BOOK NEWS: Examining maternal love and power in American fiction

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative: Maternality in US Literature

By Mary Jo Bona

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9798855801996

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mothers-Mobility-Narrative

Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.

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.

Mothers, Mobility, Narrative pairs women-identified writers whose work illuminates a range of maternal practices in the face of egregious structural inequalities and obstacles. By using the critical lens of maternal feminism, alongside recent theories of time, space, and memory, Mary Jo Bona reengages the field of motherhood studies to explore linkages between motherhood and movement. Across genres, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kym Ragusa, Carole Maso, Cristina García, and Rebecca Makkai develop maternal figures who, in battling against institutional oppressions in eras of slavocracy, colonialism, dictatorship, and pandemic, expose the fundamentally intersectional nature of social categorization and disrupt traditional discourses of the maternal. Mothers, Mobility, Narrative rethinks maternality across a century and a half of literary expression in the United States, compelling readers to embrace more capacious understandings of maternal subjectivity, care, and kinship.

"By placing literary texts by women from multiple ethnic cultures in conversation, Mary Jo Bona makes a much-needed intervention into motherhood studies. In Bona's reading, these texts demonstrate how women singularly construct practices of motherhood that resist social scripts. Among other things, the book offers a fresh, timely look at the AIDS health crisis and its impact on the LGBTQ community over decades and across genders, drawing on the work of Audre Lorde to explore literary representations of queer maternality among caretakers." — A Yęmisi Jimoh, coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship

Mary Jo Bona is distinguished SUNY professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.

BOOK NEWS: Vital collection of newly discovered Woolf correspondence

 The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399507325

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-uncollected-letters-of-virginia-woolf.html

Many previously undiscovered letters from Virginia Woolf have come to light since the original six-volume Collected Letters was published between 1975 and 1980. Over 1,400 are included in this vital new book, illuminating facets of Woolf’s life that have previously been hidden or only glimpsed. Important letters to contemporary writers, such as Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Berta Ruck, have been unearthed from archives, as well as fifty letters to T. S. Eliot. This book also features substantial collections of letters to Lady Colefax, Winifred Holtby, Mary Hutchinson, Christabel McLaren (Lady Aberconway) and Raymond Mortimer, as well as previously unrecorded correspondents. 

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.

Through these letters we see Woolf encouraging would-be authors and negotiating with editors, literary agents and foreign translators in her role as a professional writer. The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf provides extraordinary insight into the variety of acquaintance of one of the most fascinating literary figures of the twentieth century.

"This beautifully designed, sturdy volume... is a colossal work of breathtaking dedication and remarkable scholarship. [...] In this meticulously curated volume, the letters, and our delight in them, will—with their laughter, intrigues and crackling fires—run on and on." – Matthew Macer-Wright, Virginia Woolf Bulletin

"...this late in the game – when [Woolf's] essays and letters have been collected, diaries published (then republished in spiffy new editions) and fiction prefaced, annotated and afterworded ad nauseam – it is rare to get a scholarship-altering book. Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N Clarke have produced just such a volume. [...] This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author." – Zoe Guttenplan, Literary Review

"The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf is the most significant contribution to Woolf Studies and the Humanities for decades. This is an immaculate critical work, which is also a major social history, edited by two pre-eminent, expert scholars. The Uncollected Letters sets a gold standard for all such editions in the future." – Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and author of The Bloomsbury Photographs

 

Stephen Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018. He co-edits, and regularly contributes to, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and in 2018 he gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture "'This Sheet is a Glass': Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters."

Stuart N. Clarke is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin from 1999 to 2022. As well as contributing almost 300 items to the Bulletin, he edited volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993).

BOOK NEWS: How Adrienne Rich's political interests affect her later poetry

Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry: Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

By Alec Marsh

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350466975

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/adrienne-richs-later-poetry-9781350466975/

Reorienting understandings of Adrienne Rich's later work through her interest in Marx and Marxist politics, this book engages with this overlooked part of her oeuvre through considerations of issues such as race, nationhood, and gender.

