BOOK NEWS: Creative explorations of reproductive justice, 1959-73

The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973

By Sophie A. Jones

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781474433303

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-reproductive-politics-of-american-literature-and-film-1959-1973.html

In the long 1960s, struggles for the rights to abortion, contraception, and reproduction itself gathered momentum. This book explores reproduction in American literature and film produced between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, and argues that writers and filmmakers of this period engaged with the social horizons of pregnancy by reflecting on their own creative practices. In an era that witnessed a renewed emphasis on planned pregnancy and population control, authors and filmmakers were often preoccupied with the ways reproduction – both cultural and biological – might escape the drive to predict and plan. Tracing this preoccupation in key works of drama, film, poetry and prose, Sophie A. Jones argues that these works mobilize the concept of contingency to address the relationships of race, disability and reproductive freedom. Offering fresh perspectives on canonical and lesser-known works, the book makes a case for the central role of culture in forging new approaches to reproductive justice.

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.

• Develops a new approach to the politics of reproduction in literature and film
• Uncovers new connections between literature, film, and the politics of reproduction
• Offers fresh approaches to a wide range of work by figures including Lorraine Hansberry, Stan Brakhage, Richard Yates and Sylvia Plath
• Develops the concept of ‘reproductive contingency’ to illuminate the cultural politics of reproduction in the long 1960s

"Remarkable in its insight, Sophie A. Jones’s The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959-1973 investigates a range of texts from the long 1960s to demonstrate the role of reproductive contingency in cultural and biological reproduction. This timely analysis offers an original contribution to American literary and cultural studies." – Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

Sophie A. Jones is lecturer in contemporary literature and gender studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Floating Cities and Amphibious Engineers, A Closer Look at JML 49.4

 David A. Vivian considers how Caribbean science fiction might resist the common climate-fiction plot of a lone savior or lone technological solution. Read more HERE 

His JML 49.4 article, "Reimagining Urban Ecology through Caribbean Science Fiction: Reading the Green Cities of Tobias Buckell and Stephanie Saulter," linked in the post, is available FREE

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.4 (Summer 2026) "Ecocriticism / Anti-Imperialism" is now LIVE!

Journal of Modern Literature 49.4 (Summer 2026), "Ecocriticism / Anti-Imperialism," edited by Edited by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57714

Content includes:

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo 

Literature on a Hot Planet: An Introduction to Ecocriticism/Anti-Imperialism

FREE!

Ecocriticism

David A. Vivian

Reimagining Urban Ecology through Caribbean Science Fiction: Reading the Green Cities of Tobias Buckell and Stephanie Saulter

FREE!

Jie Chen and Quan Wang

Steaming into a Postcolonial Utopia: Reimagining Energy Futures in N.K. Jemisin’s “The Effluent Engine” 

Kuhelika Ghosh

Caribbean Blooms: The Invisible Hands of Tropical Gardens in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book)

Huiming Liu

Financial Colonialism and Ecological Echoes in The Waste Land 

Hadas Wagner

“Let it Blaze”: Burning Leaves, Recycling, and Reform in Virginia Woolf’s Late Writing 

Joe Larios

Escape from Humanity: Subjective Constraint and the Non-Human in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves 

Anti-Imperialism

Leo Kadokura

Amidst the Wreckage: Joseph Conrad’s Epistemology of Englishness and Empire

Holly Eva Allen

One Tangle of Shadows: Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, and a Message Against Nationalism and Traditional Translation

Yiran Xu

Reimagining the Occupation in the 1990s: Postwar Butterfly, Disillusionment, and Historical Legacies in Shimada Masahiko’s Suisei no Jūnin 

Reviews 

Alyson Favilla

Leave No Trace: A Review of Gina Caison’s Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance

Rory Michael Hutchings

Theorizing Like a Rat

Nataša Tučev

Conrad’s Spatial Narratives

Sarah Dowling

Language Questions and Language Answers

BOOK NEWS: The poetic innovations of the Noigandres group

Noigandres: Poetry Made New in Brazil

By Antonio Sergio Bessa

Fordham UP, 2026

ISBN: 9781531513689

https://fordhampress.com/noigandres-hb-9781531513672.html

The Noigandres group was one of the key movements in Brazilian modernism. Bessa’s account works through the specific poetic innovations that are the hallmark of the concrete poetics the group developed. These include their unprecedented reevaluation of Brazilian literary history, their distinctive exploration of graphic space inspired by emerging studies on cybernetics, and their embrace of a range of Modernist traditions, from Mallarmé’s vision of poetry as a constellation of words, to Joyce’s concept of the “verbivocovisual,” to Pound’s writings about the Chinese ideogram.

