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.

BOOK NEWS: Examining maternal love and power in American fiction

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative: Maternality in US Literature

By Mary Jo Bona

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9798855801996

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mothers-Mobility-Narrative

Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.

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.

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

"By placing literary texts by women from multiple ethnic cultures in conversation, Mary Jo Bona makes a much-needed intervention into motherhood studies. In Bona's reading, these texts demonstrate how women singularly construct practices of motherhood that resist social scripts. Among other things, the book offers a fresh, timely look at the AIDS health crisis and its impact on the LGBTQ community over decades and across genders, drawing on the work of Audre Lorde to explore literary representations of queer maternality among caretakers." — A Yęmisi Jimoh, coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship

Mary Jo Bona is distinguished SUNY professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.

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 rise of ekphrastic fiction since the 2010s

Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel

By Sofie Behluli

Oxford UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780198954484

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/art-in-contemporary-anglo-american-fiction-9780198954484?cc=us&lang=en&#

This book addresses the recent surge of Anglo-American novels about visual art since the 2010s and interprets it as a coming of age of an old literary sub-genre, which is here termed as the 'ekphrastic novel'. These novels are distinguished by their systematic use of ekphrasis which creatively and critically negotiates the intertwined aesthetics of literature and visual art. By addressing the challenge of representing visual images such as photographs, paintings, and art installations with words, these novels reveal a greater interest in exploring how and why we engage with art, rather than merely depicting the art itself. In this way, ekphrastic novels present themselves as powerful practitioners and critics of contemporary image-making.

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 book focuses on four aspects emerging from ekphrastic passages--value, form, affect, and scale--to explore critical questions posed by contemporary ekphrastic novels: Who has the power to assign value today, and at what cost? Which social, political, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions are obscured by certain forms, and how can ekphrasis (re)introduce these aspects into public discourse? What affects do images and artworks elicit, and how do they reinforce or challenge existing value systems? How can narrative scale uncover potential injustices in the interplay between life and art? Moreover, what insights do ekphrastic novels offer into contemporary reading habits and strategies? By tracing a literary tradition from nineteenth-century to contemporary fiction and offering detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels, this book delves into the theoretical and practical intersections of ekphrasis and the novel.

• Explores the intersection of ekphrasis and the novel and introduces a new sub-genre: the 'ekphrastic novel'
• Shows how indebted contemporary novels on art are to their nineteenth-century literary predecessors
• Provides detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels

Sofie Behluli is an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she teaches and conducts research on "Dis/affection in 19th-Century American Literature." Prior to holding this post, she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Behluli is interested in intermediality and ekphrasis studies, affect theory, life writing, gender studies and feminist literature, and theoretical conceptions of the contemporary. Her work has been published in Women: A Cultural Review (2021), Anglia: Journal of English Philology (2022), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2023), as well as in several companions and handbooks.

BOOK NEWS: Engaging critically with Sandra Cisneros's oeuvre

¡Ay Tú!: Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sandra Cisneros

Edited by Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano

U of Texas P, 2024

ISBN: 9781477329900

https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477329900/

Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), author of the acclaimed novel The House on Mango Street and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, was the first Chicana to be published by a major publishing house. ¡Ay Tú! is the first book to engage critically with her life and work as a whole. Edited by scholars Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Geneva M. Gano, this volume addresses themes that pervade Cisneros’s oeuvre, like romantic and erotic love, female friendship, sexual abuse and harassment, the exoticization of the racial and ethnic “other,” and the role of visual arts in the lives of everyday people. Essays draw extensively on the newly opened Cisneros Papers, housed in the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, and the volume concludes with a new long-form interview with Cisneros by the award-winning journalist Macarena Hernández.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

As these essays reveal, Cisneros’s success in the literary field was integrally connected to the emergent Chicana feminist movement and the rapidly expanding Chicanx literary field of the late twentieth century. This collection shows that Cisneros didn’t achieve her groundbreaking successes in isolation and situates her as a vital Chicana feminist writer and artist.

