NEW ISSUE: JML 49.3 (Spring 2026) "Long Modernisms" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 49.3 (Spring 2026), on the theme "Long Modernisms," edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, is now LIVE on ProjectMuse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57113.

Content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Long Modernisms: Editor’s Introduction

Jonathan Foster

Woolf’s Westminster: Decentering the State in Mrs. Dalloway

Carolina Iribarren

Strange Communications: Conversation Breakdowns, Monadic Hang-Ups, and Telepathic Approximations in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

Yuli Pan

Anticipating the Postdramatic: Greek Ritual, Modernist Rupture, and Theatrical Innovation in Woolf’s Theater-Fiction Between the Acts

Florian Gargallio

Histories of Violence: William Carlos Williams and Daniel Boone

Nathan Wallace

Dante and Moses in “The Parable of the Plums”

Joseph LaBine

“Gabriel the chauffeur”: James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence as Modernist Precursors to W.G. Sebald’s “Ambros Adelwarth” 

Andrew Koenig

The Refusal to “Write Back” in Elizabeth Costello

Thomas Gould

The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk

Carra Glatt

Trompe-l'œil: Neo-Victorian Plotting in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Phillip Masterman Broadbent

Against the Oriental Gaze: Race and Belonging in Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye

Reviews

Ira Nadel

Reading Ellmann Reading Joyce

Arka Chattopadhyay

Reading The Nabokov Effect: The Letter between Literature and Cinema

 

Matthew Holman

Glittering Like Cut Glass 

BOOK NEWS: Using Animal Studies tools to approach liminal figures in fiction

Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

BY DAVID P. RONDO

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350356122

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/doing-animal-studies-with-androids-aliens-and-ghosts-9781350356122/

Exploring what can be learned when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.

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.

Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.

"A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recomment" —Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School

"Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that aren't animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understanding of the human." —John Miller, University of Sheffield

David P. Rando is a professor in the Department of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (Bloomsbury, 2022); Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (Palgrave, 2017); and Modernist Fiction and News (Palgrave, 2011). 

The Survival Tactics of J.M. Coetzee

 

JML authors Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan discuss the importance of care and caregiving to Coetzee's fiction in this post for the Indiana University Press blog. 

Their JML 46.2 piece "Caring to Survive," which introduces their special guest cluster, "Precarious Times: J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Survival," is available to read for FREE for a limited time. Find a link in the post.

JML 46.2 (Winter 2023) is LIVE!

JML 46.2 (Winter 2023) is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/49621

Featuring a special guest cluster, "Precarious Times: J.M. Coetzee and the Politics of Survival" and a second, mini cluster "Spy Fiction"

Content includes:

Lynda Ng and Paul Sheehan

Introduction: Caring to Survive

FREE!

Precarious Times: Corporeal Reimagining

Kai Wiegandt

Precarious Lives: Near-Death and Survival in Coetzee’s Fiction

Paul Sheehan

Heart of Stone: Posthumanist Politics in Life & Times of Michael K

Janet M. Wilson 

Corporeal Suffering: Performing Resistance and Resilience in Slow Man

Precarious Times: The Ethics of the Form

Anthony Uhlmann

The Precarious Author, Diary of A Bad Year, Slow Man

Paul Patton

Individual and Society in The Childhood of Jesus: The Stories We Tell

Iona Gilburt

Writing Photographs Ethically: Strategies of Ekphrasis in J.M. Coetzee’s Prose

Precarious Times: The New Geopoetics

Lynda Ng

Civilization Perilous: Resituating Coetzee’s Barbarians and the West

Mina Roces

Coetzee and the Filipino Woman

Ellke Boehmer

Migration and the South in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels

Spy fiction 

Judy Suh

Rerouting Wartime Paranoia in Agatha Christie’s N or M?

Allan Hepburn

“To Come into the Story as Late as Possible, and To Tell It as Fast as You Can”: Pace in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

FREE!

Reviews

John Greaney 

Derrida and Modernism: A Review of Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism

John Bolin

“Anathema to the spirit the Beats are remembered for”: A Review of Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

Caroline Levander

Writing Race, Class, and Social Mobility in Post-Slavery America

JML 42.4, A modernist lineage: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee

JML 42.4 (Summer 2019), on the theme "Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee," is now available!

Read it on JSTOR and Project Muse. 

The sequence of names heading this issue’s thematic clusters—James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and John M. Coetzee—embody an ideal modernist lineage. Indeed, Beckett began his career as Joyce’s unofficial secretary, and he always named Joyce’s devotion to his art as influencing his decision to pursue a literary rather than academic career. Coetzee, who started out as a computer expert and an English professor, wrote an excellent dissertation on the style of Beckett’s Watt, as well as important essays on Beckett. Beckett offered both a repertoire of literary techniques and a model of ethical integrity. This sequence of names suggests that modernism has not yet lost its purchase as an umbrella term. Modernism has not been replaced by the “posts” that have been tried and petered out, one after the other. 

Issue content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Editor’s Introduction: Joyce, Beckett, Coetzee

David Spurr 

Trials of the Letter in Joyce and Proust

Neil R. Davison

“Ivy Day”: Dublin Municipal Politics and Joyce’s Race-Society Colonial Irish Jew 

Georgina Binnie 

“Photo girl he calls her”: Re-Reading Milly in Ulysses 

Elizabeth M. Bonapfel 

Joyce’s Punctuation and the Evolution of Narrative in Finnegans Wake 

Megan Girdwood

“Danced through its seven phases”: Samuel Beckett, Symbolism, and Stage Choreographies 

Rick de Villiers 

A Defense of Wretchedness: Molloy and Humiliation 

Patrick Whitmarsh 

“So it is I who speak”: Communicating Bodies in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and The Unnamable 

Emilie Morin

Beckett, War Memory, and the State of Exception

Shannon Forest

Challenging Secularity’s Posthistorical “Destination”: J.M. Coetzee’s Radical Openness in the Jesus Novels

Marc Farrant 

Finitizing Life: Between Reason and Religion in J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Novels

Ian Tan 

Ways into Joycean Silences: Reviewing James Joyce’s Silences 

Michelle Chiang 

Samuel Beckett and Modernist Film Culture: Review of Samuel Beckett and Cinema

Arya Aryan 

The Late Style of Borges, Beckett, and Coetzee as Postmodernist Cynics 

Erin A. Smith

Modernism for the Middle Class