NEW ISSUE! JML 48.2 (Winter 2025) is now LIVE

 

Journal of Modern Literature issue 48.2 (Winter 2025), on the theme "Matter, Meaning, Material" is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/54502

Content includes:

Enrico Bruno

Athleticism, Accommodation, and the Labor Question in Ellison’s “Afternoon” 

Grzegorz Kosc 

From Coinage Metallurgy to Fiat Money: Robert Lowell’s Poetic Evolution 

Sean Collins

Marianne Moore and the Environmental “Octopus” of Modernist Collage

Jeffrey Careyva

“The Mind and the Poem Are All Apiece”: William Carlos Williams and the Dysfluent Poetics of Aphasia 

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Frances Wear

To Worship Burning Art: T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” as the Organon of F.W.J. von Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism

Enaiê Mairê Azambuja

The Tao of the Non-human: Ineffability, Materiality, and Ecosemiotics in Marianne Moore’s Assemblage Poetics

Bowen Wang

Vital Modernism: E.E. Cummings’s Still Life, the Quotidian, and Visceral Poetics 

Ryan Kerr

Anarchism and Misery in Austerity Britain: Alan Sillitoe, Samuel Selvon, and the Origins of Neoliberalism 

Reviews

Emily James and Ellie Lange

The Material Lives and Afterlives of World War I

 

Chen Lin

Giving Voice to the Hidden Muse: A Review of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl 

Orchid Tierney

“The Age of Plasticene”: A Review of Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn 

Cole Adams

Poetry After Criticism, Criticism After Poetry: A Review of The Academic Avant-Garde

Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

A New Realism for Perilous Times

BOOK NEWS: Typographical experiments in modern poetry

The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry

BY DANIEL MATORE

 

   

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192857217 

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-graphics-of-verse-9780192857217?cc=us&lang=en&

Is poetry a visual art? Why do the pages of nineteenth-century poetry look so different to those of twentieth-century verse? Exploiting the expressive possibilities of print--from spacing and indentation to alignment and typeface--is one of the defining ways in which poetry was modernized in the twentieth century. While the visual experiments of European poets have been well documented, the typographical explorations of poets writing in English have been largely neglected. This volume confronts a major unanswered question: why did British and American poets, from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the present day, choose to experiment with the design and lay-out of the printed page?

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This book aims to provide the first detailed account of this lineage of literary style, examining the poetry and criticism of figures such as Ezra Pound, Hope Mirrlees, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, David Jones, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Frances Motz Boldereff, and J.H. Prynne. It draws on unpublished archival materials to show how poets began to draft, sketch, and compose in new and eccentric ways as they annexed the roles of book designer and printer. Typography, it argues, was instrumental in debates about metre, free verse, and the nature of poetry as poems morphed into scores, slogans, maps, and signs. It investigates how the typography of poetry was animated by musicology, psychophysics, linguistics, politics, ophthalmology, cartography, and advertising.

Daniel Matore is lecturer in modern, American and comparative literature at the University of York. He read for a BA and MPhil in English at the University of Cambridge, winning the Betha Wolferstan Rylands Prize. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and has been awarded grants by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has previously been lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Jean Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

NEW ISSUE: JML 47.1 "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature issue 47.1 (Fall 2023), on the theme "Inheritances and Intertexts" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51953

Content includes:

Aakanksha J. Virkar

Max Klinger’s Beethoven (1902), Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and the Anti-fascist Poetics of T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan I “Triumphal March” (1931) 

Matthew Thompson

Mobilizing Great War Literature: Rereading the English Canon through Mulk Raj Anand’s Across the Black Waters

Courtney Ferriter

Inheriting the Language of Stein: The Pragmatist Poetics of Harryette Mullen

Paula Vene Smith

Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen

Erin Yanota

E.E. Cummings’s Shakespeare and the Modernist Middlebrow Sonnet

Dan Sperrin

The Augustan Plath: “Gulliver” and Other Poems

Sam Walker

“[S]ongs of allusion”: Sterling Brown, Harryette Mullen, and the Roots of Poetic Recycling

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Jason Ciaccio

Modernity’s Waking Dreams: Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, and the Illuminations of Twilight States

Brian Brennan

“Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus”: W.H. Auden and the Latin Poet Venantius Fortunatus

Reviews 

Catherine Enwright

David Jones’s Medieval Voices: A Review of Poet of the Medieval Modern by Francesca Brooks

Layne M. Farmen

Gazing into the Eclipse: A Review of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Yingjie M. Cheng

“Possible, Possible, Possible”: Katherine Mansfield Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Burt Kimmelman

The New American Poetry, Personism, and the Cold War

Daniel T. O’Hara

The Gospel According to Lazarus