Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
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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.
Journal of Modern Literature seeks to expand a future cluster on ecocriticism of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and poetry.
Submissions should comply with our guidelines, available HERE. Please email a Word or Rich Text Format document, formatted according to the guidelines, to jml.editorial (at) gmail.com.
Edited by Ann Vickery
Cambridge UP, 2024
ISBN: 9781009470230
An invaluable resource for faculty and students in literary studies and Australian studies, this volume is the first major critical survey on Australian poetry. It investigates poetry's central role in engaging with issues of colonialism, nationalism, war and crisis, diaspora, gender and sexuality, and the environment.
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.
Individual chapters examine Aboriginal writing and the archive, poetry and activism, print culture, and practices of internationally renowned poets such as Lionel Fogarty, Gwen Harwood, John Kinsella, Les Murray, and Judith Wright. The Companion considers Australian leadership in the diversification of poetry in terms of performance, the verse novel, and digital poetries. It also considers Antipodean engagements with Romanticism and Modernism.
"Introduction" Ann Vickery
I. Change and Renewal
1. "Models of poet and nation" Philip Mead
2. "War, crisis and identity in Australian poetry" Dan Disney
3. "Cultivating Australian poetry through periodicals" John Hawke
II. Networks
4. "Above and below: sublime and gothic relations in nineteenth century Australian poetry" Michael Farrell
5. "Romanticism, sensibility, and colonial women poets" Katie Hansord
6. "Experiment and adaptation in Australia's modernist poetry" Aidan Coleman
7. "The postwar 'golden generation' (1945–1965)" Toby Davidson
8. "Generation of '68 and a culture of revolution" Corey Wakeling
III. Authors
9. "High delicate outline: the poetry of Judith Wright" Nicholas Birns
10. "Burning Sappho: Gwen Harwood's Incendiary verse" Ann-Marie Priest
11. "Les Murray: ancient and modern" David McCooey
12. "Lionel Fogarty's poetics of address and negative lyric" Dashiell Moore
IV. Embodied Poetics
13. "'The strength of us as women': A Poetics of relationality and reckoning" Natalie Harkin and Jeanine Leane
14. "'Country snarled/ in borders': spatial poetics in Asian Australian poetry" Kim Cheng Boey
15. "Australian poets in the countries of others'" Louis Klee
16. "Writing the Body" Orchid Tierney
17. "Not the poem: in media res" John Kinsella
V. Expanding Form
18. "Hybrid Forms: the verse novel, prose poetry, and poetic biographies" Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington
19. "Electronic, visual and sound poetries in Australia" A. J. Carruthers
Ann Vickery is professor of writing and literature at Deakin University. She is the Author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (2000) and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics of Australian Women's Poetry ((2007)). She is also the co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys into Private Papers (with Maryanne Dever and Sally Newman, 2009).
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
FREE!
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
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
JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) with clusters on Virginia Woolf and literary misfits is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53384
Content includes:
Kate M. Nash
The Ecology of Virginia Woolf’s London Scene
Gabriel Quigley
Moments of Rupture: Woolf, Whitehead, Deleuze
Timothy O’Leary
Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux
Abhipsa Chakraborty
Vernacular Acoustics: Caste, Embodiment, and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935)
Carly Overfelt
“To Suggest the Sound”: Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Long Fiction
Lillianna G. Wright
“A Fascination, Strange and Compelling”: Marriage as the Prevention of Queerness in Nella Larsen’s Passing
Ryan James McGuckin
E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View
FREE
Tim Clarke
The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante’s Ask the Dust
Susan Poursanati and Maryam Neyestani
Sisyphean or Medusan: The Absurd Hero in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea
Anna Nygren
Rewriting the Narrative of Modernisms
Andrew Hui
The Once and Always Baroque
Benjamin Schreier
How to Be a Critic
Daniel T. O’Hara
Memorial Tributes
BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS
Cambridge UP, 2024
ISBN: 9781009287265
Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasizes that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.
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.
Content includes:
Chapter 1 - ‘everybody eating everyone else’
Chapter 2 - Pythagoreans; or, Vegetarians before ‘Vegetarianism’
Chapter 3 - Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel
Chapter 4 - Vegetarianism as Religion
Chapter 5 - Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women’s Liberation
Chapter 6 - Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene
Chapter 7 - ‘Pity the meat!’: Ideology, Metaphor, Violence
"What we have here is a monograph in food studies that transforms the field as a whole. The scope of this project is expansive, the analysis is consistently delightful, and the argument is original, making an important contribution to literary histories of vegetarianism." —Gitanjali Shahani, San Francisco State University
Theophilus Savvas is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He works on postmodernist American writing and the interconnections between history and fiction as well as literature and ecology.
EDITED BY BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN
Bloomsbury, 2023
ISBN: 9781350230118
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/9781350230118/
Bringing together a diverse array of new and established scholars and creative writers in the rapidly expanding field of memory studies, this collection creatively delves into the multiple aspects of this wide-ranging field. Contributors explore race-ing memory; environmental studies and memory; digital memory; monuments, memorials, and museums; and memory and trauma.
