, with popular fantasy narratives often depicting Indigenous groups as primitive, deviant peoples in need of salvation. Such representations are based on a Western binary of rational versus magical and are influenced by tenets of Christianity, ultimately contributing to depictions of “the dark fantastic” or fantasy worlds where dark and othered characters are implicitly portrayed as evil and irredeemable. 

Organized around four Christian ideals that appear frequently in Western fantasy texts—virtue, envy, patriarchy, and salvation—Dispelling Fantasies demonstrates how non-Eurocentric fantasy worlds offer alternative versions of morality, race, gender, and sexuality and make space for authors to move away from hierarchical, binary systems of good and evil.

“Written in an accessible style....[Dispelling Fantasies] is focused and well organized, and the examples are current and thoughtfully analyzed....Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.” —P. J. Kurtz, CHOICE

“Dispelling Fantasies significantly advances scholarship on works that break from the Western, Eurocentric fantasy tradition, highlighting how Christian virtues and their historical ties to colonialism and white supremacy have shaped fantasy’s bias toward whiteness.” —Taylor Driggers, author of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature: Fantastic Incarnations and the Deconstruction of Theology

“Sanchez-Taylor introduces a large number of BIPOC authors into the critical arena, engaging with subtleties and variations across different ethnic, religious, and colonialized experiences and revealing how these writers challenge and subvert the fantasy canon. Dispelling Fantasies is creative and insightful.” —Farah Mendlesohn, author of Rhetorics of Fantasy

Joy Sanchez-Taylor is professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY), where her research addresses intersections between science fiction, fantasy, and critical race studies. She is the author of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction by Authors of Color (2021).

SPECIAL FEATURE: The Garden and the Machine, a Closer Look at JML 49.1

 

In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Robert Fillman discusses William Carlos Williams's unique approach to the pastoral. Read it HERE.

His JML 49.1 essay, "'[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy': William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic," is available to read FREE for a limited time.

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.1 (Fall 2025), "Running Counter" is LIVE!

 

Journal of Modern Literature 49.1 (Fall 2025) on the theme "Running Counter" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56220

Content includes:

Preston Stone 

“She will be right”: Queer Haitian Protest in Roxane Gay’s “Of Ghosts and Shadows”

Laura Lorhan

Turning the Tables on “Bluebeard”: Intertextuality in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox

Dan Dougherty

“[S]trange new air of myth”: Homophony, Narration, and the Modernist Autobiography in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Roy Benjamin

“Unprobables in their poor suit of the improssable”: The Improbability Principle in Joyce

Robert Fillman

“[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy”: William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic

FREE

Dennis Wilson Wise

C.S. Lewis’s Modernist Moment: Taking up the Gauntlet in “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians” 

Jeremy Pomeroy

Reconsidering Moretti’s “rhetoric of innocence”: Ambivalence Toward and Rationalizations of Heroic Violence in Contemporary Epic

Jihuan Yu

A Play on the Post-isms: The Unnamed Narrator’s Quest for Realness in Remainder

Kevin Rulo

Autonomy, Satire, and Parasitic Aesthetics in Wyndham Lewis’s “Joint” and The Apes of God 

Ira Nadel

Lawless Exuberance: Céline and Roth

Reviews

Jean-Michel Rabate

How It Is / Comment C’est / Как ЭTо: Glosses for Beckett’s Darkest Novel

James Mesiti

Samuel Beckett and his Transdisciplinary and Creative Process

Nicole Higgins

“There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE”: A Review of Joseph Pizza’s Dissonant Voices

Joseph Darlington

Little Wilson and Uncle Sam

Bryan Counter

Turning Around Uncertainty