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.

From 1983 onward, after she visited revolutionary Nicaragua until the end of her life, Rich's political vision can best be described as Marxist-Humanist. Until recently, very little attention has been paid to Rich's “interest” in Marx; there is no in-depth treatment of the effect of Marx's humanistic philosophy on Rich's later work, or even on her unwavering, but altered dedication to Women's Liberation. This book fills this gap, showing how Rich's discovery of Marx's humanism affected her poetry. In doing so, it makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through poetry.

Contents:

Chapter 1: 'I Long Ago Moved On': Adrienne Rich, Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

Chapter 2: Marxist Humanism, Freedom and Raya Dunayevskaya

Chapter 3: Adrienne Rich “Feeling Contradictions” Nicaragua, and Your Native Land, Your Life.

Chapter 4: In Quest of America: The Dialectical Dimensions of “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Chapter 5: Chapter Five: Suffering in the Heart of Capital: Dark Fields of the Republic

Chapter 6: American Innocence, the German 'Guilt Question” and the Oslo Peace Process.

Chapter 7: The End of History and the Forgotten Future: Rich vs. Neoliberalism

Chapter 8: Fox: “Terza Rima” and the End of History

Chapter 9: Salvaging Midnight Salvage

Chapter 10: Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: “Draft #2006” An American Jeremiad

Chapter 11: 9/11 and The School Among the Ruins: “Tendril”

Chapter 12: Rich in the Borderlands: Late Style and Her World of Pain

"Written in an open and eloquent style, this book makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics, and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through the genre." —Steven Matthews, University of Reading

Alec Marsh is professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light (2021), William Carlos Williams and the Prose of Pure Experience (2016), John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (2015), Ezra Pound (2011), and others.

BOOK NEWS: Muriel Spark, the literary shapeshifter

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark

By James Bailey

Princeton UP, June 2026

ISBN: 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691290171/like-a-cat-loves-a-bird

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels—with their plots featuring a cast of elderly characters receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham, and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray—but it is also true of her as a person. As sly, nimble, and elegant as Spark’s own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird offers a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much 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.

From Spark’s childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany—via South Africa, London, New York, and Rome—James Bailey traces a light-footed journey around the world and through the novelist’s strange and magnificent books. The result is an irresistible story of transformation, wit, and fierce determination—and a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

“Bailey’s slippery Spark is chaotic, complex, often hilarious, and constantly shapeshifting. His kaleidoscopic portrait illuminates Spark’s life and work from every angle, yet—crucially—allows her the freedom she craved to confound and elude those who would try to pin her down. This is a deeply stylish, astute, and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer.”—Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

“Utterly charming. A book as elegant, sharp-witted, and mischievous as its subject. If you love literary biography, you’ll feel like the cat that got the cream.”—Clare Pollard, author of Delphi: A Novel

James Bailey is a writer and researcher who holds a PhD in literature and is the author of Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction.

BOOK NEWS: Literary perspectives on labor and gender

Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature: New Literary Perspectives on the Times, Spaces and Forms of Women’s Work

Edited by Emily J. Hogg and Charlotte J. Fabricius

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541336

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-feminized-work-and-the-labor-of-literature.html

In a world wherein work is increasingly feminized, historical and contemporary literature can reveal what ‘women’s work’ entails. Reading across different genres, time periods and geographical locations, this book explores gendered working lives through novels, poetry, comics, editorial work and book collecting. It moves from the library of an early modern noblewoman to protest comics in the 2017 Women’s March, from Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and Buchi Emecheta to writing from the 2020s about motherhood and explores topics as various as gossip, poetic scraps and household management as well as gender-based violence and the creation of feminist solidarity. In doing so, it shows how literary perspectives on labor and gender can provide insights into work that is otherwise made invisible and can help us to better understand the challenges of today’s insecure work-lives.

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.

