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 48.3 "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE

Journal of Modern Literature 48.3 (Spring 2025) on the theme "Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55227

Content includes

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Editor’s Introduction: Human-Nonhuman Transgressions and the Global Uncanny

Romy Rajan

Subaltern Mosquitoes and Cyborg Histories in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

FREE

Tracy A. Stephens 

Kinship as a Counter to the Settler Gaze in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians 

Emad Mirmotahari 

Revisiting Juan José Saer’s El entenado / The Witness—Forty Years Later 

Isabelle Wentworth

Fluid Dynamics of Queer Desire: Ellen van Neerven’s “Water” and Lía Chara’s Agua 

Trevor Westmoreland

Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West 

Xiaofan Amy Li

Neo-Surrealism in Hong Kong: The Fiction of Hon Lai-chu and Dorothy Tse

Stanka Radović

Alice in Monsterland: Neocolonial Investigation in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes

Mara Reisman 

Grotesque Spaces and Transformative Nature in Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque 

Tiasa Bal and Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Memory, Uncanny, and Spectrality in Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon 

Umar Shehzad

“[D]elete the face it’s preferable”: Prosopagnosia as an Artistic Practice in Samuel Beckett’s Work

Xiaoshan Hou and Fuying Shen

Puppet and Paralipsis: The Performance of Maria and the Narrator in Joyce’s “Clay”

Derek Ryan 

Review: Abstraction for All

BOOK NEWS: Expansive temporality in queer experience

Never on Time, Always in Time: Narrative Form and the Queer Sensorium 

By Kate McCullough

Ohio State UP, 2024.

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1577-7

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215777.html

Queer futures begin with the body. In Never on Time, Always in Time, Kate McCullough explores how writers summon queer bodily experiences by way of the senses: these experiences have much to tell us about the pasts, presents, and futures of queer life. The author discusses how narrative form and techniques represent the senses in order to open a more expansive temporality for writers and readers. 

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.

Can queer futures contain the utopic, while also addressing the violence of the past and present? McCullough argues that a narratology that incorporates the senses is integral to conceptions of queer time, which in its most potent, palpable, and radical expression depends on a rendering of the senses. Never on Time, Always on Time looks at works by Monique Truong, Carol Rifka Brunt, Mia McKenzie, and Alison Bechdel to explore how they invoke the senses to narrate what otherwise seems to be non-narrativizable. McCullough thus reveals a vital queer narratology at work, a mode of reading and writing the senses toward a survivable future. She calls this cluster of contemporary texts “narratives of the queer sensorium,” and argues that representations of the senses in these texts open new perspectives onto history, futurity, and relationality.

“Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.” —G. Sikorski, CHOICE

“Never on Time, Always in Time is a groundbreaking work in narrative theory. It accomplishes a queer narratology that clearly and coherently connects specific narrative devices with such major concerns of queer theory as temporality, futurity, materiality, affect, and anti-heteronormative resistance. A transformative work.” —Robyn Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

 

Kate McCullough is associate professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Regions of Identity: The Construction of America in Women’s Fiction, 1885–1914.

BOOK NEWS: Spirit forces in global contemporary novels

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel 

BY HILARY THOMPSON

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350373815

https://www.bloomsbury.com/worldly-spirits-extrahuman-dimensions-and-the-global-anglophone-novel-9781350373815/

Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings—were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses—as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of "magical realism," Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds.

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.

Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction.

A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Hilary Thompson is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium (2018) and has published multiple articles on Amitav Ghosh and on global anglophone literature, biopolitics, and the Anthropocene.

BOOK NEWS: The struggle to make novels matter 1965-99

 Novel Competition: American Fiction and the Cultural Economy, 1965-1999

BY EVAN BRIER

U of Iowa P, 2024

ISBN: 9781609389390

https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/novel-competition

Novel Competition describes the literary and institutional struggle to make American novels matter between 1965 and 1999. As corporations took over the book business, Hollywood movies, popular music, and other forms of mass-produced culture competed with novels as never before for a form of prestige that had mostly been attached to novels in previous decades. In the context of this competition, developments like the emergence of Rolling Stone magazine, regional publishers, Black studies programs, and “New Hollywood” became key events in the life of the American novel. Novels by Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, Toni Cade Bambara, Cynthia Ozick, and Larry McMurtry—among many others—are recast as prescient reports on, and formal responses to, a world suddenly less hospitable to old claims about the novel’s value. This book brings to light the story of the novel’s perceived decline and the surprising ways American fiction transformed in its wake.

