BOOK NEWS: An expansive and multifaceted account of the Bloomsbury Group

A History of the Bloomsbury Group 

Edited by Derek Ryan

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009423663

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/history-bloomsbury-group

A History of the Bloomsbury Group ranges more widely across the Bloomsbury group's interdisciplinary activities and international networks than any previous volume. From innovations in the literary and visual arts to interventions in politics and economic policy, core members including Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes are explored in relation to a diverse cast of lesser-studied figures to offer an expansive and multifaceted account of the group's achievements and influence. Leading international scholars provide authoritative and accessible commentaries on a variety of topics under the broad headings of 'Aesthetic Bloomsbury,' 'Global Bloomsbury,' 'Intimate Bloomsbury,' and 'Public Bloomsbury.' Whether addressing established narratives or pushing into new critical terrain, the book demonstrates that, more than a century on from its formation, the Bloomsbury group remains an active and dynamic force in the key critical debates of today.

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.

• Shows how relevant the Bloomsbury group remains for the study of modernism and contemporary culture
• Demonstrates how serious engagement with the Bloomsbury group involves analysis of literature, the visual arts, economics, global politics, gender and queer studies, and more
• Offers a range of historically contextualized readings by experts in the field

Contents

1. The Bloomsbury friction by Derek Ryan

Part I. Aesthetic Bloomsbury:

2. The Bloomsbury novel by Jesse Matz

3. Bloomsbury's shorter fiction by Bryony Randall

4. Bloomsbury and the new biography by Todd Avery

5. Post-impressionism and the Bloomsbury brand by Wendy Hitchmough

6. Bloomsbury and music by Tsung-Han Tsai

7. Poetry in, or around, Bloomsbury by Sara Sullam

Part II. Global Bloomsbury:

8. Bloomsbury, South Asia, and empire by Susheila Nasta and Florian Stadtler

9. Bloomsbury and China by Patricia Laurence

10. Bloomsbury and the USA by Mark Hussey

11. Bloomsbury and Russomania by Rebecca Beasley

12. Cross-channel diplomacy and postwar Bloomsbury by Claire Davison

13. Late Bloomsbury's dialectic of enlightenment by Christine Froula

Part III. Intimate Bloomsbury:

14. Bloomsbury, friendship, and love by Jesse Wolfe

15. Bloomsbury's gender politics by Pamela Caughie

16. Bloomsbury, nudity, and race by Jane Garrity

17. Bloomsbury and psychoanalysis by Gabrielle McIntyre

18. Bloomsbury life writing by Drew Patrick Shannon

Part IV. Public Bloomsbury:

19. Bloomsbury and economics by Paul Crosthwaite

20. Bloomsbury and the meanings of labor by Morag Shiach

21. The Bloomsbury bookshop by Derek Ryan

22. Bloomsbury, education, and meritocracy by Natasha Periyan

23. Bloomsbury and science by Michael H. Whitworth

24. Bloomsbury afterlives by Monica Latham

Derek Ryan is a senior lecturer in modern literature at the University of Kent. His previous books include Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (2022), and the co-edited volumes Cross-Channel Modernisms (2020) and The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018). He is editor of Edinburgh University Press's book series Virginia Woolf – Variations.

BOOK NEWS: Modern literature and the science of sleep

Sleep Works: Experiments in Science and Literature, 1899-1929 

By Sebastian P. Klinger

Johns Hopkins UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781421450803

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53855/sleep-works

At the turn of the twentieth century, sleep began to be seen not merely as a passive state but as an active, dynamic process crucial to our understanding of consciousness and identity. In Sleep Works, cultural historian and literary scholar Sebastian P. Klinger explores the intriguing connections between scientific inquiry and literary expression during an era when sleep was both a scientific mystery and a cultural fascination.

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.

Scientists, physicians, and pharmaceutical companies were at the forefront of this newfound fascination with sleep: some researchers distinguished sleep from related states such as fatigue and hypnosis, while others investigated sleep disorders and developed treatments for insomnia. Meanwhile, literary giants like Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust grappled with their own sleep disturbances and channeled these experiences into their writing. Through the lens of their discoveries, Klinger reveals the broader implications of sleep for concepts of selfhood and agency.

