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