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.

“Novel Competition is a beautifully written institutional history of the literary novel in the United States from 1965 to 1999. Placing the novel in a larger cultural field—in competition with journalism, popular music, and films for cultural prestige—Brier illuminates not only novels, but their readers, critics, editors, publishers, and booksellers.”—Erin A. Smith, University of Texas at Dallas

“Novel Competition confronts a fascinating and important subject: an examination of how the novel came to matter differently over the last third of the twentieth century. This decline is something that scholars of the novel have bemoaned for some time, and Brier offers a useful approach to making sense of it without resorting to well-trod and over-simplified answers. It is an engaging and important book.”—Emily Johansen, author of Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Life

“As a longtime Evan Brier fan, I’ve been eagerly waiting this book, his account of the American novel’s response to its declining fortunes. Brier dazzles with a virtuosic reading of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood that takes us through the culture of The New Yorker, the Kansas literati, and the first stirrings of publishing’s conglomeration. He delivers an extraordinary investigation into Toni Morrison’s career as an editor—culminating in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters—and her publication of The Black Book. We follow Philip Roth to Eastern Europe and Cynthia Ozick’s and Saul Bellow’s characters into diaspora. Minimalism, rock and roll, New Hollywood, Rushdie’s fatwa, the American West—an astounding account of Larry McMurtry’s career—the memoir boom. Brier touches it all. Brier quietly transcends the limitations of dominant norms in the practices of literary history and the sociology of literature to give us an nth-dimensional view of American literature since 1965: how the novel became residual. He tells us what it means to believe—or disbelieve—in the power of fiction. It’s no less than thrilling.”—Dan Sinykin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

Evan Brier is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He is author of A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. He lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

BOOK NEWS: Bolaño's and Pynchon's hyperbolic style

Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon's and Bolaño's Late Maximalist Fiction

BY SAMIR SELLAMI

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501360497

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hyperbolic-realism-9781501360497/

What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. 

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.

Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

"Samir Sellami writes with brilliant clarity and makes difficult arguments easy to follow. Philosophers and critical theorists should study his techniques." —Kathryn Hume, Pennsylvania State University

Samir Sellami is a literary critic and, together with Tobias Haberkorn, founding editor of the Berlin Review. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and media studies from the University of Perpignan and the Federal Fluminense University in Nitéroi, Brazil. His research interests include post-avantgarde writing in the Americas, critiques of strong narrativity, aesthetic autodidacticism, and the intersectionality of genre, affect, and form.

BOOK NEWS: 21st century American authors grapple with the construct of whiteness

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

BY STEPHANIE LI

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

ISBN 978-1-5179-1574-2

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/ugly-white-people

Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors (Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others) as they grapple with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take, Stephanie Li examines the tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice.

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 questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

"Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness." — Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

"The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share." — David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

JML 47.2 (Winter 2024), "Contemporary Works" is now LIVE!

 

Journal of Modern Literature 47.2 (Winter 2024), on the topic "Contemporary Works," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52288

Content includes:

Editorial News

Maysaa Jaber

“I am a celebrated murderess”: Female Criminality and Multiple Personalities in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Klem James

Particules Flottantes: Mutable Identity and Postmodern “Schizophrenia” in the Works of Michel Houellebecq

FREE!

Rhys William Tyers

Houellebecq’s Platform: The Detective Novel and Its Infinite Boundary

Ian Almond

Armenians in Modern Turkish Literature: The Ghost Stories of Orhan Pamuk 

Jessica Morgan-Davies

Intermediality and the Politics of (Un)Making in Agnès Varda’s Visages Villages

Elin Käck 

A Spatiotemporal Collage Aesthetic: Poets and Poetry in Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future

Ciara Moloney

Word and Image in Alison Bechdel’s Memoirs

Daniel Dufournaud

“Reduced to Near Nothingness”: Don DeLillo’s Ethico-Political Project in Cosmopolis

Daniel R. Adler 

Making Visible the “Mental Wreckage”: A Historical Materialist Reading of Milkman 

FREE!

