NEW ISSUE! JML 48.2 (Winter 2025) is now LIVE

 

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 

Reviews

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

Book News: The lyric vs. liberal subject in postwar poetry

 Lyric and Liberalism in the Age of American Empire

BY HUGH FOLEY

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780192857095

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/lyric-and-liberalism-in-the-age-of-american-empire-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.