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.

Bessa’s account begins with the core traits of concrete poetry developed by the Noigandres poets throughout the 1950s (the so-called “heroic phase” of concretism) and continues to the poetic experiments the group undertook after the military coup of 1964 in Brazil. The book concludes with translations of key primary texts: essays by the poets Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos and correspondence between the three poets and Ezra Pound.

Bessa persuasively situates the Noigandres group—the missing link between Modernism and the poetics of our digital age—within an artistic and philosophical lineage. Providing an accessible and incisive summary of the theoretical background and the particular cultural conditions of post-war Brazil, Bessa’s book is the ideal guide for understanding this novel, challenging, and important poetry.—Craig Dworkin, author of The Sound of Thinking: A Listener's Companion to Conceptual Music

Bessa renews our understanding of the Noigandres poets. His readings, with an eye on contemporary concerns, will introduce the movement to new generation of scholars.—Marília Librandi, author of Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel

Antonio Sergio Bessa is a scholar of concrete poetry and the author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (2008). He has edited several volumes on concrete poetry including Haroldo de Campos’s Novas: Selected Writings (with Odile Cisneros, 2007), and Mary Ellen Solt: Toward a Theory of Concrete Poetry (2010).

BOOK NEWS: Tracing Chilean women poets' resistance to neoliberalism

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980–2020

By Bárbara Fernández-Melleda

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541497

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-chilean-women-s-poetry-under-neoliberalism-1980-2020.html

Examines how women poets have expressed resistance against neoliberalism in Chile at times of intense political upheaval

• A 4-decade chronology following on women’s poetry response to neoliberal ideology
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to poetic work engaging with neoliberalism in Chile
• Centers on iconic works by canonical Chilean authors that deserve study in an international setting

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.

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980-2020 explores how the works of 6 women poets interact with the imposition and development of neoliberalism in Chile over 4 decades. The book follows a chronology that joins poetic work that criticizes the model from its inception during dictatorship times (1980s), through a democratic transition that did not live up to its expectations (1990s), until the naturalization of neoliberalism as a new normal that seems not possible to overcome (2000s). Finally, the 2010s show how the great inequalities denounced in the works from the previous 3 decades found concrete resistance through the October 2019 social revolt. This juncture brings new poetry hoping for a refoundation of Chile while also imagining the failure of a revolutionary movement. In the end, the latter came to pass.

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda brilliantly kickstarts her analytical journey when the sweeping violence of the Pinochet dictatorship installed the neoliberal model. Her book highlights various mechanisms of resistance against a repressive and individualistic social system. It also examines the asymmetry affecting Chilean literary production, perpetuating patriarchal practices that reduce or negate the contributions carried by the aesthetics of women writers. – Diamela Eltit, winner of the National Literature Prize of Chile 2018

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda is assistant professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She has published articles on Gabriela Mistral, Elvira Hernández, Carmen Berenguer, and Nadia Prado, among other Chilean poets. She was awarded the Early Career Scheme Grant by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee for her project The Fall of Neoliberalism in the Chilean Post-Dictatorship Novel (2000–2020). Her current research interests delve into Sino-Latin American diplomatic relations, especially through the lives and works of Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Armando Uribe. In 2024, she received the General Research Fund award to begin her 3-year project entitled Pablo Neruda in China.

BOOK NEWS: Youth catalyzing change in stories of Central American migration

Coming of Age(ncy) on the Migrant Trail: Adolescent Journeys in Contemporary Latinx Young Adult Literature

By Susana S. Martínez

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5965-8

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814216026.html

Susana S. Martínez’s Coming of Age(ncy) on the Migrant Trail maps the contours of agency in young adult literature involving Latinx migrant youth—a project that could not be timelier given anti-immigrant hostility, LGBTQ+ book bans, and intense scrutiny of how we teach about race. Martínez leads readers chronologically and geographically from the 1980s Central American civil wars north through Mexico during the war on drugs to the recent experiences of those living undocumented in the United States, showing that YA is an ideal medium through which to tease out those stories of Central American migration that are often subsumed within Latinx studies and to combat stereotypes of young migrants. 