• Explores literary representations of ‘women’s work’ to generate new understandings of contemporary working conditions
• Takes a literary approach to understanding contemporary feminized working conditions
• Develops a transhistorical approach to the study of literature and notions of gendered work
• Surveys literary representations of feminized work across a range of genres and periods, including twentieth and twenty-first century novels, poetry, autofiction, and activist comics, while also considering gendered labor in the production and circulation of literature, including in contemporary publishing, and Early Modern book collecting

"What is the relation between work and books, between women’s labor and women’s writing? And how does women’s work cut across standard divisions of space and time? This collection of case studies, prefaced by an incisive and comprehensive introduction, offers illuminating answers." – Rita Felski, University of Virginia

Emily J. Hogg is associate professor of contemporary anglophone literature at the Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-editor of Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2021).

Charlotte J. Fabricius is a postdoc with the project ‘Feminized: A New Literary History of Women’s Work’ at the Center for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD in cultural studies and works in the intersection of global and digital anglophone literature, comics studies, and feminist critique. She is the author of Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics (2023).

BOOK NEWS: The Resurgence of the Archetypal Feminine

Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature

By April C. Heaslip

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496856968

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Regenerating-the-Feminine

Mythologists work as cultural animateurs, tracking patterns and trends, identifying archetypal and symbolic wounds and remedies. Reading cultural and environmental events via texts and patterns from such a perspective enables dynamic dialogue and action. Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature examines the history of the lost and degraded archetypal feminine of Western cultures, whose resurgence in scholarship, the arts, and social justice practices is now on the rise. Drawing on various methodologies to deepen our understanding of this regenerative phenomenon, author April C. Heaslip charts the significance of interconnected expressions dramatically impacting our sense of self, community, history, health, culture, and creativity.

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 study examines the feminine’s resurgence via emerging imaginal archetypal paradigms in literary fiction, memoir, and cinematic expression. Utilizing literary and film studies, depth psychology, archaeomythology, history, and religious studies to examine the cultural and personal phenomenon of feminine renewal, this book explores how remythologizing regeneration—as well as remapping complex and neglected personal and collective wasteland landscapes—revitalizes the relationship between psyche, culture, and nature.

Tending to the return of the feminine and the complex cultural and eco wastelands, this post-Jungian inquiry remythologizes notions of wholeness, amplifies feminist revisions of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s” journey, and provides transdisciplinary best practices in support of personal individuation, cultural revitalization, and ecological healing.

"Regenerating the Feminine makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields of women’s studies, popular culture, psychoanalysis, feminist theology, and more. Not only does this book offer original thought to all these areas, but it draws these disciplines together in new, imaginative ways that suggest future avenues of research."  —Susan Rowland, author of Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide

April C. Heaslip is a mythologist, educator, and artist. Her work has been published in journals and edited collections such as Myths Shattered and Restored: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; Evolving God–Images: Essays on Religion, Individuation, and Postmodern Spirituality; and more.

BOOK NEWS: Reconsidering short works by the mother of the horror genre, Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction

Edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350361157

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shirley-jacksons-dark-tales-9781350361157/

The first dedicated exploration of the short fiction of Shirley Jackson for three decades, this volume takes an in-depth look at the themes and legacies of the 200-plus short stories by the mother of contemporary horror. Scholars from across the globe, and from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, dig into the lasting impact of her work in light of its increasing relevance to contemporary critical preoccupations and the re-release of Jackson's work in 2016. 

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.

Offering new methodologies to study her work, this volume calls upon ideas of intertextuality, ecocriticism and psychoanalysis to examine a broad range of themes from national identity, race, gender and class to domesticity, the occult, selfhood and mental illness. With consideration of her blockbuster works alongside later works that received much less critical attention, Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales promises a rich and dynamic expansion on previous scholarship of Jackson's oeuvre, both bringing her writing into the contemporary conversation, and ensuring her place in the canon of horror fiction.

"Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales is a much-needed expansion of Jackson studies. These essays apply diverse critical approaches to a wide array of previously understudied stories, exploring topics such as influence, identity, space, and genre. They offer compelling new perspectives on Jackson's work, yet remain vitally aware of her position in the cultural landscape of mid-century America." --Melanie D. Anderson, Delta State University

Joan Passey is a lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, where she has taught since 2016. She has published on Shirley Jackson in Women’s Studies, introduced the biopic Shirley for 70+ Curzon cinemas nationwide, and participated in a Q&A to promote Shirley with Birds Eye View.