"¡Ay Tú! brings together a stellar ensemble of Latina/x and Chicana/x literary scholars and essays devoted to the writing of Sandra Cisneros, one of the most prolific writers of our time. This tremendous collection is a gift to every professor and student of literature and cultural studies." ~Deborah R. Vargas, Yale University, author of Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music: The Limits of La Onda

"¡Brava! The coeditors of ¡Ay Tú! have gathered a wealth of scholarly perspectives that students, scholars, and general readers are sure to find illuminating. Insightful and thought-provoking, every chapter opens a door into Cisneros’s familiar and well-loved literary works. Whether you are new to Cisneros or have read and reread favorites, you are sure to find new insights and approaches to her work in this magnificent collection." ~Norma E. Cantú, Trinity University, coeditor of ¡Somos Tejanas! Chicana Identity and Culture in Texas

Sonia Saldívar-Hull is a professor emerita of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is the author of Feminism on the Border: Chicana Literature and Politics.

Geneva M. Gano is a professor of English at Texas State University and the author of The Little Art Colony and US Modernism.

BOOK NEWS: Disrupting racist security regimes

Refiguring Race and Risk: Counternarratives of Care in the US Security State

By Roberta Wolfson

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-8354-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215692.html

In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.

“Whereas many books merely critique the security state, Refiguring Race and Risk reframes risk management in terms of care and community, rather than trauma and racialization, looking to literature and culture as repositories not only of critiques of power but also of potential remedies.” —David Vázquez, author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity

“Making compelling connections among surveillance, identity, and aesthetics, Wolfson illuminates an exciting archive of works by writers of color, including immigrant writers, to bring together critical race studies, comparative literature, critical security studies, art and aesthetics, and political studies.” —Kumarini Silva, author of Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State

Roberta Wolfson is lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University. Her articles have appeared in College Literature, American Literature, and MELUS.

BOOK NEWS: A critique of "true feeling" in late-twentieth-century fiction

The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth

By Nicholas Manning

Edinburg UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399508001

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-artifice-of-affect.html

Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Proposes a wide-ranging literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, especially relevant to the United States’s current sociopolitical climate
• Represents the first book-length study using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Argues that twentieth-century American realism is not a conservative genre, but rebels in surprising ways against restrictive notions of authenticity
• Links key concepts in current affect theory with writers such as Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Paula Fox or Philip Roth, who have never been analyzed using these tools
• Models a new transdisciplinary interaction between affect theory and literature, with literary texts used to reveal the ever-present artifice of corporal processes
• Combines methods from affect theory, literary studies, and the medical humanities

"An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings." – Adam J. Frank, University of British Columbia

Nicholas Manning is professor of American literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. 

BOOK NEWS: Cross-caste romance in W.E.B. Du Bois's fiction

Tales from Du Bois: The Queer Intimacy of Cross-Caste Romance

By Erika Renée Williams

SUNY Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781438488189

https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/Tales-from-Du-Bois

Offers a new framework for understanding Du Bois's poetics and politics, including the concept of double consciousness, by tracing the trope of the cross-caste romance across his fiction.

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.

Tales from Du Bois brings together critical race theory, queer studies, philosophy, and genre theory to offer an illuminating new comprehensive study of W. E. B. Du Bois's fiction from 1903–1928. Erika Renée Williams begins by revisiting Du Bois's tale of being rebuffed by a white female classmate in The Souls of Black Folk, identifying it as a failure of what she calls "cross-caste romance"—a sentimental, conjugal, or erotic relation projected across lines of cultural difference. In Du Bois's text, this failure figures as the cause of double consciousness, the experience of looking at oneself through the eyes of others. 

Far from being unique to Souls, the trope of cross-caste romance, Williams argues, structures much of Du Bois's literary oeuvre. With it, Du Bois queries romance's capacity to ground nationalism, on the one hand, and to foment queer forms of Afro-Diasporic reclamation and kinship, on the other. Beautifully written and deftly argued, Tales from Du Bois analyzes familiar works like Souls and Dark Princess alongside neglected short fiction to make a case for the value of Du Bois's literary writing and its centrality to his thought more broadly.

"Well researched and clearly written, this volume provides a new perspective on Du Bois, calling attention to his less-known writing Williams carefully documents the contexts and sources of the critical discourse surrounding her approach, making this excellent book a reasonable introduction to Du Bois." — CHOICE

"The insights this book offers are sometimes startling but also so convincing that one wonders how earlier scholars had not seen them." — Koritha Mitchell, author of From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture

"Williams's archive and interventions are wide-ranging and far-reaching as she nimbly carries us from queer of color critique to medieval and African folklore to affect theory to Enlightenment formulations that braid aesthetics, morality, and reason. Still, it is not enough to say that this study of double consciousness and its enframement in cross-caste romance will be important to ongoing conversations across multiple disciplines. Rather, Williams invites a re-thinking of the key concepts that moor Black Studies." — Nicole A. Waligora-Davis, author of Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire

Erika Renée Williams is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut.