Alexandra Lawrie

“The lost boys of privilege”: Triangulation and the End of History in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School 

Geoff Hamilton

Finite Jest: Irony and Healing in There There

Reviews

Aimee Pozorski

Language, Trauma, and Medicine: A Review Essay of John Zilcosky’s The Language of Trauma and a Defense of Trauma Theory

Sol Peláez

An Intimacy of Strangers: An Aesthetic Clinic

BOOK NEWS: Using Animal Studies tools to approach liminal figures in fiction

Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in Fiction

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). 

Book News: 1980 interview with Borges now in print

An Interview with Borges / Una entrevista a Borges 

BY FABIAN SPAGNOLI AND JORGE LUIS BORGES

Introduction by Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, translation by Jillian Tomm

 

Adolf Hoffmeister, Jorge Luis Borges, 1965

Damocle Edizioni, Venezia (Italy), 2023

ISBN: 978-88-32163-35-3

https://damocleedizioni.com/2023/04/28/fabian-spagnoli-una-entrevista-a-borges-an-interview-with-borges/

This previously unpublished interview of Jorge Luis Borges taken in 1980 by Fabian Spagnoli represents a great literary revelation.

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.

Aspiring to become a journalist, Fabian Spagnoli was a high school student when he decided to interview Borges. Right after calling him for the first time, Spagnoli barely had the time to grab a recorder when he was immediately invited to speak with Borges in his apartment in Calle Maipú (Buenos Aires). The two extensively discussed Spagnoli’s interests in literature and foreign languages, as well as his future aspirations. This occasion led Borges to share personal memories from his life, his teaching experience in the United States, and his time in Geneva. Despite such accomplishment, Spagnoli never published the interview.

The interview is now published by Damocle Edizioni, a Venetian independent publishing house, in a double Spanish-English version. Transcribed and translated by Jillian Tomm and introduced by Carlo Alberto Petruzzi, the text is enriched with several footnotes which help to contextualize references to Borges’s works, relationships, and circumstances discussed in the interview.

Presented 37 years after Borges’s death, this interview represents a unique document for Borges scholars and all those interested in his literary work and life.

Book News: The possibilities and perils of disappearing acts in queer fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

BY BENJAMIN BATEMAN

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192896339

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/queer-disappearance-in-modern-and-contemporary-fiction-9780192896339

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. 

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.

Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

• Places modernist classics in conversation with contemporary queer and environmental fiction
• Intertwines literary studies, queer theory, and the environmental humanities
• Advances critical alternatives to 'coming out' narratives
• Revises theories of gender and sexual performativity

Benjamin Bateman is senior lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature at The University of Edinburgh and author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Oxford UP, 2017). He previously held a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he also served as director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities. 

BOOK NEWS: The effects of financialized discourse on post-2008 Irish fiction

Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction

BY MARY M. MCGLYNN

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815637868

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5168/broken-irelands/

While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In Broken Irelands, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.

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.

Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.

"McGlynn identifies fascinating patterns in contemporary Irish fiction and persuasively connects these to the cultural logics of the time period.…This is a complex and challenging endeavor and McGlynn does it with a sophistication that is dizzyingly brilliant."—Claire Bracken, Union College

"Broken Irelands offers a carefully calibrated analysis of capital, class, and narrative form in the post-Celtic Tiger Irish novel. Deftly combining literary criticism, theories of neoliberalism, and studies of late capitalist modernity, McGlynn contends, convincingly, that it is at the level of formal brokenness, rhetorical technique, and syntactical and stylistic strangeness and distress that something like the politics of contemporary Irish fiction discloses itself. Written with brio, critical affection for its subject matter, and intelligent insight, Broken Irelands sets an impressively high bar for future reflection on these topics."—Joe Cleary, Yale University

Mary M. McGlynn is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar for Irish Studies.

Book News: The narrowed politics of form in contemporary literature

 Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature

BY MITCHUM HUEHLS

Ohio State UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1524-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215241.html

Can form be political? Do specific aesthetic and literary forms necessarily point us toward a progressive or reactionary politics? Artists, authors, and critics like to imagine so, but what happens when they lose control of the politics of their forms? In Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature, Mitchum Huehls argues that art’s interest in revolution did not end with the twentieth century, as some critics would have it, but rather that the relationship between literary forms and politics has been severed, resulting in a twenty-first century investment in forms of generality such as genre, gesture, constructivism, and abstraction. 