Robert Lloyd is a teacher and researcher at Cardiff University, UK, and specializes in women’s literature, the supernatural, and critical theory. He completed his thesis on Shirley Jackson and hauntology in 2021, is in the process of preparing his monograph, and has published on Jackson in Women’s Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Sylvia Plath's daily life 1955-63

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2: 1955-1963

By Carl Rollyson

UP of Mississippi, 2024

ISBN: 9781496844286

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-2

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience, ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath was also fueled in part by the nature of her death—a suicide while she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, who was himself a noteworthy British poet. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath, projecting an array of points of view about their subject, has appeared over the last fifty-five years.

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.

Now biographer Carl Rollyson, the author of two previous biographical studies of Plath, has surveyed the vast amount of material on Plath, including her biographies, her autobiographical writings, and previously unpublished material, and distilled that data into the two volumes of Sylvia Plath Day by Day. As the follow-up to volume 1, volume 2 commences on February 14, 1955, the day Plath wrote to her mother declaring her intention to study in England, a decision that marked a major turning point in her life. With brief signposts provided by the author, this volume follows Plath through the entirety of her marriage to Hughes, the challenges of simultaneously raising a family and nourishing her own creativity, and the major depressive episodes that ultimately led to her suicide in 1963. By providing new angles and perspectives on the life of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, Sylvia Plath Day by Day offers a comprehensive image of its enigmatic subject.

"Using a journal-style approach, Rollyson documents Plath’s life in exacting and compelling detail. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2 is a must-have addition to the library for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature in general, and Sylvia Plath in particular." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Fresh insights into the 1920s experimental author Mary Butts

Mary Butts: Necessary Contradictions and Feminist Reconstructions

Edited by Joel Hawkes

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501380716

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mary-butts-9781501380716/

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author.

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.

Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these.

This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters cover Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

"Mary Butts wrote marvelous prose—shimmering, intractable, wayward, and piercing. Original in tis range of content as in its design and never sidestepping difficulties, this impressive new collection demonstrates that Butts—trenchant and extreme, bold and generous—has become a voice we need more that ever to reckon with." —Ralph Pite, University of Bristol

Joel Hawkes is a lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is editor of The Collected Essays of Mary Butts (2021) and has published a number of articles and book chapters about Mary Butts. Through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for The Mary Butts Letters Project, with the support of the Butts Estate, he made Butts’s letters available in a print collection and open-access website, marybutts.com.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing feminism's progress in literature and television

Feminism's Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

By Carol Colatrella

SUNY P, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493947

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminism-s-Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

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.

Feminism's Progress builds on more than fifty years of feminist criticism to analyze narrative representations of feminist ideas about women's social roles, gender inequities, and needed reforms. Carol Colatrella argues that popular novels, short stories, and television shows produced in the United States and Britain — from Little Dorrit and Iola Leroy to Call the Midwife and The Closer — foster acceptance of feminism by optimistically illustrating its prospects and promises. Scholars, students, and general readers will appreciate the book's sweeping introduction to a host of concerns in feminist theory while applying a gender lens to a wide range of literature and media from the past two centuries. In exploring how individuals and communities might reduce bias and discrimination and ensure gender equity, these fictions serve as both a measure and a means of feminism's progress.

"This book is a remarkably comprehensive survey of feminocentric novels and television series that offer personal and systemic responses to the continuing oppression of women. Colatrella pulls together dozens of disparate texts to argue that many popular works from the nineteenth century to the present have been promoting feminist principles in ways that must certainly have affected public attitudes toward and understanding of gender discrimination. Feminism's Progress offers a hopeful outlook on the potential for literature and media to bring about positive change in real-world gender politics." — Robyn R. Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

Carol Colatrella is professor of literature and codirector of the Center for Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the coeditor (with Joseph Alkana) of Cohesion and Dissent in America, also published by SUNY Press.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the feminist spiritualities of Caribbean women writers

Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Resistance in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas

BY JOSHUA R. DECKMAN

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493411

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminist-Spiritualities

Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. 