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.

Viewed through the lenses of intersectionality and racialized capitalism’s politics of disposability, the novels in question contribute to timely antiracist pedagogical discussions where youth emerge as catalysts for social change. By including non-Latinx authors who wrote about the Guatemalan and Salvadoran civil conflicts alongside authors from the Central American diaspora—Marcia Argueta Mickelson, Jennifer De Leon, and Bessie Flores Zaldívar among them—Martínez invites us to reflect on solidarity in contentious times.

“While young people, and particularly young people seeking refuge, are at the mercy of oppressive systems, Martínez sheds light on the ways they discover and enact their power. Her nuanced analysis makes visible the ways that global capitalist policies and processes on both sides of the border directly impact people.” —Amina Chaudhri, author of Multiracial Identity in Children’s Literature

“Martínez deftly uses data and social scientific research alongside her analysis of young adult novels to contextualize the causes of youth migration and to counter xenophobic ideologies that position migrants as criminal, deportable bodies.” —Cristina Herrera, author of ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy

Susana S. Martínez is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University. Her articles have appeared in Ciberletras, Brújula, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, and elsewhere.

A tribute to Rachel Blau Duplessis (1941-2026)

It is with deep sadness we report that Rachel Blau Duplessis died at Penn Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia on September 2 of this year. DuPlessis served as a Journal of Modern Literature co-editor from 2005-2016, and stepped back to advisory editor in 2017. 

A poet, editor, and scholar she earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University. Her special interests were in modern and contemporary poetry, especially issues of gender, the long poem, and cultural poetics. She is one of the foremost critics of her generation, and her works of scholarship include Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (2012), Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (2006), Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), and Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985). As editor, her books include The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990) and, with Susan Stanford Friedman, Signets: Reading H.D. (1990). With Peter Quartermain, she coedited The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999) and with Ann Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation (1998; reprint 2007). 

DuPlessis is one of the pioneers of feminist literary study, as essayist/scholar, as a long-time member of the collective that edited the journal Feminist Studies, and as an early contributor to analytic gender studies in the university.  She was the founding editor and the scholarly and acquisitions editor for Palgrave Macmillan’s series in “Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics” and edited book series on poetry and poetics for the University of Alabama and Iowa presses.

DuPlessis’s major work as a poet is the long poem Drafts, which she began in 1986 and published the final installment of in 2012: Surge: Drafts 96-114. Other books in the project include The Collage Poems of Drafts (2011), Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (2010), Torques: Drafts 58-76 (2007), Drafts: Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, unnumbered: Précis (2004), and Drafts 1-38, Toll (2001). Her recent poetry publications include Secular Ex Votos (2026), Life in Handkerchiefs (2023), Daykeeping (2023), Poetic Realism (2020), Around the Day in 80 Worlds (2018), Numbers (2018), and Days and Works (2017). A full list of her publications is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Blau_DuPlessis.

A professor at Temple University for many years, DuPlessis retired in 2011. In 2012, she was a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Auckland. She has also held an appointment with the National Humanities Center in North Carolina and a residency at Bellagio sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

DuPlessis’s many honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize, Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.

We invite JML readers to share a memory at https://peopleforever.com/p/rachel-blau-duplessis.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Mexican counterculture's diverse corpus, 1920-1990

Consuming Citizens: Countercultural Bodies in Twentieth-Century Mexico

By Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9798855802290

https://sunypress.edu/Books/C/Consuming-Citizens

Explores twentieth-century Mexican counterculture through the lens of pleasure, body autonomy, and music and film undergrounds.

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.

Consuming Citizens offers a fresh conception of twentieth-century Mexican cultural production by critically tracing the underside of mestizo modernity. Examining a diverse corpus that includes poetry, song, avant-garde film, and more from the 1920s to '80s, the volume uses queer, feminist, and psychedelic theories to understand counterculture-and especially different acts of consumption-as a way of creating culture and alternative social structures. Practices of consuming media, sex, and drugs become means of generating community among subjects who have been marginalized by the nominally inclusive mestizo nation. Consuming Citizens thus rethinks nationalism, citizenship, and society in relation to, and as creations of, countercultural bodies.

