BOOK NEWS: Examining transhistorial re-imaginings of the early American past in literary and creative media

Early America and the Modern Imagination: Rewriting the Past in the Present 

Edited by Patrick M. Erben and Rebecca L. Harrison

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399536172

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-early-america-and-the-modern-imagination.html

Recurring culture war controversies in the US—ranging from reproductive freedom and gender identity to racial inequality and immigration—often turn public attention to early American precedents. At the same time, early American figures and tropes enjoy a stunning cachet in popular culture. Early America and the Modern Imagination squarely interprets the significance and cultural uses of these transhistorical re-imaginings of the early American past. While drawing productively on public memory scholarship, this volume augments its neglect of early American studies. The collection’s critical and pedagogical essays investigate how a variety of modalities—including literature, film, television, theatre, video games and graphic novels—rescript early America as a usable past for contemporary audiences. Early America and the Modern Imagination, therefore, interprets early American themes and their present-day echoes to grapple with the evolving and highly contested import of the American nation’s past in the present cultural moment.

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.

• Analyses the pervasive use of early American themes in contemporary culture, including literature, television series, film, theatre, graphic novels and video games
• Combines expertise in early American research methods with the study of new modalities (such as video games and graphic novels) and cultural paradigms (such as restorative approaches to Native American history and sovereignty)
• Interfaces with the burgeoning field of memory studies/public memory, especially its examination of cultural artifacts as mediators of a shared past
• Models innovative methodological approaches for navigating transhistorical topics and textualities that so far lack robust scholarly treatment
• Foregrounds particular strengths in Native American and Indigenous studies, African American studies, Gender and Sexuality studies, and Film studies

"This book is both brilliant and necessary. Each chapter links a deep knowledge of the past to its modern redeployments in contemporary media. In doing so, the book makes a powerful case for the humanities, explaining public memory and showing how important it is for literary scholars to study it. A vital project, and a terrific book." – Abram Van Engen, Washington University in St. Louis

Patrick M. Erben is professor of English at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (2013) and co-edited The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader (2019). Erben is a past president of the Society of Early Americanists and currently serves on the editorial board for Early American Literature.

Rebecca L. Harrison is professor of English at the University of West Georgia. She is the co-editor of the Eudora Welty Review and President of the Eudora Welty Society. Her books include Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez (2013), Teaching, Pedagogy, and Learning: Fertile Ground for Campus and Community Innovations (2017) and Revitalizing Classrooms: Innovations and Inquiry Pedagogies in Practice (2017).

BOOK NEWS: Looking at cities through the stories people tell about them

City Scripts: Narrative of Postindustrial Urban Futures 

EDITED BY BARBARA BUCHENAU, JENS MARTIN GURR, AND MARIA SULIMMA

Ohio State UP, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1552-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215524.html

Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.

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 stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.

“There are tremendous political and economic challenges to creating more just and resilient cities, but City Scripts is a reminder that the stories we tell about cities can be just as important as a new policy or funding scheme. The essays in this volume, along with a great conceptual introduction, are a vital entry point to understanding the importance of literary and cultural analysis in the broader field of urban studies.” —Robert R. Gioielli, author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago

“When reading this book, urban planners in the US and Germany will understand why transdisciplinary city narratives often provide better information on what citizens need than do master plans and voluminous technical reports on sustainable development. While declining industrial cities in the US and in Germany have long been branded as losers of economic transformation and capitalism, the case studies at the heart of this book tell other stories—of successful interventions and revitalization.” —Klaus R. Kunzmann, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London

“City Scripts reenergizes discussions at the intersection of urban studies and literary and cultural studies. Innovatively reading material spaces using narratological tools developed through the analysis of fictional texts, it will be a rich and productive resource for scholars across disciplines.” —Erin James, author of Narrative in the Anthropocene

Barbara Buchenau is professor of North American cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Jens Martin Gurr is professor of British and Anglophone literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Maria Sulimma is junior professor of North American literature and cultural studies at the University of Freiburg.

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.

Book News: The Nordic Avant Garde, 1925-50

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950

Edited by Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, and Tania Ørum

Brill, 2022

ISBN: 978-90-04-52011-0

https://brill.com/display/title/38041?language=en

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It includes 138 color illustrations.

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.

It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Of interest to teachers and students of modernism and the avant-garde, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, art history, literature, cultural history, discourse and ideology of the interwar period.

Benedikt Hjartarson is professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Iceland. He has written and edited a number of books and articles on the European avant-garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.

Andrea Kollnitz is associate professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has published a monograph on nationalist agendas in Swedish art criticism 1908-34 and edited a collection on Fashion and Modernism as well as published research on fashion caricatures, nationalist fashion and art discourses, the avant-garde artist’s role and artistic self-fashioning.

Per Stounbjerg is DPhil in Scandinavian literature and head of the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He has published on August Strindberg, genre studies, avant-garde, modernism and the aesthetics of the ugly.

Tania Ørum is professor emerita at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is general editor of the volumes of A Cultural History of the Avant Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill | Rodopi)