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.

Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

"Feminist Spiritualities provocatively invites us to sit with the decolonizing potential of Afro‐Caribbean ancestral spiritual practices and how they shape feminist and queer practices of shared love, joy, and pain across difference in the islands and their diasporas. A twist on decolonial thought inspired by the possibilities of other worlds and solidarities emerging from within Afro‐Caribbean creative imaginaries." — Alaí Reyes‐Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Joshua R. Deckman is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Stetson University.

BOOK NEWS: Unique biography examines Sylvia Plath's daily life

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955

BY CARL ROLLYSON

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496835000

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-1

Since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, she has become the subject of a constant stream of books, biographies, and articles. She has been hailed as a groundbreaking poet for her starkly beautiful poems in Ariel and as a brilliant forerunner of the feminist coming-of-age novel in her semiautobiographical The Bell Jar. Each new biography has offered insight and sources with which to measure Plath’s life and influence. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, a two-volume series, offers a distillation of this data without the inherent bias of a narrative.

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.

Volume 1 commences with Plath’s birth in Boston in 1932, records her response to her elementary and high school years, her entry into Smith College, and her breakdown and suicide attempt, and ends on February 14, 1955, the day she wrote to Ruth Cohen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, to accept admission as an “affiliated student at Newnham College to read for the English Tripos.”

Sylvia Plath Day by Day is for readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the woman and her work. The entries are suitable for dipping into and can be read in a minute or an hour. Ranging over several sources, including Plath’s diaries, journals, letters, stories, and other prose and poetry—including new material and archived material rarely seen by readers—a fresh kaleidoscopic view of the writer emerges.

"The details in Rollyson’s Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 are a dream come true for the reader, fan, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. The seeds of so much of her creative writing are present, but Rollyson deftly does not foreshadow how events impact Plath’s life and when she transforms experiences from life to art. He lets each moment stand on its own importance." —Peter K. Steinberg, coeditor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 is a must-have book for any reader interested in Plath. Detailed yet highly readable, it paints a portrait of a young woman who would become, as will be chronicled in volume 2, one of the seminal authors in the twentieth century." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 fills the lacunae of existing biographies and uncovers new insights into its subject, as when Plath writes about her experiences at Smith, hearing ‘nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you, meant for you, to strangle you on the invisible noose of insinuation.’ Or her months in New York at Mademoiselle, which grow less mysterious here. Again, Carl Rollyson has provided us with an indispensable book on Sylvia Plath." —Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life 

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Caribbean women fictionalize the past

Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past 

BY TEGAN ZIMMERMAN

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496846358

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Matria-Redux

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women.

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.

Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses.

Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

"The first sustained study of Caribbean historical fiction by diasporic women." —Jennifer Donahue, author of Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

"A tour de force, Matria Redux offers readers the most recent analytical literary frameworks for decolonizing Caribbean women’s subjecthood as portrayed in the historical and material realms of the past."  —Valérie K. Orlando, author of Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean

 

Tegan Zimmerman is adjunct professor in women and gender studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her work has been published in such journals as Feminist Theory; MELUS; Journal of Romance Studies; Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice.

BOOK NEWS: Probing gender and sexuality in spy fiction

Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage: Spying Undercover(s)

EDITED BY ANN REA 

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350271364

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sexuality-and-gender-in-fictions-of-espionage-9781350271364/

An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. 

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.

Covering texts such as the Bond novels, John Le Carré's oeuvre (and their notable adaptations) and works by Helen MacInnes, Christopher Isherwood and Mick Herron, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage takes stock of spy fiction written by women, female protagonists written by men, and probes the representations of masculinity generated by male authors. Offering a counterpoint to a genre traditionally viewed as male-centric, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage proposes a revision of masculinity, femininity, queer identities and gendered concepts such as domesticity, and relates them to notions of nationality and the defense work conducted at crucial moments in history.

