Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
William Carlos Williams was a rare poet who found fame and lived long enough to enjoy it, and yet, Jeffrey Careyva notes, "few learn about the series of strokes that knocked Williams down again and again during the height of his fame after World War II."
Read more about it in Careyva's post for the Indiana University Press blog, "This Old Goose Still Honks: Dysfluency in William Carlos Williams's Late Poetry."
The author's JML 48.2 essay on Williams is available FREE, linked in the post!
Journal of Modern Literature issue 48.2 (Winter 2025), on the theme "Matter, Meaning, Material" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54502
Content includes:
Enrico Bruno
Athleticism, Accommodation, and the Labor Question in Ellison’s “Afternoon”
Grzegorz Kosc
From Coinage Metallurgy to Fiat Money: Robert Lowell’s Poetic Evolution
Sean Collins
Marianne Moore and the Environmental “Octopus” of Modernist Collage
Jeffrey Careyva
“The Mind and the Poem Are All Apiece”: William Carlos Williams and the Dysfluent Poetics of Aphasia
FREE!
Frances Wear
To Worship Burning Art: T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” as the Organon of F.W.J. von Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja
The Tao of the Non-human: Ineffability, Materiality, and Ecosemiotics in Marianne Moore’s Assemblage Poetics
Bowen Wang
Vital Modernism: E.E. Cummings’s Still Life, the Quotidian, and Visceral Poetics
Ryan Kerr
Anarchism and Misery in Austerity Britain: Alan Sillitoe, Samuel Selvon, and the Origins of Neoliberalism
Emily James and Ellie Lange
The Material Lives and Afterlives of World War I
Chen Lin
Giving Voice to the Hidden Muse: A Review of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl
Orchid Tierney
“The Age of Plasticene”: A Review of Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn
Cole Adams
Poetry After Criticism, Criticism After Poetry: A Review of The Academic Avant-Garde
Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
A New Realism for Perilous Times
By Jess A. Goldberg
University of Minnesota Press, 2024
ISBN: 9781517917890
https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517917890/abolition-time/
Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics.
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.
Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology.
Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.
"Through close reading, Jess A. Goldberg shows us that ‘justice is not an event’ and that to bring into being a different set of relations, imagining and building must take place at the same time. Clearly and compellingly argued and written, Abolition Time arrives right on time. This book is utterly necessary." —Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes
"In Abolition Time, Jess A. Goldberg develops an abolitionist reading practice through which readers can find the seeds of collective liberation immanent in creative intellectual work. By emphasizing reading as constructive and imaginative work rather than passive decoding, Goldberg encourages us to reimagine what being human could mean in a world where people were truly free." —Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
Jess A. Goldberg is assistant professor of American literature at New Mexico Highlands University. They are coeditor of Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition, a special issue of GLQ.
BY LAURA ELIZABETH VRANA
Ohio State UP, 2024
ISBN: 978-0-8142-1575-3
https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215753.html
From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women’s poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles.
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 Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside lesser-known poets, Vrana both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets’ works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.
“Few scholars have so convincingly dissected the logic and the priorities by which awards-granting institutions distribute prestige, and none has done so while also providing the incisive close readings of complex, challenging poetry that Vrana has here. Pitfalls of Prestige is an impressive achievement.” —Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights
“Vrana documents the poetic lineages that Black women construct as they navigate the politics of the contemporary poetry landscape, and pressures the false binary between ‘formalist’ and ‘experimental’ verse. Pitfalls of Prestige is a compelling read that will significantly enhance scholarly understandings of contemporary Black women’s poetry.” —Emily Ruth Rutter, author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry
Laura Elizabeth Vrana is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She coedited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas and has published on contemporary Black poetics, including in the anthologies Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.
BY JUSTIN PARKS
Cambridge UP, 2023
ISBN: 9781009347839
Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society. Poetry and the Limits of Modernity in Depression America pursues this guiding premise through six chapters, each framing the problem of the ongoing vitality of language as a social medium with respect to a particular poet: Louis Zukofsky and the commodification of language; Muriel Rukeyser and documentary photography; Charles Reznikoff and Depression-era historiography; Sterling A. Brown and the blues as both an ethnographic phenomenon and a marketable cultural product; Norman Macleod and Southwest regionalism; and Lorine Niedecker and ethnographic surrealism. The book closes by examining the shifting status of the poet as society transitioned from a focus on production to an emphasis on consumption in the Post-war period.
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.
Justin Parks is associate professor at the Institute for Language and Culture at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. His work is rooted in modern and contemporary poetry and American studies, with particular interest in Depression-era culture. His recent work engages with energy humanities: he has edited a special of Textual Practice on 'writing extractivism.'
Sam Walker explores Sterling Brown's and Harryette Mullen's poetic experiments with "recycling" in this post for the Indiana University Press blog:
His JML 47.1 essay is available for FREE, linked in the blog post.