"Consuming Citizens explores the underbelly of mestizo ideology in Mexico, from the 1920s to the late 1980s, when the discourse of neoliberalism solidified. Drawing from a remarkable breadth of primary sources, the book brings together a novel mix of literary and cultural figures under the conceptual umbrella of 'countercultural bodies'—including Cube Bonifant, Nahui Olin, Salvador Novo, Abigael Bohorquez, Margarita Dalton, Parménidez García Saldaña, Fernando del Paso, and Sergio García Michel. Foregrounding pleasure rather than identity as a basis of citizenship, Aguirre shows how countercultural bodies creatively intervene in their environments and how pleasure can serve as an unexpectedly powerful form of dissent." — Viviane Mahieux, author of Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life

Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at the University of California, Riverside.

BOOK NEWS: How modernist writers reading faces reconfigured physiognomy

Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

By Anca Parvulescu

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009599801 Open Access ebook

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/face-and-form/3C155E6711CD5D399C1F20B7DE1B2D24

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. 

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 literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, or difference – and combinations thereof. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority, but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction. The modernist overinvestment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition. 

“Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.” —Katja Haustein, lecturer in Comparative Literature, University of Kent

“Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on “modernist faciality” in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.” —Rochelle Rives, professor of English, City University of New York

Anca Pârvulescu is a scholar of comparative literature specializing in global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatist, migration studies, and East Europe. She is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at the Washington University in St. Louis. Her books include Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT P, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (U of Chicago P, 2014); and with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022).

BOOK NEWS: How literary scent offers new ways of relating

Olfactory Worldmaking

By Hsuan L. Hsu

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-2123-1 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517921231/olfactory-worldmaking/ 

Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.

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.

Hsu theorizes olfaction as a speculative, reparative practice. Examining projects from historical novels, memoirs, and speculative fiction to conceptual art and experimental perfumes, he reveals how these works mobilize scent to imagine alternative ways of sensing, relating, and creating more equitably livable worlds.

"By articulating scent as both a multilayered medium and an ethical practice, Hsu’s work situates sensory experience squarely within contemporary debates in societal multimodality while simultaneously challenging the field to grapple with the unresolved frictions, contradictions, and inequalities that attend atmospheric and olfactory relations." —Multimodality & Society

Hsuan L. Hsu is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics, and Air Conditioning.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing the arbitrary or frivolous whims of four modernist authors

Modernism’s Whims

By Beci Carver

Oxford UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780198950721

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780198950721

Thomas Hardy asks of the ghost stalking him: 'Whither, O whither will your whim now draw me?' Immediately tripping up on its own laid-out comma, then pausing to howl theatrically, and hedging its bets with a stuttering, archaic 'whither' that skeptically hovers between 'where' and 'whether', this line has already begun to worry about where it is going or being 'whim-drawn.' On the other hand, it enjoys its worry, over-performs the conundrum. It is a whim addressing a whim.

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.

Beci Carver's Modernism's Whims is a book about whims; their tyrannies, arbitrariness, ultimate frivolity: how they may feel urgent for all their lightness, while still letting you play, letting you go, letting you off the hook. The book is at once a meditation on the whim as a phenomenon and an endeavor to track the specific (albeit necessarily intangible) literary whims of four modernist writers: Hardy, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Elsie Elizabeth Phare. Moving counter to the otherwise professionalized spirit of modernism, these literary whims and their author sponsors are imagined to occupy a fugitive position within the broader movement, their progress dangerously silly. Carver situates modernism after whim's Golden Age in the mid-nineteenth century, at a literary-historical moment when authors were expected to know what they were about. Hardy's stalker ghost is on the run.

• Offers hundreds of original close readings of poems and prose passages, which in their turn contribute to a new take on the history of literary whims
• Offers a new lens on modernism, via a hitherto unknown modernist author, Elsie Elizabeth Phare
• The first extended and in-depth treatment of the debt to geometry in William Empson's poems

Beci Carver is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter. She earned her BA, MPhil, and PhD at Cambridge University,  and stayed on there for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. After that, she moved on to a teaching fellowship at University College London, followed by a three-year Early Career Leverhulme Fellowship. She took up a one-year lectureship at the University of St Andrews in 2016, and in 2017, was appointed to a permanent lectureship at the University of Exeter. Her first book is Granular Modernism (Oxford UP, 2014). 

