NEW ISSUE: JML 49.2, “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance”

JML 49.2 (Winter 2026), edited by Ramón E. Soto-Crespo, on the theme “Bodies, Subjectivities, and States of Queer Abundance” is now live on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56630.

Content includes:

Nir Evron

Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction

FREE

Claire Marie Class

X-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher’s Detective Fiction 

Ian Tan

Narrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth’s Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange 

Meindert Peters

No Creature of Habit? Gregor’s Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita’s Adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis 

Megan Girdwood

“As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only”: Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911) 

Jena DiMaggio

Abortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature 

Julyan Oldham

“Preserved Through Childbirth”: Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway’s Virginity 

Chris Coffman

H.D.’s Nonbinary Poetics

Daniel Swain

Frank O'Hara Has Collapsed! 

Julia C. Obert

Queering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road 

Reviews 

Grant Matthew Jenkins

“This Is Your Brain on Poetry” 

Aaron Stone

How to Do the History of Queer American Literature

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: 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).