Contents:

1. "Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (Megan Faragher, Wright State University, Ohio)
2. "Vanished Ladies: Using Helen MacInnes's Above Suspicion to Look at Women in Spy Fiction" (Kyle Smith, Perth College UHI, Scotland)
3. "While Still We Live: Gender, Secret Agents, and National Ethics" (Michael T. Williamson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
4. "'Some Other Man Who Would Have to be Set Aside:' Burgess, Maclean, and the Adversarial Spy in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love" (Oliver Buckton, Florida Atlantic University)
5. "Bond, Colonialism and the 'Other'" (Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth)
6. "'Learn, Babies, Learn': Race, Representation, and John Birch Society Activists Julia Brown and Lola Belle Holmes" (Veronica Wilson, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
7. "'A New Domesticity' and Masculinity in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Len Deighton's The Ipcress File" (Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
8. "A Queer Thing: The Older Woman Spy" (Rosie White, Northumbria University)
9. "'What's the character?' Adapting Agency and Gender in The Little Drummer Girl" (Rachel Hoag, West Virginia University)
10. "'Extolling the Virtues of Alpaca Cloth or Buttons Made of Tagua Nut': The Influence of Douglas Hayward and Tailoring in John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama (Llewella Chapman, University of East Anglia)
11. "'Darling Men, Lover Boys and Rogues:' Connie Sachs, Molly Doran and the Precarity of of Institutional Memory in John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mick Herron's Dead Lions" (Paul Lohneis, University of West London)
12. Coda: Ann Rea, Stella Rimington, "The 'Open Secret' and the 'Mission to Inform'”

Ann Rea is professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. She is co-editor of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series with Nick Hubbleand she also edited the essay collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse in 2015.

BOOK NEWS: Stein's responses to the politics of authorship

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

BY ISABELLE PARKINSON

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474484329

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-gertrude-stein-and-the-politics-of-participation.html

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation offers a new way of reading Stein’s key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation

• Tackles the problem of Stein’s politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein’s writing as ‘democratic’ by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracy
• Explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation
• Explores the way discourses of biological sciences and pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, as well as those of politics, law and education are mediated in literary conceptions of authorship

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 explores the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception. It examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein’s right to participate in modernist authorship provide an instructive example of the way literary culture reflected contemporary political discussion. This study explores how representations of Stein that figured her either as barely human or as the ultimate democratic subject reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended.

"Isabelle Parkinson provides keen-eyed reappraisals of Stein's political writing, and of the political claims made by others about Stein's writing. Gertude Stein and the Politics of Participation is a sober, multidimensional guide to some of the most vexing problems of modernism and mass democracy." – Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University

Isabelle Parkinson is a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on Gertrude Stein’s authorial identity and on the role of the anthology in constructing an avant-garde canon. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Cultures, and Bloomsbury’s Historicising Modernism series.

Book News: Critical takes on and creative homages to Mansfield's short fiction

 Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories

EDITED BY GERRI KIMBER AND TODD MARTIN

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399509947

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-katherine-mansfield-and-the-garden-party-and-other-stories.html

The last collection of short stories published in her lifetime, The Garden Party and Other Stories would solidify Katherine Mansfield’s place as the most prominent modernist short story writer of her generation. Early reviewers of the collection commented on the similarities it shared with her previous collection, Bliss and Other Stories; however, while contemporary reviews were mixed, many emphasized the psychological power of her stories, praising how she was able to bring her characters to life in a way simple action could not. While it contains some of Mansfield’s most sophisticated and well-loved stories, several of the stories in The Garden Party initially appeared in the Sphere, and thus were often dismissed as inferior. Mansfield herself felt some of these stories fell short of her desired effect, though recent scholarship has revealed their greater complexity. 

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.