Tracing the emergence of interdisciplinary sleep science and the cultural production of sleep through literature, Sleep Works weaves together literary analysis, historical context, and research in the archives of the pharmaceutical industry to provide a comprehensive and compelling account of how sleep has been understood, represented, and experienced in the modern era.

"So much has been written on dreams in literature, so little on the experience of sleep itself. Klinger's fascinating book breaks the mould by placing texts by Proust, Valéry, Kafka, Rilke, and Schnitzler in the context of the sleep science of the early 20th century, as well as the burgeoning drug industry. Paying close attention to language and form, it shows how literary works generated new modes for discussing and understanding sleep. A major contribution to literature and science studies." — Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford

"Klinger's book is that rare piece of scholarship that takes up a familiar topic and transforms it into a genuinely new field of inquiry. His incisive analyses introduce us to the poetics of good and bad sleep while showing how literary discourses perform their own sleep experiments." — Jan Mieskowski, Reed College

Sebastian P. Klinger is a researcher and teacher-scholar in the department of German Studies at the University of Vienna, as well as an Honorary Faculty Research Fellow in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist depictions of "masculine pregnancy"

Masculine Pregnancies: Modernist Conceptions of Creativity and Legitimacy, 1918-1939

By Aimee Armande Wilson

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438495606

https://sunypress.edu/Books/M/Masculine-Pregnancies

Examines literary depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to reframe the relationship between creativity and gender in 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.

Who is taken seriously as an artist? What does gender have to do with it? Is there a relationship between artistic creation and physical procreation? In Masculine Pregnancies, Aimee Armande Wilson argues that modernist writers used depictions of "mannish" pregnant women and metaphors of male pregnancy to answer these questions. The book places "masculine pregnancies" in works by Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound in the context of interwar debates about eugenics, immigration, midwifery, and sexology in order to redefine the relationship between creativity and gender in modernism. Attending to recent developments in queer theory, Wilson challenges the critical assumption that figures of masculine pregnancy necessarily reinforce oppressive norms. The book's first half shows how some writers indeed used such figures to delegitimize artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The second half then shows how others used masculine pregnancies to extend legitimacy to mannish women, dark-skinned immigrants, and their (pro)creations-and did so a century before the current boom in queer pregnancy narratives.

"…this book does contribute to queer theory, interwar cultural history, and modernist literary studies in a significant way. It will appeal to those who want to explore where these branches of inquiry intersect." — CHOICE

"Masculine Pregnancies opens up important new perspectives on queer reproduction. Drawing on cutting-edge work in queer and trans studies, and carefully considering the entanglements of gender, sexuality, racialization, and class, Wilson reveals the uses, meanings, and contemporary legacies of masculine pregnancy in the modernist period." — Jana Funke, coeditor of Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

Aimee Armande Wilson is associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Conceived in Modernism: The Aesthetics and Politics of Birth Control.

BOOK NEWS: Fresh insights into the 1920s experimental author Mary Butts

Mary Butts: Necessary Contradictions and Feminist Reconstructions

Edited by Joel Hawkes

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501380716

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mary-butts-9781501380716/

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author.

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.

Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these.

This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters cover Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

"Mary Butts wrote marvelous prose—shimmering, intractable, wayward, and piercing. Original in tis range of content as in its design and never sidestepping difficulties, this impressive new collection demonstrates that Butts—trenchant and extreme, bold and generous—has become a voice we need more that ever to reckon with." —Ralph Pite, University of Bristol

Joel Hawkes is a lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is editor of The Collected Essays of Mary Butts (2021) and has published a number of articles and book chapters about Mary Butts. Through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for The Mary Butts Letters Project, with the support of the Butts Estate, he made Butts’s letters available in a print collection and open-access website, marybutts.com.

BOOK NEWS: Tracing feminism's progress in literature and television

Feminism's Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

By Carol Colatrella

SUNY P, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493947

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminism-s-Progress

Explores how popular novels, short stories, and television shows from the United States and Britain illustrate the positive effects of feminism and promote gender equity.

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.