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.
Organized around 7 sections, this book examines memory in a global context, from Kashmir and Chile to the US and UK. Featuring contributions on topics such as the Black Lives Matter movement; the AIDS crisis; and memory and the anthropocene, this book traces and consolidates the field while analyzing and charting some of the most current and cutting-edge work, as well as new directions that could be taken.
"Brett Ashley Kaplan has put together an innovative and appealing collection that opens up a dynamic, multipronged vision of memory studies. With fiction and memoir placed side-by-side with essays by scholars, activists, and practitioners, Critical Memory Studies offers new directions for a field rapidly becoming institutionalized. Its global scope, interdisciplinary range, and attention to urgent areas of concern, such as ecology and race, make it a must read for all those concerned with the future of the past. —Michel Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators
"Unique in its combination of creative and scholarly approaches to memory, this rich collection presents the cutting-edge of memory studies. Absolutely essential reading." —Susanne C, Knittel, Utrecht University, Netherlands
"This important volume shows the diversity of contemporary cultural memory studies. It opens new avenues for the field by bringing together scholarly and artistic work in a way that invites us to reflect on the fluidity between fictional and theoretical approaches to cultural memory." —Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland
Brett Ashley Kaplan directs the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies and is a professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her novel, Rare Stuff, was published in 2022 and she is the author of Unwanted Beauty, Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory, and Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth.
EDITED BY JEREMY DIAPER
Clemson UP, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949-97985-5
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54594/
This volume of critical essays provides the first major guide to ecology, environment and nature in literary modernism. It explores the environmental turn and green consciousness in modernist criticism and broadens the boundaries and scope of current ecocritical enquiry. In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism. In the rapidly burgeoning field of environmental studies, it will serve as a vital touchstone for scholars and students alike to explore the major areas and crucial themes in ecocritical modernism.
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.
CONTENTS
“Ecocriticism and Modernism”Jeremy Diaper
“Modernism and the Rural Novel”
Dominic Head
“Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalisation of Nature Poetry”
Elizabeth Black
“‘No poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy”
Elizabeth O’Connor
“‘Has it begun to sprout?’: The Ecological Life of Modernist Corpses”
Julia E. Daniel
“Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetics”
Sharla Hutchinson
“Modernism’s Insect Sense”
Rachel Murray
“Eco-consciousness and Eco-poetics in Modernist Writing”
Fiona Becket
“‘The Parched Eviscerate Soil’: Environmental Thought in Eliot’s Poetry and Prose”
Jeremy Diaper
“The Law of Hoes and Rakes”: Wallace Stevens’s Agrarian Poetics
Jasmine McCrory
“‘Grain by grain’: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene”
Caitlin McIntyre
“‘There All The Time Without You’: Modernism and the Anthropocene”
Peter Adkins
Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles and chapters on T.S. Eliot's agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement. His essays have appeared in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, the Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society UK, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Literature & History. He recently edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on "Modernism and the Environment."
BY MATTHEW M. LAMBERT
UP of Mississippi, 2020
Hardcover : 9781496830401
Paperback : 9781496830418
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Green-Depression
Dust storms. Flooding. The fear of nuclear fallout. While literary critics associate authors of the 1930s and ’40s with leftist political and economic thought, they often ignore concern in the period’s literary and cultural works with major environmental crises. To fill this gap in scholarship, author Matthew M. Lambert argues that depression-era authors contributed to the development of modern environmentalist thought in a variety of ways. Writers of the time provided a better understanding of the devastating effects that humans can have on the environment. They also depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman nature, including animal “predators” and “pests. ” Finally, they laid the groundwork for “environmental justice” by focusing on the social effects of environmental exploitation.
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.
To show the reach of environmentalist thought during the period, the first three chapters of The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s focus on different geographical landscapes, including the wild, rural, and urban. The fourth and final chapter shifts to debates over the social and environmental effects of technology during the period. In identifying modern environmental ideas and concerns in American literary and cultural works of the 1930s and ’40s, The Green Depression highlights the importance of depression-era literature in understanding the development of environmentalist thought over the twentieth century. This book also builds upon a growing body of scholarship in ecocriticism that describes the unique contributions African American and other nonwhite authors have made to the environmental justice movement and to our understanding of the natural world.
"Many of the important authors considered in this study—Nelson Algren, Tillie Olsen, James T. Farrell, and Richard Wright, to name a few—have received insufficient attention from ecocritics, and yet, as Matthew M. Lambert shows in The Green Depression, their work and other writing during the Depression and the World War II eras is profoundly relevant to the roots of contemporary environmentalism that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. "
- Scott Slovic, coeditor of Ecocritical Aesthetics: Language, Beauty, and the Environment
Matthew M. Lambert is assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and Journal of Popular Film and Television.