The essays in this volume, by both seasoned and newer Mansfield scholars, work to continue this conversation. The collection also includes Mansfield-inspired short fiction, two translations of memorial poems dedicated to Mansfield by Chinese and French contemporaries with accompanying notes, and a recently re-discovered book review by Mansfield. In addition, Sydney Janet Kaplan provides a reflection on her personal meeting with Christopher Isherwood, a writer heavily influenced by the life and work of Mansfield.

Content includes:

CRITICISM

Redefining ‘Photographic Realism’ in the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield

Daisy Birch

Knowing What We Feel about Katherine Mansfield: Sentimentality and Expression in ‘The Garden Party’

Jay Dickson

Dickens, Death and Mary Ann: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Life of Ma Parker’

Martin Griffiths

‘Passion in Movement’: Katherine Mansfield – Gesture, Motion, and Dance

Richard Cappuccio

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Marriage à la Mode’: ‘far too facile’?

Anna Kwiatkowska

The Quest for Autonomy Amid Shifting Gender Expectations and Relationships in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Calvin Goh

‘Forgive my Hat’: Clothing as a Condition of Narratability in The Garden Party and Other Stories

Samantha Dewally

Katherine Mansfield’s Desperate Housewives and Metonymic Desire

Sovay Hansen

‘If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness’: The Political Language of Flowers in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories

Sharon Gordon

CREATIVE WRITING

‘How Loud the Birds’

Ailsa Cox

‘The Marquee’

Paula McGrath

‘Endless Sea’

Bronwyn Calder

Twenty Immortal Minutes: A Poem by Xu Zhimo

Stuart Lyons

A Poem by Philippe Chabaneix

Gerri Kimber

CRITICAL MISCELLANY

Returning to ‘Kathy’: Christopher Isherwood’s Katherine Mansfield Fascination

Sydney Janet Kaplan

Katherine Mansfield’s Daily Herald Review of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue

John G. Peters

REVIEW ESSAY

Redrawing Katherine Mansfield’s Critical Horizons

Elyse Blankley

Gerri Kimber is a visiting professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

A professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin’s primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.

Book News: Interviews with award-winning Afrofuturist Nalo Hopkinson

Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson

EDITED BY ISIAH LAVENDER III

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496843678

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Nalo-Hopkinson

A key figure in contemporary speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (b. 1960) is the first Black queer woman as well as the youngest person to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her Caribbean-inspired narratives—Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine—project complex futures and complex identities for people of color in terms of race, sex, and gender. Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers, and this desire is reflected in her award-winning anthologies. Her work best represents the current and ongoing colored wave of science fiction in the twenty-first 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.

In twenty-one interviews ranging from 1999 until 2021, Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson reveals a writer of fierce intelligence and humor in love with ideas and concerned with issues of identity. She provides powerful insights on code-switching, race, Afrofuturism, queer identities, sexuality, Caribbean folklore, and postcolonial science fictions, among other things. As a result, the conversations presented here very much demonstrate the uniqueness of her mind and her influence as a writer.

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. He is author of Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement; editor of Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, both published by University Press of Mississippi; and coeditor of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century.

Book News: Women modernists challenging gendered ideas of the senses

 

Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology

BY ALLYSON C. DEMAAGD

UP of Florida, 2022

ISBN: 9780813069166

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069166

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.  

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.

Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the “masculine” senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the “feminine” senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered “lower,” were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd’s analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration.            

Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.  

“DeMaagd’s timely study examines the changing sensescape in modernist aesthetics and gives the long-denigrated ‘lower’ senses of smell, taste, and touch their interpretive due, not only uncovering the gendering of sensory experience but also demonstrating the extent to which sensory practices crucially involve questions of class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and species.”—Vicki Tromanhauser, SUNY New Paltz  

“Redressing the focus on visual senses that has dominated discussions of modernist (usually male) writers, Dissensuous Modernism argues that these modernist women writers call upon the underacknowledged senses of touch, feel, and smell in questioning gendered hierarchies of embodied and institutional power.”—Linda A. Kinnahan, editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry  

Allyson C. DeMaagd is an independent scholar and college success manager at Mid-Shore Scholars.