Feminism's Progress builds on more than fifty years of feminist criticism to analyze narrative representations of feminist ideas about women's social roles, gender inequities, and needed reforms. Carol Colatrella argues that popular novels, short stories, and television shows produced in the United States and Britain — from Little Dorrit and Iola Leroy to Call the Midwife and The Closer — foster acceptance of feminism by optimistically illustrating its prospects and promises. Scholars, students, and general readers will appreciate the book's sweeping introduction to a host of concerns in feminist theory while applying a gender lens to a wide range of literature and media from the past two centuries. In exploring how individuals and communities might reduce bias and discrimination and ensure gender equity, these fictions serve as both a measure and a means of feminism's progress.

"This book is a remarkably comprehensive survey of feminocentric novels and television series that offer personal and systemic responses to the continuing oppression of women. Colatrella pulls together dozens of disparate texts to argue that many popular works from the nineteenth century to the present have been promoting feminist principles in ways that must certainly have affected public attitudes toward and understanding of gender discrimination. Feminism's Progress offers a hopeful outlook on the potential for literature and media to bring about positive change in real-world gender politics." — Robyn R. Warhol, coeditor of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions

Carol Colatrella is professor of literature and codirector of the Center for Women, Science, and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is the coeditor (with Joseph Alkana) of Cohesion and Dissent in America, also published by SUNY Press.

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: Literary vegetarians

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century

BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009287265

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vegetarianism-and-veganism-in-literature-from-the-ancients-to-the-twentyfirst-century/E5332A2457468C0DFD58C561CF957055

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.

BOOK NEWS: Psychic connection and porous selves in British fiction

Psychic Connection and the Twentieth-Century British Novel: From Telepathy to the Network Novel

BY MARK TAYLOR

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399524483

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-psychic-connection-and-the-twentieth-century-british-novel.html

Criticism of the novel routinely starts with the assumption that characters must think, develop, and strive for self-fulfillment as individuals. This book challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium. It describes how major writers throughout the twentieth century—many convinced by the supposed findings of parapsychology—rejected the idea of the discrete character. Treating the self as porous, they offered novels structured around the development of communities and ideas rather than individuals. By focusing on D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and Doris Lessing, Mark Taylor demonstrates the need to broaden our approach to character when addressing the novel of the twentieth century and beyond.

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.

• Contends that the twentieth century novel’s approach to character fundamentally shifted in response to contemporaneous theories of psychic connection
• Challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium
• Charts an unmapped trajectory in the novel’s development away from individualism
• Accessibly outlines how psychic speculation informs the conception of character in major twentieth century novels
• Offers valuable tools for analyzing literature without treating the individuated character as a necessary unit

"Taylor’s book offers a fascinating alternative history of the twentieth-century British novel. While the novel form is often seen as the definitive narrative of individualism, Psychic Connection tracks a different path through telepathy, panpsychism, and visions of collective selves, working through D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, and ending with a generative reading of the contemporary ‘network novels’ of David Mitchell. A cogent and consistently compelling counter-narrative." —Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College

Mark Taylor is a specialist in twentieth-century British literature, most recently working as assistant professor in English Literature at HSE University, Moscow. His research focuses on notions of individual and collective selfhood in British literature of the previous century. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic and Science Fiction Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Examining unseen structures and uncertain spaces in crime writing

The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces

EDITED BY MEGHAN P. NOLAN AND REBECCA MARTIN 

Anthem Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781839991172

https://anthempress.com/the-crossroads-of-crime-writing-hb

Over a century ago, in his examination The Sensational in Modern English Fiction (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded—that is, the appeal to fear” (p. 2). It is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal—a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. 

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 volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to and reflect collective fears and anxieties. Drawing upon the insights and expertise of an international array of scholars, the chapters explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. They examine unseen structures and uncertain spaces, and simultaneously provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Agatha Christie, and iconic fictional figures, like Sherlock Holmes, as well as underexplored subjects, including Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find new perspectives on crime writing employing theories of cultural memory and deep mapping.  

This volume features authors and subjects that are global in scope with original, innovative work on crime writing. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find specialized explorations of individual works and authors, while the critical and theoretical approaches and the topical coherence of the collection offer to a wide audience a scholarly overview of crime writing, as a still-growing area of popular interest and a still-evolving field of intellectual exploration.