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.

Focusing on three particular domains (art, theory, and revolution) in which the relationship between form and politics has collapsed, Huehls shows how twenty-first-century US fiction writers such as Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rachel Kushner, Salvador Plascencia, and Sheila Heti are turning to forms of generality that lead us toward a more modest, ad hoc, context-dependent way to think about the politics of form. The result is the first major study of generality in literature.

“With theoretical capaciousness, thematic timeliness, and rhetorical clarity, Art, Theory, Revolution makes a much-needed intervention into ongoing discussions about fictional realism, historical fiction, and political forms. In this way, Huehls promises to enliven debates about how novels possess their own political agency and contribute aesthetically to the making of theory.” —Alexandra Kingston-Reese, author of Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

“Huehls captures what’s exciting and unique about recent American fiction and remains clear-sighted despite dealing with difficult concepts in aesthetic theory, deconstructive thinking, and the politics of revolution. Art, Theory, Revolution breaks new ground in how we understand cultural production after postmodernism.” —Daniel Grausam, author of On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War

Mitchum Huehls is associate professor in the Department of English at UCLA. He is the author of After Critique: Twenty-First Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age and Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time and co-editor (with Rachel Greenwald Smith) of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture.

Book News: Risk as the crux of theatre

When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays

BY EDWIN WONG

Friesen Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3 

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000213016212/Edwin-Wong%2C-Gabriel-Jason-Dean-and-Nicholas-Dunn-%26-Emily-McClain-When-Life-Gives-You-Risk%2C-Make-Risk-Theatre

Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.

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.

Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.

Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.

Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.

Book News: Interviews with innovative Choctaw author LeAnne Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe

EDITED BY KIRSTIN L. SQUINT

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496836441

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-LeAnne-Howe

Conversations with LeAnne Howe is the first collection of interviews with the groundbreaking Choctaw author, whose genre-bending works take place in the US Southeast, Oklahoma, and beyond our national borders to bring Native American characters and themes to the global stage. Best known for her American Book Award–winning novel Shell Shaker (2001), LeAnne Howe (b. 1951) is also a poet, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, theorist, and humorist. She has held numerous honors including a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship in Amman, Jordan, from 2010 to 2011, and she was the recipient of the Modern Language Association’s first Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for her travelogue, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013).

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.

Spanning the period from 2002 to 2020, the interviews in this collection delve deeply into Howe’s poetics, her innovative critical methodology of tribalography, her personal history, and her position on subjects ranging from the Lone Ranger to Native American mascots. Two previously unpublished interviews, “‘An American in New York’: LeAnne Howe” (2019) and “Genre-Sliding on Stage with LeAnne Howe” (2020), explore unexamined areas of her personal history and how it impacted her creative work, including childhood trauma and her incubation as a playwright in the 1980s. These conversations along with 2019’s Occult Poetry Radio interview also give important insights on the background of Howe’s newest critically acclaimed work, Savage Conversations (2019), about Mary Todd Lincoln’s hallucination of a “Savage Indian” during her time in Bellevue Place sanitarium. Taken as a whole, Conversations with LeAnne Howe showcases the development and continued impact of one of the most important Indigenous American writers of the twenty-first century.

Kirstin L. Squint is the Whichard Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Humanities (2019–2022) and associate professor of English, specializing in Native American literatures, at East Carolina University. She is author of LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature and coeditor of Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies. She is also a contributor to Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to “Hillbilly Elegy,” winner of the 2020 American Book Award for criticism.

Book News: How do minds work?

Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative

BY TORSA GHOSAL

Ohio State UP, 2021

ISBN:  978-0-8142-1482-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214824.html

What is the relationship between aesthetic presentation of thought and scientific conceptions of cognition? Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind: Mode, Mediation, and Cognition in Twenty-First-Century Narrative answers this question by offering incisive commentary on a range of contemporary fictions that combine language, maps, photographs, and other images to portray thought. Situating literature within groundbreaking debates on memory, perception, abstraction, and computation, Ghosal shows how stories not only reflect historical beliefs about how minds work but also participate in their reappraisal. 

