JML 47.3 (Spring 2024) is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature 47.3 (Spring 2024), with a special guest-edited cluster “Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel,” and a cluster on “Ireland’s Modernists,” is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52819.

Content includes:

Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Doug Battersby

Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Kirsty Martin

D.H. Lawrence and Shyness

Doug Battersby

Elizabeth Bowen’s Equivocal Modernism

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Heart

Rick de Villiers

True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness 

Ulrika Maude

“Other kinds of emotions”: Ishiguro’s Late-Modernist Affect 

Derek Attridge

Joycean Form, Emotion, and Contemporary Modernism: Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Ireland’s Modernists

Katherine Franco

Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in “Circe” 

FREE

Karl O’Hanlon

Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Danielle N. Gilman

Elizabeth Bowen’s Critical “Scrap Screen” 

Jivitesh Vashisht

“He will now think he hears her”: Indirect Perception and the Return to Proust in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio

Mantra Mukim

Timbral Poetics: Samuel Beckett and the Impossible Voice

Book News: Women modernists challenging gendered ideas of the senses

 

Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology

BY ALLYSON C. DEMAAGD

UP of Florida, 2022

ISBN: 9780813069166

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069166

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.  

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.

Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the “masculine” senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the “feminine” senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered “lower,” were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd’s analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration.            

Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.  

“DeMaagd’s timely study examines the changing sensescape in modernist aesthetics and gives the long-denigrated ‘lower’ senses of smell, taste, and touch their interpretive due, not only uncovering the gendering of sensory experience but also demonstrating the extent to which sensory practices crucially involve questions of class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and species.”—Vicki Tromanhauser, SUNY New Paltz  

“Redressing the focus on visual senses that has dominated discussions of modernist (usually male) writers, Dissensuous Modernism argues that these modernist women writers call upon the underacknowledged senses of touch, feel, and smell in questioning gendered hierarchies of embodied and institutional power.”—Linda A. Kinnahan, editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry  

Allyson C. DeMaagd is an independent scholar and college success manager at Mid-Shore Scholars.

Book News: Opinion Polls in Interwar British Literature

Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature: The Psychographic Turn

BY MEGAN FARAGHER 

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780192898975

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/public-opinion-polling-in-mid-century-british-literature-9780192898975?cc=us&lang=en&#

Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution--the mid-century--when "psychography," a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new "material" turn so often associated with interwar writing.

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.

• Provides a cultural genealogy of public opinion polling in canonical and non-canonical literary works from the 1920s to the 1940s
• Demonstrates the propensity for sociologically inflected literature to flatten distinctions between high and low cultures by including experimental fiction, science fiction, detective fiction, and war fiction
• Presents the first history of polling as a cultural phenomenon as well as an institutionalized practice, which builds on growing interest in the complex relationship between modernism and institutionalism
• Adds to scholarly discussions of aesthetic transformation in the interwar period by introducing group psychology as a dominant cultural influence
• Integrates archival research from Home Intelligence Reports, Mass Observation Surveys, Wartime Social Survey Research, and BBC Listener Research Reports
• Provides interdisciplinary avenues for understanding changing cultural representations of psychological interiority that extend beyond literary modernism

Megan Faragher is an associate professor of English at Wright State University's Lake Campus. She received her PhD in English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2012, where she specialized in twentieth-century English and Irish literature. She joined Wright State University Lake Campus in 2013 after completing a post-doctoral teaching fellowship at East Tennessee State University. Her research and teaching interests center on British literature between the world wars, and the intersection between technology, information, and culture.

Book News: the gramophone's influence in Irish literature

 Ireland’s Gramophones: Material Culture, Memory, and Trauma in Irish Modernism

BY ZAN CAMMACK

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97977-0

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/55431/

Because gramophonic technology grew up alongside Ireland’s progressively more outspoken and violent struggles for political autonomy and national stability, Irish Modernism inherently links the gramophone to representations of these dramatic cultural upheavals. Many key works of Irish literary modernism—like those by James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Sean O’Casey—depend upon the gramophone for their ability to record Irish cultural traumas both symbolically and literally during one of the country’s most fraught developmental eras. In each work the gramophone testifies of its own complexity as a physical object and its multiform value in the artistic development of textual material. In each work, too, the object seems virtually self-placed—less an aesthetic device than a “thing” belonging primordially to the text. The machine is also often an agent and counterpart to literary characters. Thus, the gramophone points to a deeper connection between object and culture than we perceive if we consider it as only an image, enhancement, or instrument. This book examines the gramophone as an object that refuses to remain in the background of scenes in which it appears, forcing us to confront its mnemonic heritage during a period of Irish history burdened with political and cultural turbulence.

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 specificity with which this book, as quoted above, documents the arrival of the Edison’s invention is characteristic of its good use of historical sources to evoke the impact of the phonograph and later the gramophone in Ireland. Another strength is the alignment of such historical details to the machine’s technical realities; this is a book that uses diagrams, graphs, and tables to considerable critical effect. [...] In its marrying of careful textual analysis to historical detail and conceptual sophistication this lucid and engagingly written study should have a significant impact on future considerations of the intersection between technology and memory in Irish writing.

--Tom Walker, Estudios Irlandeses

Zan Cammack is a lecturer in the Department of English and Literature at Utah Valley University. Her research primarily focuses on studies of material culture in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. She has published on Elizabeth Bowen, G.B. Shaw, Lennox Robinson, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Jane Austen (the latter two publications are manifestations of deep fangirling of said authors). Her current work is situated at the intersection of material culture and gender studies, including work on female performance studies in Samuel Beckett’s plays and flapper fashion and British politics.

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) on the theme "Genealogies and Historiographies" is now live on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-1 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/43684

Contents include:

Genealogies of the Modern

Michael Bedsole

Exteriority and Interiority in T.S. Eliot’s Graduate Work  

Ignasi Ribó 

“At the farthest pole from man”: Kafka’s Posthuman Outlook on War 

John S. Bak

Tennessee Williams’s “Homage to Ophelia (A Pretentious Foreword)” with Commentary

Joseph Darlington

Anthony Burgess and William S. Burroughs: Shared Enemies, Opposed Friends

Kevin McGuirk

“[T]he apple an apple”: Ammons, Bloom, and “the ten thousand things” – with Emerson and Lao Tzu 

Dream Historiographies

Clare Udras Ellis

Pursued by Time: The Chronolibidinal Aesthetics of Katherine Mansfield 

Annaliese Hoehling

Seeing History in the Baroque Ruins of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: An Indictment of Cosmopolitan Modernity

Liran Razinsky

Psychoanalysis and Autobiography: Leiris, Freud and the Obstacle to Self-Knowledge 

Jesse Zuba

Raymond Carver and the Modern Career Imaginary

Bram Mertens

Dread, Desire and Destruction: The Historical Sublime in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel (1999) 

Reviews

Elizabeth Scheer

Surveying the Damage: Marina MacKay’s Modernism, War, and Violence

Robert L. Caserio

Audacious Reconciliation

Farisa Khalid

Good, Brave Causes: British Fiction of the 1950s