BOOK NEWS: Post-1960 poetry speaks directly to eroding notions of public life

Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public

By Keegan Cook Finberg

Columbia UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780231219228

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

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.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures—including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and NourbeSe Philip—whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state’s facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

"Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: poetry—when at its weirdest!—is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital." —Sarah Dowling, author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form

"Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the genre of poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies." —Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

BOOK NEWS: Examining anachronism in contemporary comics

The New Old Style: Anachronism in Contemporary Comics

By Matthew Levay

U of Nebraska P, 2026

ISBN: 9781496237620

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496237620/the-new-old-style/

The New Old Style explores how the deliberate use of cartooning styles that mimic those of the early twentieth century has paradoxically become one of the most significant vehicles for formal experimentation in contemporary comics. Dubbing this phenomenon “the anachronistic aesthetic,” Matthew Levay argues that what can initially appear to be a nostalgic affinity for outmoded drawing styles is in fact a complex and holistic movement in contemporary comics with profound consequences for how artists and audiences might understand the critical possibilities and historical legacies of the medium itself.

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 phenomenon of anachronism as an aesthetic mode is visible in North American comics as early as the 1970s, but it rose to prominence in the 1990s. Since then, multiple artists have drawn in ways that reference cartooning styles of the distant past—those of early twentieth-century newspaper comics, early American animation, and midcentury comic books for young children, to name a few. The New Old Style characterizes these cartoonists’ use of anachronism as a mode of critical engagement that reveals how comics, as a medium, can simultaneously interrogate its history—and the violence, misogyny, and racial stereotypes that pervade it—while opening up new ways of addressing its aesthetic conditions. A work of comics history as well as theory, The New Old Style traces the uses of anachronism in comics published from the 1970s to the present and, via a focused set of case studies, argues that those uses represent a wide-ranging critique of the politics of the past, the material culture of the present, and the aesthetic possibilities of the future.

“In isolating the anachronistic aesthetic, The New Old Style makes an important contribution to the field of comics studies, providing a critical term for a distinctive style or even a kind of genre, and offering a vocabulary and a set of parameters for other scholars to think about similar works. The distinctions being made between the anachronistic aesthetic, retro style, and nostalgia more broadly provide useful contextualization.”—Barbara Postema, author of Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments

“Through the notion of the ‘anachronistic aesthetic,’ The New Old Style helps contextualize an important strand of comics and cartooning that is increasingly prevalent in both independent comics and those owned by major media corporations. By introducing this term, The New Old Style situates itself at the forefront of a conversation that is only beginning to emerge, and I suspect that the introduction, in particular, will be frequently cited by scholars working on independent and alternative comics, especially those interested in the cartoonists represented in this volume.”—Zack Kruse, author of Mysterious Travelers: Steve Ditko and the Search for a New Liberal Identity

Matthew Levay is a professor of English at Idaho State University. He is the author of Violent Minds: Modernism and the Criminal.

BOOK NEWS: An expansive and multifaceted account of the Bloomsbury Group

A History of the Bloomsbury Group 

Edited by Derek Ryan

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009423663

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/history-bloomsbury-group

A History of the Bloomsbury Group ranges more widely across the Bloomsbury group's interdisciplinary activities and international networks than any previous volume. From innovations in the literary and visual arts to interventions in politics and economic policy, core members including Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes are explored in relation to a diverse cast of lesser-studied figures to offer an expansive and multifaceted account of the group's achievements and influence. Leading international scholars provide authoritative and accessible commentaries on a variety of topics under the broad headings of 'Aesthetic Bloomsbury,' 'Global Bloomsbury,' 'Intimate Bloomsbury,' and 'Public Bloomsbury.' Whether addressing established narratives or pushing into new critical terrain, the book demonstrates that, more than a century on from its formation, the Bloomsbury group remains an active and dynamic force in the key critical debates of 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.