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.

Out of Mind makes a compelling case for understanding narrative forms and cognitive-scientific frameworks as co-emergent and cross-pollinating. To this end, Ghosal harnesses narrative theory, multimodality studies, cognitive sciences, and disability studies to track competing perspectives on remembering, reading, and sense of place and self. Through new readings of the works of Kamila Shamsie, Aleksandar Hemon, Mark Haddon, Lance Olsen, Steve Tomasula, Jonathan Safran Foer, and others,  Out of Mind generates unique insights into literary imagination’s influence on how we think and perceive amid twenty-first-century social, technological, and environmental changes.

Listen to author Torsa Ghosal discuss "What Contemporary Literature and Science Tell Us about Forgetting" on The Academic Minute: https://academicminute.org/2021/09/torsa-ghosal-california-state-university-sacramento-what-contemporary-literature-and-science-tell-us-about-forgetting/

“Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind urges us to be more open-minded (pun intended) and embrace explanatory pluralism for how minds work.” —Sue Kim, author of On Anger: Race, Cognition, Narrative

“As cognitive literary studies moves more adeptly across narrative media, Torsa Ghosal’s Out of Mind admirably takes media-conscious, multimodal fictions into the fold, exploring the ways in which narrative fiction culturally and historically encodes what we think we are doing when we perceive, map, remember, and forget our own lived experiences.” —David Ciccoricco, author of Reading Network Fiction

Torsa Ghosal is assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.

Book News: Reconsidering realism in contemporary British fiction

Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism

BY EMILIE WALEZAK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350171350

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rethinking-contemporary-british-womens-writing-9781350171350/

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A.S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader.

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.

Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Emilie Walezak is professor of Contemporary English at the University of Nantes, France. A specialist of contemporary British women writing, she has devoted several articles to the works of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Hall, Rose Tremain and Jeanette Winterson. She is the author of Rose Tremain. A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Book News: revised, expanded study of Colson Whitehead

 Understanding Colson Whitehead, revised and expanded edition

BY DEREK C. MAUS 

U of South Carolina P, 2021

ISBNs: 978-1-64336-174-1 paperback

978-1-64336-173-4 hardback

978-1-64336-175-8 ebook

https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Colson-Whitehead-revised-and-expanded-edition

In 2020 Colson Whitehead became the youngest recipient of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Although Whitehead's widely divergent books complicate overarching categorization, Derek C. Maus argues that they are linked by their skepticism toward the ostensible wisdom inherited from past generations and the various forms of "stories" that transmit it. Whitehead, best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Underground Railroad, bids readers to accompany him on challenging, often open-ended literary excursions designed to reexamine—and frequently defy—accepted notions of truth.

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.

Understanding Colson Whitehead unravels the parallel structures found within Whitehead's books from his 1999 debut The Intuitionist through 2019's The Nickel Boys, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. By first imitating and then violating their conventions, Whitehead attempts to transcend the limits of the formulas of the genres in which he seems to write. Whitehead similarly tests subject matter, again imitating and then satirizing various forms of conventional wisdom as a means of calling out unexamined, ignored, or malevolent aspects of American culture.

Although it is only one of many subjects that Whitehead addresses, race is often central to his work. It serves as a prime example of Whitehead's attempt to prompt his readers into revisiting their assumptions about meanings and values. By upending the literary formulas of the detective novel, the heroic folktale, the coming-of-age story, the zombie apocalypse, the slave narrative, and historical fiction, Whitehead reveals the flaws and shortcomings by which Americans have defined themselves. In addition to evoking such explicitly literary storytelling traditions, Whitehead also directs attention toward other interrelated historical and cultural processes that influence how race, class, gender, education, social status, and other categories of identity determine what an individual supposedly can and cannot do.