BOOK NEWS: The struggle to make novels matter 1965-99

 Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999

BY EVAN BRIER

U of Iowa P, 2024

ISBN: 9781609389390

https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-competition

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

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.

“Novel Competition is a beautifully written institutional history of the literary novel in the United States from 1965 to 1999. Placing the novel in a larger cultural field—in competition with journalism, popular music, and films for cultural prestige—Brier illuminates not only novels, but their readers, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers.”—Erin A. Smith, University of Texas at Dallas

“Novel Competition confronts a fascinating and important subject: an examination of how the novel came to matter differently over the last third of the twentieth century. This decline is something that scholars of the novel have bemoaned for some time, and Brier offers a useful approach to making sense of it without resorting to well-trod and over-simplified answers. It is an engaging and important book.”—Emily Johansen, author of Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Life

“As a longtime Evan Brier fan, I’ve been eagerly waiting this book, his account of the American novel’s response to its declining fortunes. Brier dazzles with a virtuosic reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that takes us through the culture of The New Yorker, the Kansas literati, and the first stirrings of publishing’s conglomeration. He delivers an extraordinary investigation into Toni Morrison’s career as an editor—culminating in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters—and her publication of The Black Book. We follow Philip Roth to Eastern Europe and Cynthia Ozick’s and Saul Bellow’s characters into diaspora. Minimalism, rock and roll, New Hollywood, Rushdie’s fatwa, the American West—an astounding account of Larry McMurtry’s career—the memoir boom. Brier touches it all. Brier quietly transcends the limitations of dominant norms in the practices of literary history and the sociology of literature to give us an nth-dimensional view of American literature since 1965: how the novel became residual. He tells us what it means to believe—or disbelieve—in the power of fiction. It’s no less than thrilling.”—Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Evan Brier is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is author of A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

BOOK NEWS: New critical edition of Larsen's Passing

Passing by Nella Larsen

EDITED BY RAFAEL WALKER

Broadview Press, 2023

ISBN: 9781554815159

https://broadviewpress.com/product/passing/#tab-description

Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group’s greatest obstacles), Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is easily among the most penetrating, skillfully composed explorations of race and gender in the twentieth century. It focuses on two estranged friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who, after years apart, are joltingly thrown back together, their lives transformed radically through one of the most scandalous and intriguing social phenomena of Larsen’s time—racial passing. Today, Larsen is ranked as one of the leading novelists of her generation; this novel, her masterpiece, demonstrates why.

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.

Appendices include material on the novel’s composition and reception, as well as legal documents relating to mixed-race individuals and a selection of recent critical work on the novel’s afterlife and the 2021 film adaptation.

“This new edition of Nella Larsen’s now-classic novel, with Rafael Walker’s excellent introduction and chronology, along with relevant reviews and contemporary documents about passing, is the best we have, perfect for classroom use and the general reader alike.” — George Hutchinson, Cornell University, author of In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line

“Rafael Walker’s introduction, along with the edition’s appendices, offers important historical contextualization for Larsen’s life and novels. These materials enhance, rather than cover over, the proliferation of meanings and contradictions that emerge not only from reviews and criticism but also from biographies and accounts that detail the archival fragments of who Larsen was. Nella Larsen was a formidable novelist and social figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but Walker creates a pathway for students and educators alike to confidently approach the magnitude of her being.” — Haylee Harrell, University of Houston

Rafael Walker is assistant professor of English, Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics).

Book News: First scholarly collection examining Edwidge Danticat's full range of works

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat

EDITED BY MAIA L. BUTLER, JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT, AND MEGAN FEIFER

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496839886

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Narrating-History-Home-and-Dyaspora

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins.

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 first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora is an in-depth interdisciplinary collection of essays that engages the corpus of Edwidge Danticat in all its dimensions: novelist, short fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, activist, and public intellectual. The book also brings these different aspects of her work together by bringing to light the alternate histories and historiographies this extraordinary storyteller maps out in her work. " - Carine M. Mardorossian, author of Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora accomplishes a sustained interrogation of Danticat's canon—including her most recent works—in ways that lay the critical foundation not only for a reappraisal of the author's writing, but also for her place within the larger discursive nexus of African diaspora writing or immigrant literature. Such a work is long overdue, and it makes a case for itself as the most exhaustive treatment of Danticat's expanding literary output." - Maxine Lavon Montgomery, editor of Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

Maia L. Butler is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is also affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies. She is a literary geographer researching and teaching in African American/diasporic, Anglophone postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is assistant professor of Black literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies. She is coeditor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy.