• Shows how relevant the Bloomsbury group remains for the study of modernism and contemporary culture
• Demonstrates how serious engagement with the Bloomsbury group involves analysis of literature, the visual arts, economics, global politics, gender and queer studies, and more
• Offers a range of historically contextualized readings by experts in the field

Contents

1. The Bloomsbury friction by Derek Ryan

Part I. Aesthetic Bloomsbury:

2. The Bloomsbury novel by Jesse Matz

3. Bloomsbury's shorter fiction by Bryony Randall

4. Bloomsbury and the new biography by Todd Avery

5. Post-impressionism and the Bloomsbury brand by Wendy Hitchmough

6. Bloomsbury and music by Tsung-Han Tsai

7. Poetry in, or around, Bloomsbury by Sara Sullam

Part II. Global Bloomsbury:

8. Bloomsbury, South Asia, and empire by Susheila Nasta and Florian Stadtler

9. Bloomsbury and China by Patricia Laurence

10. Bloomsbury and the USA by Mark Hussey

11. Bloomsbury and Russomania by Rebecca Beasley

12. Cross-channel diplomacy and postwar Bloomsbury by Claire Davison

13. Late Bloomsbury's dialectic of enlightenment by Christine Froula

Part III. Intimate Bloomsbury:

14. Bloomsbury, friendship, and love by Jesse Wolfe

15. Bloomsbury's gender politics by Pamela Caughie

16. Bloomsbury, nudity, and race by Jane Garrity

17. Bloomsbury and psychoanalysis by Gabrielle McIntyre

18. Bloomsbury life writing by Drew Patrick Shannon

Part IV. Public Bloomsbury:

19. Bloomsbury and economics by Paul Crosthwaite

20. Bloomsbury and the meanings of labor by Morag Shiach

21. The Bloomsbury bookshop by Derek Ryan

22. Bloomsbury, education, and meritocracy by Natasha Periyan

23. Bloomsbury and science by Michael H. Whitworth

24. Bloomsbury afterlives by Monica Latham

Derek Ryan is a senior lecturer in modern literature at the University of Kent. His previous books include Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022), and the co-edited volumes Cross-Channel Modernisms (2020) and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018). He is editor of Edinburgh University Press's book series Virginia Woolf – Variations.

BOOK NEWS: Examining transhistorial re-imaginings of the early American past in literary and creative media

Early America and the Modern Imagination: Rewriting the Past in the Present 

Edited by Patrick M. Erben and Rebecca L. Harrison

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399536172

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-early-america-and-the-modern-imagination.html

Recurring culture war controversies in the US—ranging from reproductive freedom and gender identity to racial inequality and immigration—often turn public attention to early American precedents. At the same time, early American figures and tropes enjoy a stunning cachet in popular culture. Early America and the Modern Imagination squarely interprets the significance and cultural uses of these transhistorical re-imaginings of the early American past. While drawing productively on public memory scholarship, this volume augments its neglect of early American studies. The collection’s critical and pedagogical essays investigate how a variety of modalities—including literature, film, television, theatre, video games and graphic novels—rescript early America as a usable past for contemporary audiences. Early America and the Modern Imagination, therefore, interprets early American themes and their present-day echoes to grapple with the evolving and highly contested import of the American nation’s past in the present cultural moment.

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.

• Analyses the pervasive use of early American themes in contemporary culture, including literature, television series, film, theatre, graphic novels and video games
• Combines expertise in early American research methods with the study of new modalities (such as video games and graphic novels) and cultural paradigms (such as restorative approaches to Native American history and sovereignty)
• Interfaces with the burgeoning field of memory studies/public memory, especially its examination of cultural artifacts as mediators of a shared past
• Models innovative methodological approaches for navigating transhistorical topics and textualities that so far lack robust scholarly treatment
• Foregrounds particular strengths in Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Film studies

"This book is both brilliant and necessary. Each chapter links a deep knowledge of the past to its modern redeployments in contemporary media. In doing so, the book makes a powerful case for the humanities, explaining public memory and showing how important it is for literary scholars to study it. A vital project, and a terrific book." – Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis

Patrick M. Erben is professor of English at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (2013) and co-edited The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader (2019). Erben is a past president of the Society of Early Americanists and currently serves on the editorial board for Early American Literature.

Rebecca L. Harrison is professor of English at the University of West Georgia. She is the co-editor of the Eudora Welty Review and President of the Eudora Welty Society. Her books include Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez (2013), Teaching, Pedagogy, and Learning: Fertile Ground for Campus and Community Innovations (2017) and Revitalizing Classrooms: Innovations and Inquiry Pedagogies in Practice (2017).