This distinctive collection investigates boundaries in crime fiction, paying attention to hidden narratives, structures, and spaces. Comprising wide-ranging essays examining topics such as ecology, politics, Black and Indian detective fiction, and true crime, Nolan and Martin’s edited volume makes a powerful contribution to the ever-diversifying field of crime fiction criticism.  — Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire

Nolan and Martin have interestingly brought together analyses of texts likely unfamiliar to English readers and re-evaluations of ones that are overly familiar, making seen how the less visible geo-spatial and genre-spatial organizations have profound bearing on the social contributions of crime fiction. — Malcah Effron, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Meghan P. Nolan, MFA, MA, PhD, is an associate professor of English and Chair of the Honors program at SUNY Rockland Community College. She is a multigenre writer, who focuses on (Neo-)Victorian and Modern literature/crime writing and fragmented perceptions of self-hood through many published academic works, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Rebecca Martin, PhD, is professor emerita of English at Pace University in New York. In addition to her PhD, which focused on the eighteenth-century Gothic novel in England, she holds a graduate certificate in film studies from CUNY Graduate Center, and her interest in crime writing focuses on the hardboiled tradition.

BOOK NEWS: Examining the literary telephone

Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place

BY SARAH JACKSON 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350259607

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/literature-and-the-telephone-9781350259607/

Literature and the Telephone explores the ways that the telephone taps into the operations of reading and writing, opening up our understanding of how, where and why literary communication takes place.

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.

Addressing the telephone's complex, multiple and mutating functions, and drawing on recent work by writers and thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Nicholas Royle, and Eyal Weizman, this open access book considers the linguistic, technical and conceptual disruptions of the literary telephone as well as the poetic and political possibilities of the exchange.

Focusing on the telephonic effects of post-war writing by authors such as Mourid Barghouti, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Raworth, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, and Rita Wong, Sarah Jackson proposes that the uncanny logic of the telephone, and its capacity for ordering and disordering the text, speaks to some of the most urgent concerns of our era.

Examining topics ranging from surveillance and migration to warfare and electronic waste, Jackson argues that the literary telephone offers new ways of conceiving ethical and creative technological futures, as well as different modes of reading, writing and listening across cultures.

"Not just a book about telephony and literature, but a book about how the telephone has active contributed to the deconstruction of literature and culture, while steadily working to deconstruction our own lives. Jackson acts as a deft operator of a complex interational switchboard, taking us through the developments of this process of deconstruction, by way of an exciting range of texts by twentieth-century and twenty-first-century novelists, poets, and theorists." --Nicoletta Asciuto, University of York

"Jackson's elegant study reconceptualizes the relationship between reading, writing, listening, and calling, with an awareness of the wider ethical, political, and spatial possibilities of the exchange, In the true spiring of pioneering work like Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature and Avital Ronell's Telephone Book, it is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the uncanny ramifications between the literary and the tele-technological." --Laurent Milesi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Sarah Jackson is associate professor in modern and contemporary writing at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker (2016), AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018-­2020) and NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017). Her publications include Tactile Poetics (2015), Pelt (2012), and a special issue of parallax on the ‘unidentifiable literary object’ (2019).

BOOK NEWS: An account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature

The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

EDITED BY BENJAMIN KAHAN

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781108918725

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-history-of-queer-american-literature/6DBC1DA60D5B4AC05431401C40AA680D

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

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.

Part I - Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality

"The Transmasculinity Narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic Eighteenth Century" By Sal Nicolazzo

"Queering the Founding; Or, the Revolution in Sex" By Don James McLaughlin

"Whither the Queer History of Slavery?" By Patrice D. Douglass

"Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924" By Madoka Kishi

"The Queerness of World War II" By Guy Davidson

"Queer Bonds of Cold War Sexuality" By GerShun Avilez

"'The Dead Never Die': Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, Queer Temporalities, and the Literature of AIDS" By Tim Dean

"Fiction in the Post–Lawrence v. Texas Era, or Inventing Heteronormative Queerness" By Kate McCullough

"Trans-ing Transcendentalism" By Dorri Beam

"Sentimental Literature and the Erotics of Identification" By Kathryn R. Kent

"Queer Modernism and Misfit Identity" By Octavio R. González

"Imperialism and the Queer Harlem Renaissance" By Fiona I. B. Ngô

"The Mystical Sexuality of the Beats and the Berkeley Renaissance" By Julia Bloch and Ignacio Infante