"With Understanding Colson Whitehead, Derek Maus offers an invaluable, readable, and comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the current era's most important authors. Few writers have shifted genres, styles, and tones so masterfully, and Maus helps readers understand how Whitehead's work all fits together."—Cameron Leader-Picone, Kansas State University

"Understanding Colson Whitehead is an indispensable study about an incredibly inventive contemporary novelist. Derek C. Maus produces superb and meticulous analyses of The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad, and Whitehead's other books. This engaging examination advances our views of an author whose idiosyncratic novels captured the attention of countless readers and earned astonishing levels of critical acclaim." —Howard Rambsy II, Author of Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers

Derek C. Maus teaches contemporary literature at the State University of New York at Potsdam. He is also the author of Jesting in Earnest: Percival Everett and Menippean Satire and Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. He is also the editor or coeditor of Conversations with Colson Whitehead; Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights; Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction; and Angry Rain: A Memoir by Maurice Kenny.

Book News: first person plural in contemporary fiction

 We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction

BY NATALYA BEKHTA

Ohio State UP, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1441-1 Hardcover

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814214411.html

Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction analyzes a storytelling form shaped by the pronoun “we,” probing the tensions between individuality and collectivity in more recent narratives in English. Despite a growing interest in collective characters and the we-form in narratology and beyond, narrative theory has not yet done justice to the plural voice in fiction. In fact, the formulation of a poetics of collective expression needs clear theoretical conventions and a reassessment of established concepts in order to approach plural voices and agents on their own terms. We-Narratives addresses this demand by distinguishing between indicative and performative uses of the first-person plural pronoun in fiction and by identifying formal and rhetorical possibilities of stories told by group narrators.

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.

What does it mean for a multitude to speak as one? How can a truly collective narrative voice be achieved or lost? What are its aesthetic and political repercussions? In order to tackle these questions, Bekhta reads a range of contemporary novels and short stories by Jeffrey Eugenides, Joshua Ferris, Toby Litt, Zakes Mda, Joyce Carol Oates, and Julie Otsuka. She also focuses on narrative innovation by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, and Susan Sontag. These narratives feature group protagonists and narrators and therefore offer insight into collective narrative discourse and focalization, construction of communal knowledge and unreliability. We-narrative, taken as a distinct storytelling form, illuminates fiction’s expressive potential and nuances models of narrative analysis.

“Combining theoretical sophistication, interpretive acumen, and a broad range of narratological insights, Natalya Bekhta’s We-Narratives delivers a compelling account of narratives cast in the we-form.” —Marco Caracciolo

Natalya Bekhta is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

Book News: Embracing the refugee

The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America

BY TIMOTHY K. AUGUST

Temple University Press, 2020

ISBN Paper: 978-1-4399-1531-8

http://tupress.temple.edu/book/20000000009352

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the underlying structures of power that create refugees in the contemporary world.

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.

August looks at the outside forces that shape refugee representation and how these expressions are received. He considers the visual legacy of the Southeast Asian refugee experience by analyzing music videos, graphic novels, and refugee artwork. August also examines the power of refugee literature, showing how and why Southeast Asian American writers look to the refugee position to disentangle their complicated aesthetic legacy.

Arguing that “aesthetics” should be central to the conceptualization of critical refugee studies, August shows how representational structures can galvanize or marginalize refugees, depending on how refugee aesthetics are used and circulated.

"August presents a compelling and multifaceted analysis of Southeast Asian refugee artistic expression....The Refugee Aesthetic is critical, interdisciplinary, and brings needed humanity to the scholarship of migration.... (August) lays a detailed foundation for envisioning and re-envisioning what it means to be a refugee and exploring what that truer and more complex meaning tells America about itself."

—Ethnic and Racial Studies

“In the space between dominant American rhetorics of condescension or benevolence and emergent voices of authors who turn the release of information into artful acts of negotiation, Timothy August locates what he argues as the politics of the refugee aesthetic. Written with sensitivity to bring attention to subjective nuances of pain, belonging, reflexivity, and hope in numerous Southeast Asian American narratives and artworks, this book is a compelling testament to a stigmatized population’s admirably creative uses of discursive forms.”

—Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience

“This erudite yet admirably lucid book brings to bear on refugee writing a new and productive set of theoretical frameworks that particularly emphasizes aesthetics and the visual. It offers fresh, compelling readings of works from Thi Bui’s graphic Narrative, The Best We Could Do, to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer. As a result, The Refugee Aesthetic immediately proves its worth to a wide audience, from readers interested in race and U.S. literature to those seeking guidance to the contemporary literary scene.”

—Timothy Yu, author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965

Timothy K. August is an Associate Professor of English at Stony Brook University.