NEW ISSUE: JML 49.3 (Spring 2026) "Long Modernisms" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 49.3 (Spring 2026), on the theme "Long Modernisms," edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté, is now LIVE on ProjectMuse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/57113.

Content includes:

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Long Modernisms: Editor’s Introduction

Jonathan Foster

Woolf’s Westminster: Decentering the State in Mrs. Dalloway

Carolina Iribarren

Strange Communications: Conversation Breakdowns, Monadic Hang-Ups, and Telepathic Approximations in Virginia Woolf’s Novels

Yuli Pan

Anticipating the Postdramatic: Greek Ritual, Modernist Rupture, and Theatrical Innovation in Woolf’s Theater-Fiction Between the Acts

Florian Gargallio

Histories of Violence: William Carlos Williams and Daniel Boone

Nathan Wallace

Dante and Moses in “The Parable of the Plums”

Joseph LaBine

“Gabriel the chauffeur”: James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence as Modernist Precursors to W.G. Sebald’s “Ambros Adelwarth” 

Andrew Koenig

The Refusal to “Write Back” in Elizabeth Costello

Thomas Gould

The Everyday Conversation and the Construction of Whiteness in Claudia Rankine and Rachel Cusk

Carra Glatt

Trompe-l'œil: Neo-Victorian Plotting in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

Phillip Masterman Broadbent

Against the Oriental Gaze: Race and Belonging in Yoko Tawada’s The Naked Eye

Reviews

Ira Nadel

Reading Ellmann Reading Joyce

Arka Chattopadhyay

Reading The Nabokov Effect: The Letter between Literature and Cinema

 

Matthew Holman

Glittering Like Cut Glass 

SPECIAL FEATURE: The Garden and the Machine, a Closer Look at JML 49.1

 

In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Robert Fillman discusses William Carlos Williams's unique approach to the pastoral. Read it HERE.

His JML 49.1 essay, "'[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy': William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic," is available to read FREE for a limited time.

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

SPECIAL FEATURE: This Old Goose Still Honks: Dysfluency in William Carlos Williams's Late Poetry

William Carlos Williams was a rare poet who found fame and lived long enough to enjoy it, and yet, Jeffrey Careyva notes, "few learn about the series of strokes that knocked Williams down again and again during the height of his fame after World War II."

Read more about it in Careyva's post for the Indiana University Press blog, "This Old Goose Still Honks: Dysfluency in William Carlos Williams's Late Poetry."

The author's JML 48.2 essay on Williams is available FREE, linked in the post!

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.