BOOK NEWS: Modernist depictions of "masculine pregnancy"

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

By Aimee Armande Wilson

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438495606

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Masculine-Pregnancies

Examines literary depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in 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.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations-and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

"…this book does contribute to queer theory, interwar cultural history, and modernist literary studies in a significant way. It will appeal to those who want to explore where these branches of inquiry intersect." — CHOICE

"Masculine Pregnancies opens up important new perspectives on queer reproduction. Drawing on cutting-edge work in queer and trans studies, and carefully considering the entanglements of gender, sexuality, racialization, and class, Wilson reveals the uses, meanings, and contemporary legacies of masculine pregnancy in the modernist period." — Jana Funke, coeditor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

Aimee Armande Wilson is associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control.

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: A provocative perspective on Pound and Pasolini

Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis

BY SEAN MARK

Palgrave Macmillan, 2022

ISBN: 978-3-030-91947-4

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-91948-1

In October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? 

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 reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today.   

“Sean Mark’s Pound and Pasolini: Poetics of Crisis expounds incisively on Pasolini’s interview of Pound in 1967 to align two poets from opposite political camps, thus exposing the complex tension between poetry and ideology in both authors’ work. Mark’s acute and sophisticated readings result in a significant revision to our understanding of Pound’s and Pasolini’s respective poetics and places in contemporary culture. This is a distinguished and important book.” 

—Alessia Ricciardi, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Director of Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University

“As Sean Mark’s magistral comparative study brings together the antithetical poles of 20th-century poetry, it illuminates both corpuses: the later Pound turns into a Pasolini character, and the poetic myth he provided allows Pasolini to reshape his religious communism. Pound and Pasolini kept their faith in human creativity and redemption and thus remain true ‘educators,’ their dialogue a source of inspiration in times of crisis.” 

—Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

“Sean Mark’s fascinating study of Pound and Pasolini ranges from their actual contacts – most notably Pasolini’s 1967 interview with Pound – to detailed consideration of their contrasting aesthetic and political approaches, culminating in unexpected parallels in the methodology of the fragmentary and late work in The Cantos and Petrolio. Mark adds new dimensions to our understanding of both the Italian Pound and the American Pasolini, and sets an example of how contemporary comparative scholarship can work.” 

—David Ayers, Professor of Modernism and Critical Theory, University of Kent

Sean Mark is associate professor in literature and translation at Université Catholique de Lille, France.

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) "The Matter of Poetry" is LIVE!

JML 45.4 (Summer 2022) on the theme "The Matter of Poetry" is now available on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48858.

Content includes:

Modernist renegotiations 

Espen Grønlie

Linguistic Relativism and Poetry: Ezra Pound’s Reading of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl as a Key to Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry

Tiao Wang and Ronald Schleifer

Ezra Pound and Mang Ke (芒克): Image, Affect, and Consumerism in Western and Chinese Modernism

Joseph Pizza

“All Aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis”: Minstrelsy and Conversion in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday

Nathaniel Mills

John Berryman’s Blackface Jokes: The Insights of Literary Failure 

Harold Schweizer

On Gentleness: Rilke’s Hands

Tradition, lamentation, and individual talent

Wit Pietrzak

“Her songs are raised like fists”: The Caoineadh Tradition in Paul Muldoon’s Lamentations 

Dalia Bolotnikov Mazur

Charles Reznikoff's Testimony of the Dead

Stefania Heim

“I for i and i for I”: Susan Howe’s That This and the Relational Self 

FREE

Marty Cain

Frank Stanford’s Rural Avant-Garde: Infrastructure, Mediation, and Poetic Community

Nate Mickelson

Composing in the Future Particular: Reading CAConrad’s (Soma)tics

Review

Stefania Heim

The Matter of Poetry 

Poetry "by the eye"

What makes a poem visual? Andrew Williamson takes us on his journey to understand the roots of Ezra Pound's visual aesthetic in a "Closer Look" post for Indiana University Press, highlighting content from our latest issue, JML 43.4 (Summer 2020). 

You can read the full post HERE.

Williamson's essay, "Pound 're/ sound'" is a special read-for-free feature. You can access the free version HERE.

Poetry and Poetics issue now LIVE!

 

JML 43.4 (Summer 2020), on the theme "Poetry and Poetics: from Pound and Moore to Trisha Low and J.H. Prynne" is now live on JSTOR  and Project Muse. 

Content includes:

Andrew Williamson

Pound “re/ sound”

FREE!

Lukas Moe

“Not anyone’s Eden”: A Critical Introduction to New Poems by George Oppen

Zuzana Říhová

“Farewell to the Whole Epoch”: The Zone as the Beginning and End of the Czech Avant-garde

Lucy Harlow

“To Snare among the Briars”: Sensory Data and Two Early Literary Influences on In Parenthesis

Laura Blomvall

“Yet the frame held”: Poetic Form and the Bombing of London during World War II 

Jennifer Soong

The “To-Do” List Poem: Prospective Memory and a New York School Genre

Elina Siltanen

Conceptual Confession: Asymmetrical Emotion in Writer-Reader Relations in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge

Jerome J.H. Lim

Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne’s “Reach Up” and “Morning” from Al-Dente (2014) 

FREE!

Eric Keenaghan

The Age of Olson

Rachel Trousdale

Reconceiving Marianne Moore

Feng Dong

The Poetic Pendulum: Valéry and Modern American Poetry 

Ann Marie Jakubowski and Vincent Sherry

David Jones and the Question of Poetic Coherence: New Approaches to his Later Work

Martin Lockerd

Theological Poetics between the Wars

Laura Vrana

Criticism and the Justification of Modernism

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