BY JO GILL
Oxford UP, 2023
ISBN: 9780198868347
Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both.
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 begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as "modern" (and often "international style") architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.
Jo Gill is vice-principal and head of the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in mid-century American literature and culture and has published widely on writers including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
EDITED BY ERIK MORTENSON AND TONY TRIGILIO
Clemson UP, 2023
ISBN: 9781638040514
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781638040514
The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy.
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 Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference presentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.
Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and English faculty member at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project. Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.
Tony Trigilio is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, Craft: A Memoir (forthcoming, Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is the author of Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012 [paper] and 2007 [cloth]) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers UP, 2008). He is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association.
BY HUGH FOLEY
Oxford UP, 2022
ISBN: 9780192857095
What is the difference between the ‘I’ of a poem--the lyric subject-- and the liberal subject of rights? Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire uses this question to re-examine the work of five major American poets, changing our understanding of their writing and the field of post-war American poetry. Through extended readings of the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Hugh Foley shows how poets have imagined liberalism as a problem for poetry.
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.
Foley's book offers a new approach to ongoing debates about the nature of lyric by demonstrating the entanglement of ideas about the lyric poem with the development of twentieth-century liberal discussions of individuality. Arguing that the nature of American empire in this period--underpinned by the discourse of individual rights--forced poets to reckon with this entanglement, it demonstrates how this reckoning helped to shape poetry in the post-war period.
By tracing the ways a lyric poem performs personhood, and the ways that this person can be distinguished from the individual envisioned by post-war liberalism, Foley shows how each poet stages a critique of liberalism from inside the standpoint of "lyric." This book demonstrates the capacities of poetry for rethinking its own relation to history and politics, providing a new perspective on a vital era of American poetry.
Hugh Foley is a teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. He has taught at the University of Liverpool, and at the University of Oxford, where he received his DPhil in 2017.
BY FRANCESCA BRATTON
Edinburgh UP, 2022
ISBN: 9781474481519
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-visionary-company.html
This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane’s poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and ‘Nopal’, a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane’s close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.
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.
Situating him deftly within different geographical contexts and cultural coteries, Bratton shows how Crane established truly transnational poetic and critical practices. Through judicious close readings and the excavation of exciting new archival material, she skilfully demonstrates Crane’s acute awareness of the publishing ecologies of modernism and the complexities of his writing and thought with which we continue to grapple. – Niall Munro, author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic
Francesca Bratton is a senior lecturer in American literature in the Department of English at Uppsala University. She has published articles and reviews in English, PN Review, Notes & Queries, and Year’s Work in English Studies. In 2013-14 she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.
BY FENG DONG
LSU Press, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8071-7611-5
https://lsupress.org/books/detail/desire-and-infinity-in-w-s-merwins-poetry/
In the first monograph on W. S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls "the other side of despair," the opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies. Feng finds these presences in Merwin's evocations of what lingers on the edge of constantly updated socio-symbolic frameworks: surreal encounters, spiritual ecstasies, and abyssal freedoms. By examining Merwin's lifelong engagement with psychic fantasies, anonymous holiness, entities both natural and supernatural, and ghostly ancestors, Feng uncovers a precarious relation with the unarticulated, unrealized side of existence.
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 on theories from Lacan, Žižek, Levinas, and Heidegger, Desire and Infinity in W.S. Merwin's Poetry reads a metaphysical possibility into the poet's work at the intersection between contemporary poetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
"As he considers the ever-evolving dynamic between notions of finitude and oblivion in Merwin's poems, Feng Dong reveals not only the consequences of Merwin's genius, but also the sources of his melancholy."—Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities, Princeton University
“It is no surprise to discover a Lacanian poet in W. S. Merwin, for whoever has glanced at his towering mass of poems will have noted the relevance of terms like the Thing, the Real outside language, or an Other jouissance, but what is truly surprising is to see how subtly and lightly, how deftly and deeply these concepts can limn an entire body of work. Feng Dong’s brilliant synthesis conjures up the figure of an American Hölderlin who avoided visionary madness by realizing an erotic ecology, by making one with his sexual paradise.”—Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, author of Lacan in America
“As he traces the dynamic of propulsion toward the infinite—followed by necessary withdrawal—Feng reveals the nuances of Merwin’s profound grief and yet relentless mysticism. Like Merwin’s decade-spanning poetry, Feng’s work is a gift: it’s focused, and yet expansive; it’s a much-needed inflection point in Merwin scholarship; and though it is not a primary aim, Feng provides one of the most illuminatory ways of seeing Merwin’s ecopoetics to date.”—Aaron M. Moe, author of Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus
FENG DONG is associate professor of English at Qingdao University in China. His essays and reviews have appeared in College Literature, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Modern Literature, and other journals.
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.
