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: 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).