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

NEW ISSUE: JML 49.1 (Fall 2025), "Running Counter" is LIVE!

 

Journal of Modern Literature 49.1 (Fall 2025) on the theme "Running Counter" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56220

Content includes:

Preston Stone 

“She will be right”: Queer Haitian Protest in Roxane Gay’s “Of Ghosts and Shadows”

Laura Lorhan

Turning the Tables on “Bluebeard”: Intertextuality in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox

Dan Dougherty

“[S]trange new air of myth”: Homophony, Narration, and the Modernist Autobiography in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

Roy Benjamin

“Unprobables in their poor suit of the improssable”: The Improbability Principle in Joyce

Robert Fillman

“[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy”: William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic

FREE

Dennis Wilson Wise

C.S. Lewis’s Modernist Moment: Taking up the Gauntlet in “Poem for Psychoanalysts and/or Theologians” 

Jeremy Pomeroy

Reconsidering Moretti’s “rhetoric of innocence”: Ambivalence Toward and Rationalizations of Heroic Violence in Contemporary Epic

Jihuan Yu

A Play on the Post-isms: The Unnamed Narrator’s Quest for Realness in Remainder

Kevin Rulo

Autonomy, Satire, and Parasitic Aesthetics in Wyndham Lewis’s “Joint” and The Apes of God 

Ira Nadel

Lawless Exuberance: Céline and Roth

Reviews

Jean-Michel Rabate

How It Is / Comment C’est / Как ЭTо: Glosses for Beckett’s Darkest Novel

James Mesiti

Samuel Beckett and his Transdisciplinary and Creative Process

Nicole Higgins

“There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE”: A Review of Joseph Pizza’s Dissonant Voices

Joseph Darlington

Little Wilson and Uncle Sam

Bryan Counter

Turning Around Uncertainty

BOOK NEWS: A critique of "true feeling" in late-twentieth-century fiction

The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth

By Nicholas Manning

Edinburg UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399508001

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-artifice-of-affect.html

Is emotional truth a damaging literary and cultural ideal? The Artifice of Affect proposes that valuing affective authenticity risks creating a homogenized self, encouraged to comply only with accepted moral beliefs. Similarly, when emotional truth is made the primary value of literature, literary texts too often become agents of conformity. Nowhere is this risk explored more fully than in a range of American realist texts from the Cold War to the twentieth century’s end. For the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Kathleen Collins, Paula Fox, Ralph Ellison, or Richard Yates, formulate trenchant critiques of true feeling’s aesthetic and social imperatives. The arguments at the heart of this book aim to re-frame emotional processes as visceral constructions, which should not be held to the standards of static ideals of accuracy, legitimacy, or veracity.

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.

• Offers a literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Proposes a wide-ranging literary and cultural critique of the concept of true feeling, especially relevant to the United States’s current sociopolitical climate
• Represents the first book-length study using affect theory to analyze post-war realist literatures
• Argues that twentieth-century American realism is not a conservative genre, but rebels in surprising ways against restrictive notions of authenticity
• Links key concepts in current affect theory with writers such as Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Richard Ford, Paula Fox or Philip Roth, who have never been analyzed using these tools
• Models a new transdisciplinary interaction between affect theory and literature, with literary texts used to reveal the ever-present artifice of corporal processes
• Combines methods from affect theory, literary studies, and the medical humanities

"An elegant, impressive account of American realism's encounters with the aesthetic and political challenges of representing emotion. Boldly anti-foundationalist in its critiques of universalizing approaches to literary value, Manning's book embraces bodily agency and the fluidity and meta-reflexivity of affective circuits, with far-reaching consequences for understanding the creation of literary and ethical meanings." – Adam J. Frank, University of British Columbia

Nicholas Manning is professor of American literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. 

Book News: Delving into the shaded world of Philip Roth

Philip Roth: A Counterlife

BY IRA NADEL

Oxford UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780199846108

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philip-roth-9780199846108?cc=us&lang=en&

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.

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.

Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time, from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

"In Philip Roth: A Counterlife, Ira Nadel exposes the multifaceted disposition of this major voice in American letters: Roth the realist, the ironist, the ventriloquist, the impersonator, the bard. In navigating the intricacies and dualities of the public and private Roth, Nadel shows the complexities, the contradictions, and the counterlives both lived and imagined. As literary sleuth, Nadel has enriched the myriad possibilities for understanding this exacting and defiant writer and his work." 

-- Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature, Department of English, Trinity University

 

"Philip Roth: A Counterlife engages and illuminates the scenes of discontent, betrayal, illness, and rage in Roth's own life that allow for new understandings of his work and relationships. Drawing on such primary source material as interviews, personal correspondence, and site visits, Nadel's biography penetrates the carefully composed narrative Roth presented publicly in order to present a "counter" Philip Roth, one who is at once more sympathetic to his readers than critics realize and more dynamic than even his self-creation allows. Nadel seamlessly weaves his interpretations of Roth's most provocative texts into the story of Roth's own life: a life shadowed by pain, illness, and personal injustices, but also illuminated by the joys of writing, ideas, and friendships that will persist long after his death." 

-- Aimee Pozorski, co-executive editor of Philip Roth Studies, professor of English at Central Connecticut State University

Ira Nadel is professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and is the author of biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and Leon Uris. He has also published Biography: Fiction Fact & Form, Joyce and the Jews and Modernism's Second Act, in addition to A Critical Companion to Philip Roth.

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) is LIVE!

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) on the theme "Reclaiming Tradition and Contingency" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47651.

Contents

Charlotte Fox 

“Reclaiming” tradition: An exploration of literary influence in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk 

K. Joudry

The Gospel According to Bolo 

Emily Anderson

An “unseemly joke”: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

Rachel Gaubinger 

The “Voiceless Language” of Sisters: Queer Possibility in E.M. Forster’s Howards End 

FREE

Niklas Cyril Fischer 

E.M. Forster, Realism, and the Style of Progressive Nostalgia

Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Philip Roth’s Politics of Freedom in the American Trilogy 

Caroline Gelmi 

Vachel Lindsay and the Primitive Singing of the New Poetry

André Furlani

Walking toward Genre: The Pedestrian Excursus

Jack Quirk 

The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts” 

John Attridge

Contingent Sociality and Same-sex Desire in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu 

Reviews

Jake O’Leary

Politics and Literature in Interwar Britain’s Only Women-Controlled Weekly Review

Robert Harris

Making Him New: Ezra Pound in the Twenty-First Century

Chen Lin

The “wholeness” of T.S. Eliot: A Review of T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination