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: Typographical experiments in modern poetry

The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry

BY DANIEL MATORE

 

   

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192857217 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-graphics-of-verse-9780192857217?cc=us&lang=en&

Is poetry a visual art? Why do the pages of nineteenth-century poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print--from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface--is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the visual experiments of European poets have been well documented, the typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This volume confronts a major unanswered question: why did British and American poets, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page?

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.

This book aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, examining the poetry and criticism of figures such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Frances Motz Boldereff, and J.H. Prynne. It draws on unpublished archival materials to show how poets began to draft, sketch, and compose in new and eccentric ways as they annexed the roles of book designer and printer. Typography, it argues, was instrumental in debates about metre, free verse, and the nature of poetry as poems morphed into scores, slogans, maps, and signs. It investigates how the typography of poetry was animated by musicology, psychophysics, linguistics, politics, ophthalmology, cartography, and advertising.

Daniel Matore is lecturer in modern, American and comparative literature at the University of York. He read for a BA and MPhil in English at the University of Cambridge, winning the Betha Wolferstan Rylands Prize. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and has been awarded grants by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has previously been lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Jean Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Book News: Women modernists' collaborations with men

 Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

BY RUSSELL MCDONALD

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009070973

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-literary-collaborations-between-women-and-men/

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed "cross-sex" collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to "make it new." 

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 current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Russell McDonald is associate professor of English at Georgian Court University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Textual Cultures, Irish Studies Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, New Hibernia Review, and Comparative Literature Studies.

Book News: Literary modernism and the environment

Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism

EDITED BY JEREMY DIAPER

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97985-5

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54594/

This volume of critical essays provides the first major guide to ecology, environment and nature in literary modernism. It explores the environmental turn and green consciousness in modernist criticism and broadens the boundaries and scope of current ecocritical enquiry. In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism. In the rapidly burgeoning field of environmental studies, it will serve as a vital touchstone for scholars and students alike to explore the major areas and crucial themes in ecocritical modernism.

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.

CONTENTS

“Ecocriticism and Modernism”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“Modernism and the Rural Novel”

Dominic Head

“Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalisation of Nature Poetry”

Elizabeth Black

 

“‘No poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy”

Elizabeth O’Connor

 

“‘Has it begun to sprout?’: The Ecological Life of Modernist Corpses”

Julia E. Daniel

“Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetics”

Sharla Hutchinson

 

“Modernism’s Insect Sense”

Rachel Murray

“Eco-consciousness and Eco-poetics in Modernist Writing”

Fiona Becket

 

“‘The Parched Eviscerate Soil’: Environmental Thought in Eliot’s Poetry and Prose”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“The Law of Hoes and Rakes”: Wallace Stevens’s Agrarian Poetics

Jasmine McCrory

 

“‘Grain by grain’: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene”

Caitlin McIntyre

 

“‘There All The Time Without You’: Modernism and the Anthropocene”

Peter Adkins

Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles and chapters on T.S. Eliot's agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement. His essays have appeared in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, the Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society UK, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Literature & History. He recently edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on "Modernism and the Environment."