BOOK NEWS: Examining department stores in French and Egyptian literature

Emporialism: Department Store Fictions and the Politics of the Mediterranean

By Amr Kamal

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781438499468

https://sunypress.edu/Books/E/Emporialism

A comparative study of iconographic and fictional representations of department stores in France and Egypt, as sites of imperial and Mediterranean cultural memory, from 1869 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.

This book examines what Amr Kamal calls the phenomenon of emporialism, or the convergence between the spaces and imaginaries of empires and emporia in the context of a modern Mediterranean divided among the British, French, and Ottoman empires. By "emporia," Kamal refers to the commercial network of nineteenth-century department stores, which gained prominence after the Suez Canal project. Taking as a focal point French and Egyptian department stores, the author examines emporialism as a set of phenomenological experiences, discursive and social praxes, and mechanisms of control and resistance, born from the intersection of modernity, colonialism, and mass consumption. Drawing on archival evidence, Kamal reads iconographic and literary representations of emporia in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, from the nineteenth century to the present, addressing works by Émile Zola, Huda Shaarawi, Jacqueline Kahanoff, and others. Emporialism, Kamal argues, served to rewrite the history of the Mediterranean, to reinvent national belonging, and to interrogate issues of modernity and social justice.

"A major critical study of the phenomenon of the department store in modern consumer culture, Emporialism offers a stimulating intervention in the fields of Egyptian literature, French literature, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Blending historical, literary, and visual analysis, Kamal rigorously draws out and cross-examines the interplay of imperialism, Orientalism, and commerce in transnational contexts, while the illustrations help highlight the rich iconography of the emporium." — H. Hazel Hahn, editor of Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia

"The word 'Emporium' today carries with it a quaint and nostalgic reference to a luxurious and remote past. But if the great nineteenth-century 'department stores' have been eclipsed today by the Amazons of the Internet, Amr Kamal's genealogical, multinational study invests them with an 'aura'—in the sense given the word by Walter Benjamin. In its disappearance, Emporialism casts an illuminating light upon contemporary consumer culture." — Samuel Weber, author of Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague and Singularity: Politics and Poetics

Amr Kamal is associate professor of French, Arabic, and comparative literature at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.3 (Spring 2026) "Long Modernisms" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 49.3 (Spring 2026), on the theme "Long Modernisms," edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, is now LIVE on ProjectMuse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57113.

Content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Long Modernisms: Editor’s Introduction

Jonathan Foster

Woolf’s Westminster: Decentering the State in Mrs. Dalloway

Carolina Iribarren

Strange Communications: Conversation Breakdowns, Monadic Hang-Ups, and Telepathic Approximations in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

Yuli Pan

Anticipating the Postdramatic: Greek Ritual, Modernist Rupture, and Theatrical Innovation in Woolf’s Theater-Fiction Between the Acts

Florian Gargallio

Histories of Violence: William Carlos Williams and Daniel Boone

Nathan Wallace

Dante and Moses in “The Parable of the Plums”

Joseph LaBine

“Gabriel the chauffeur”: James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence as Modernist Precursors to W.G. Sebald’s “Ambros Adelwarth” 

Andrew Koenig

The Refusal to “Write Back” in Elizabeth Costello

Thomas Gould

The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk

Carra Glatt

Trompe-l'œil: Neo-Victorian Plotting in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Phillip Masterman Broadbent

Against the Oriental Gaze: Race and Belonging in Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye

Reviews

Ira Nadel

Reading Ellmann Reading Joyce

Arka Chattopadhyay

Reading The Nabokov Effect: The Letter between Literature and Cinema

 

Matthew Holman

Glittering Like Cut Glass 

BOOK NEWS: Centennial edition of Robinson Jeffers poems in wide format

Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Centennial Edition

By Robinson Jeffers
Foreword by Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, Afterword by Tim Hunt 

Tor House Press, 2025

https://www.torhouse.org/tor-house-press/p/the-echo-vase-7drbh

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), a contemporary of Pound and Eliot, was in the 1920s and 1930s viewed as one of the most significant American poets. His explorations of narrative poetry and his long verse line contributed to several of the major New Critics dismissing his work when the classroom canon was initially formulated in the 1940s and 1950s, but his rejection of Imperialism, critique of modern mass society, and advocacy for environmental matters are leading to renewed interest in his work. A new edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925), the collection that initially made his reputation, attempts to re-present his work in a manner that invites additional reappraisal of his craft and artistry.

