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. 

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 satiric mentality at work in modernist writing

Satiric Modernism

BY KEVIN RULO

Clemson University Press, 2021

ISBNs: 978-1-949-97989-3 Hardback, 9781949979909 Ebook

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54544/

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.

In this book, Kevin Rulo reveals the crucial linkages between satire and modernism. He shows how satire enables modernist authors to evaluate modernity critically and to explore their ambivalence about the modern. Through provocative new readings of familiar texts and the introduction of largely unknown works, Satiric Modernism exposes a larger satiric mentality at work in well-known authors like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Ellison and in less studied figures like G.S. Street, the Sitwells, J.J. Adams, and Herbert Read, as well as in the literature of migration of Sam Selvon and John Agard, in the films of Paolo Sorrentino, and in the drama of Sarah Kane. In so doing, Rulo remaps the last hundred years as an era marked distinctively by a new kind of satiric critique of and aesthetic engagement with the temporal fissures, logics, and regimes of modernity. This ambitious, expansive study reshapes our understanding of modernist literary history and will be of interest to scholars of twentieth century and contemporary literature as well as of satire.

'Kevin Rulo’s Satiric Modernism is an intellectually capacious rethinking of the relationships among literary (and ultimately filmic and theatrical) modernism, postmodernism, and satire. Rulo posits that one can find satire’s traces in a variety of modernist manifestations—hidden, as it were, in plain sight. The book contains startlingly original readings, unexpected critical juxtapositions, and creative treatments of the affiliations between modernist texts and texts that both look backward and forward from them. Satiric Modernism will be consulted with keen interest by scholars both of modernist studies and of the history and theory of satire.'

—Scott W. Klein, Wake Forest University

'In this powerful, capacious, deeply researched book, Kevin Rulo teaches us that to be modern is also to be dismayed about being modern and to express that dismay in the form of satire: satirical modes of analysis and expression are foundational to modernism in all of its various phases and incarnations. Lucid and convincing, Satiric Modernism offers us bracing, revisionary understandings of each author and every text that falls under Rulo’s inquiry, even—especially—those authors with whom we are familiar, as well as those beyond the boundaries conventional to studies of the field. Not afraid to explore even the darkest aspects of these satirists’ worlds, demonstrating how each writer also turns the scalpel on their own failings, Rulo shows how these artists clear a way to make it new, building magnificently on excoriated ground.'

—John Whittier-Ferguson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Kevin Rulo is a clinical assistant professor in the English Department at the Catholic University of America. He has published in The Review of English Studies, Neohelicon, and The T.S. Eliot Studies Annual.