Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Nir Evron discusses how Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, like other regionalist writers, depicts animals as individualized beings with distinctive experiences and inner lives that demand recognition and interpretation. Read it HERE.
His JML 49.2 essay, "Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Animal Fiction," is available to read FREE for a limited time.
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
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
Grant Matthew Jenkins
“This Is Your Brain on Poetry”
Aaron Stone
How to Do the History of Queer American Literature
EDITED BY ALEX GOODY AND SASKIA MCCRACKEN
Edinburgh UP, 2023
ISBN: 9781474498029
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beastly-modernisms.html
A contemporary collection of scholarly essays exploring the vibrant intersections of modernist studies and critical animal studies
The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new and progressive field of enquiry that locates crucial questions about what it means to live with animals at the foundation of modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside new and emerging scholars who, together, revisit canonical figures and decentre the canons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, the contributions work with cultural history and theoretical frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century literature and culture.
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 chapters in Beastly Modernisms present a diverse range of approaches and topics, exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China, animals and gender in surrealism to African-American texts, Sámi reindeer to rat propaganda, modernist jellyfish to metamodernist beasts, 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories, and chart the current and future state of modernist animal studies.
"Overall, these scholars offer a fascinating analysis of the ways in which writers use nonhuman animals to explore and contest the traditional limits of modernism. All of the volume’s essays are informed by sophisticated theoretical positions, but most are clearly written enough for determined undergraduates—although graduate students may find the volume more useful." – R.D. Morrison, Morehead State University
"A major contribution to animal studies as well as modernist studies, Beastly Modernisms gathers international perspectives that strategically redeploy modern profusions of beastliness—whether within, without, or betwixt and between (sometimes human) animals—in ways geared to advance timely feminist, antiracist, and decolonial critiques." – Susan McHugh, University of New England
Alex Goody is professor of twentieth-century literature & culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019),Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).
Saskia McCracken completed her PhD on Virginia Woolf’s Darwinian animal tropes at the University of Glasgow. Her research has been published in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture: 1880-1950 (2021), Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2022), Animal Satire (2022), and Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human, and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (2024). She also transcribed the first manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge edition.
BY DAVID P. RONDO
Bloomsbury, 2023
ISBN: 9781350356122
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/doing-animal-studies-with-androids-aliens-and-ghosts-9781350356122/
Exploring what can be learned when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them.
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.
Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.
"A great leap forward in the literary-theoretical approach to animal studies. Recommended for students of theory and fantastika. Heartily recomment" —Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School
"Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts provides a brilliantly subtle and compelling discussion of how thinking about entities that aren't animals can change our conceptions of animals by reconfiguring understanding of the human." —John Miller, University of Sheffield
David P. Rando is a professor in the Department of English at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX. He is the author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce (Bloomsbury, 2022); Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology (Palgrave, 2017); and Modernist Fiction and News (Palgrave, 2011).
JML 46.4 (Summer 2023), "Evocations of Intimacy," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51258
Content includes:
Anca Parvulescu
The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Patty Argyrides
Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works
Patricia Morgne Cramer
“Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion”: The Waves as a Modernist Symposium
FREE!
Cory Austin Knudson
Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille
FREE!
Farah Ali
The Invisible Flesh: Mimesis in Jean Genet’s The Maids
Molly B. Lewis
The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard’s Drama
Sina Movaghati
A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man
Yi-chin Shih
Senses of Place: The Black Community in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band
Hsiao-wen Chen
Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Celiese Lypka
“I Look Straight into His Eyes … For the Last Time”: Intimacy and Indifference in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives
Caroline Hovanec
The Modernist Dog
BY DEREK RYAN
Cambridge UP, 2022
ISBN: 9781009182973
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualization of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of the human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enriches our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World War.
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.
Derek Ryan is senior lecturer in modernist literature at the University of Kent. His previous publications include Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and the co-edited volumes The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (2019).
JML 45.1 (Fall 2021) is now available. Find it on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47191.
Calista McRae
“More human than others”: Stevie Smith and the Minds of Pets
FREE
Caroline Hovanec
“Animal/Fool/Clown”: Stevie Smith’s Frivolity
Aleksandra Hernandez
Jack London’s Poetic Animality and the Problem of Domestication
Tali Banin
The Winged Creatures of The Waves and Virginia Woolf’s Figurations of “The One”
FREE
Karen Ya-Chu Yang
Female Biologists and the Practice of Dialogical Connectivity in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer
Michael Davidson
“how to dance / sitting down”: Aging, Innovation, and the Graying of Disability
Benjamin Kossak
A Choreography of Parts: The Impersonal Intimacies of Touch and Movement in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Poetry, Contact Improvisation, and Embodied Reading
Katie Collins
“Her Ruined Head”: Defacement and Bodyminds in Jean Stafford’s Life and Work
Naomi Miyazawa
The Blindness of the Writer in Nabokov’s Despair
Takashi Sakai
Stonewall Offstage: Recontextualizing Tennessee Williams’s Small Craft Warnings
Robert Volpicelli
Modernist Illness Now
Jess Waggoner
Leaky Masculinities, Porous Nations, Queercrip Affiliations
Rainer Rumold
After the Animal Fable: Creaturely Ciphers in transition