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 pages of this centennial edition of Roan Stallion are landscape rather than portrait so that none of the long verse lines are doubled back because of the right margin. Also, the edition uses the corrected punctuation from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford UP) and thus removes the additional layer of punctuation the typesetters added when the book was first published. These adjustments provide a clearer record of the momentum, modulations, and inflections of the poetry. 

“The publication of the Roan Stallion/Tamar volume a century ago was a major event in American letters. It not only announced the arrival of a major poet, and a poet from the west far from, the eastern establishment; it also proclaimed and enacted a poetics antithetical to the modernist poetics of Pound and Williams. A different sense of poetic form, but also, more essentially, a different sense of the sources and ends of poetry. The wide format of William Everson’s hand press volume of Granite and Cypress some years ago was a revelation because it released Jeffers’s free verse line to run with full sweep and force without line-breaks. This centennial edition of Jeffers’s breakthrough volume gives us the poems at last in their full form.” —Albert Gelpi

“One can't fully understand the force and originality of Robinson Jeffers’s poetry until one sees his lines laid out exactly as they were written without the line breaks made necessary by commercial formats. I remember the startling clarity I experienced when I saw William Everson's Granite and Cypress. The new Tor House Press edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar & Other Poems makes it possible to see (as well as hear) the strange, tragic music that made Jeffers famous. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the centennial of Roan Stallion than to allow us to see the texts, clear and unbent, for the first time.” —Dana Gioia 

“After The Waste Land and the early Cantos of Pound, or perhaps Marianne Moore’s Poems, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems was the second or third shock of modernist aesthetics to transform American poetry. This edition is the perfect way to recover that shock and its energy for a new generation of readers.” —Robert Hass

 

As a resource for instructors, Jeffers's first four trade collections are now available as PDFs from the Robinson Jeffers Association at https://robinsonjeffersassociation.org/his-writing/poetry/ 

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Mexican literature's representations of sapphic desire

Lenchitudes: Sapphic Representation in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

By Alejandra Márquez

SUNY Press, 2026

ISBN: 9798855805154

https://sunypress.edu/Books/L/Lenchitudes2

Shows how representations of sapphic desire can subvert or sustain prevailing norms of gender, sexuality, and power in Mexican texts from the 1980s to the 2010s.

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 inspiration from the 2020 Marcha Lencha—"Lesbian March"—in Mexico City, Alejandra Márquez expands the concept of lenchitudes into a critical framework for thinking about gender and sexuality more expansively and inclusively, beyond essentialist identity categories. Assembling a lesbian archive that stretches from the publication of Rosamaría Roffiel's cult classic Amora in 1989 to the 2010s, Lenchitudes argues that sapphic representation in contemporary Mexican narrative subverts but also reinforces patriarchal norms. Sapphic narratives, Márquez argues, are not inherently queer but rather can uphold binary gender roles, heteronormativity, and monogamy. Bridging literature and activism, and putting theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz into conversation with Latin American scholarship, Lenchitudes boldly joins ongoing debates about the place of queerness, or lo cuir, in Latin America.

"Sure to become a reference point for research and teaching in LGBTQ+ studies in and about Latin America, Lenchitudes challenges the dominant focus on gay male representation in cuir studies without simply adding lesbian culture to the existing scholarship. In dialogue with both the epistemologies of Mexican social movements and Latin American lesbian, marica, and travesti thinkers, Márquez moves beyond an identity-based approach to gender and sexuality, exploring the entanglement of multiple sapphic representations, desires, and experiences." — Patricio Simonetto, author of A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina

"A very important contribution to the study of Spanish-language LGBTQ+ literature and culture from Mexico. Márquez incorporates a deep knowledge of queer/cuir approaches, skillfully connecting concepts from Anglo-American theory to related, though distinct, Mexican cultural schemes to produce readings that transcend the identity politics of Mexican lesbian-feminist circles. Lenchitudes is poised to help visibilize Mexican sapphic cultures in the English-speaking world." — Brandon Bisbey, author of Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

Alejandra Márquez is an assistant professor of Spanish at Michigan State University.

BOOK NEWS: Reading Irish women's writing through a queer, postcolonial lens

Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399547468

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html

A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing

• Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
• Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
• Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past

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.

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.