Megan Feifer is assistant professor of English at Medaille College in New York. Her research and teaching addresses Afro-Caribbean diasporas in the US, multiethnic literatures, postcolonial literature and theory, and feminist theories.

Book News: Children in hemispheric American Gothic fiction

Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas

BY SUZANNE MANIZZA ROSZAK 

University of Wales Press, 2022

ISBN: 9781786838667

https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/uncanny-youth/

A literary study of childhood in the American Gothic. 

Childhood in Gothic literature has often served colonialist, white supremacist, and patriarchal ideologies, but in Uncanny Youth, Suzanne Manizza Roszak highlights hemispheric American writers who subvert these scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Condé to N. Scott Momaday and Tracey Baptiste, Gothic conventions critique systems of power in the Americas. As fictional children confront shifting configurations of imperialism and patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, their uncanny stories call on readers to reckon with intersecting forms of injustice.

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.

‘Mining an impressive array of Gothic texts – including novels, short stories, plays, and literature written for young adult audiences – Uncanny Youth deftly argues for the subversive and revolutionary power of child and teen characters who confront (and only sometimes survive) the devastating impacts of white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide.’ --Bridget M. Marshall, associate professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Suzanne Manizza Roszak is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Book News: Analyzing Alice Walker's multifaceted oeuvre

Understanding Alice Walker

BY THADIOUS M. DAVIS 

U of South Carolina P, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64336-237-3 hardback │ 978-1-64336-238-0 paper│ 

978-1-64336-239-7 ebook

https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Alice-Walker

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker’s biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker’s complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. 

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.

Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.

Davis traces Walker’s literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

“In Thadious Davis, Alice Walker has found an ideal reader, one who places the author and her work in personal, historical, and political contexts, one whose critical analysis reveals depth and meaning beyond the obvious, and one whose brilliance complements that of the writer.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University 

“This brilliant book provides a dazzlingly crystalline and panoramic portrait of Alice Walker’s expansive body of work. It incorporates insights on Walker’s biography, examining stages in her epic journey as a writer whose life and work have profoundly impacted the world and been devoted to helping its healing.”  — Riché Richardson, Cornell University 

“a succinct and searching study of Alice Walker’s expansive corpus and evolving imagination. Thadious Davis provides her readers a comprehensive and illuminating overview of Walker’s writings across multiple themes and genres, but also of the contexts—local and global—that have given it form.”                 — Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia

“Davis reveals an immense scholarly patience with Alice Walker and her works, reading and discussing and analyzing them in a deep and well-organized reconstruction of the author's background against American history and events around the globe.” — Geneva Cobb Moore, author of Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Emerita, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature; Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context.

Book News: revised, expanded study of Colson Whitehead

 Understanding Colson Whitehead, revised and expanded edition

BY DEREK C. MAUS 

U of South Carolina P, 2021

ISBNs: 978-1-64336-174-1 paperback

978-1-64336-173-4 hardback

978-1-64336-175-8 ebook

https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Colson-Whitehead-revised-and-expanded-edition

In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine—and frequently defy—accepted notions of truth.

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.

Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.

Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

"With Understanding Colson Whitehead, Derek Maus offers an invaluable, readable, and comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the current era's most important authors. Few writers have shifted genres, styles, and tones so masterfully, and Maus helps readers understand how Whitehead's work all fits together."—Cameron Leader-Picone, Kansas State University

"Understanding Colson Whitehead is an indispensable study about an incredibly inventive contemporary novelist. Derek C. Maus produces superb and meticulous analyses of The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, and Whitehead's other books. This engaging examination advances our views of an author whose idiosyncratic novels captured the attention of countless readers and earned astonishing levels of critical acclaim." —Howard Rambsy II, Author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Derek C. Maus teaches contemporary literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is also the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. He is also the editor or coeditor of Conversations with Colson Whitehead; Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights; Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction; and Angry Rain: A Memoir by Maurice Kenny.