"The New York School’s Queer Happiness" By Brian Glavey

"Chicana and Latina Lesbian Feminists and the Radical Making of Anthological Archives of Willfulness" By T. Jackie Cuevas

"Queer Literature after Queer Theory" By Michael D. Snediker

Part II - Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality

"Queer Historical Poetics and Queer Formalism: American Poetry before 1850" By James Mulholland

"Queer Mythology in American Poetry, 1855–1913" By Vivian R. Pollak

"Funny Emotions: Queer Lyric from the New Verse to the New American Poets" By Chad Bennett

"Queer American Poetry Now" By Stephanie Burt

"Queer American Drama: Plays, Replays, Yet-To-Be-Plays" By Penny Farfan

"The Gay Genre: Musical Theatre from Show Boat to A Strange Loop" By James F. Wilson

"The Oneiric Golden Age of Gay and Lesbian Pulp" By Stephanie Foote

"Queering Desire in American Science Fiction" By Anna Kurowicka

"Queering Comics Histories" By André Carrington

"LGBT Bestsellers" By Diarmuid Hester and Jack Parlett

"History Touches Us Everywhere: American Queer and Trans Memoir in the Long Twentieth Century" By Emma Heaney

"Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre" By Jules Gill-Peterson

"Queer Types for Early Asian American Literature" By Andrew Way Leong

"The Queerness of Blackness" By Amber Jamilla Musser

"Two-Spirit Writers and Queer Native American Literature" By Alicia Carroll

"Queer Southern Literature and the Dirty South" By Michael P. Bibler and Sharon P. Holland

"Queer DiaspoRican Circuits" By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

"'where sadness makes sense': The Queer Poetics of the Midwest Terrain" By Richard T. Rodríguez

"Queer New England Regionalism" By J. Samaine Lockwood

"Queer Beginnings at the End of the Frontier: Asia and the Pacific in the Making of a Modern Gay American Identity" By Amy Sueyoshi

"Queer American Literature in the World" By Marta Figlerowicz

Part III - Queer Methods

"Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy" By Melissa Hardie

"Gender Variance before Trans: A Literary History" By Xine Yao

"Female Friendship: Romantic Friends and Boston Marriages" By Lillian Faderman

"The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing" By Simon Stern

"'Flung out of space': Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" By Aaron S. Lecklider

"Quantifying Sex" By Joan Lubin

"The Pleasures of Reading Camp" By Teagan Bradway

"The Queerness of Religion" By Tracy Fessenden

"Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time" By Ellen Samuels

"Queer Print Culture: The Market and Circulation of Queer Literature" By Jaime Harker

Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. 

BOOK NEWS: Reassessing the meanings, uses, and limitations of lesbian modernism

Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

EDITED BY ELIZABETH ENGLISH, JANA FUNKE, AND SARAH PARKER

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474486057

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-interrogating-lesbian-modernism.html

Makiko Minow coined the phrase ‘lesbian modernism’ in 1989. Since then, scholars of lesbian modernism have produced crucial work to critique and expand the modernist canon. At the same time, there has been ongoing critical debate about what constitutes a lesbian modernist text, who counts as a lesbian modernist author, and how lesbian modernism relates to queer and trans modernism. This edited volume presents twelve newly commissioned chapters that reassess and interrogate the meanings, uses and limitations of lesbian modernism by exploring a broad range of authors, genres and histories. Individual chapters investigate what work the concept of ‘lesbian modernism’ has done in the past, how its boundaries have been defined and contested, and what voices have been included and excluded. As a whole, the book demonstrates how the concept of lesbian modernism can be mobilized in new and meaningful ways to continue to inform and enrich modernist studies.

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

Introduction, Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker

Part 1: Interrogating Lesbian/Queer/Trans Modernism

Chapter 1: Loving/Hating/Loving Lesbian Modernism, Jodie Medd

Chapter 2: Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism: Christopher St. John, Trans Masculinity and Celibate Friendship in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul, Jana Funke

Chapter 3: The Ontology of the Pluri-Singular Body in Natalie Clifford Barney’s The One Who is Legion or A.D.’s After-Life, Katharina Boeckenhoff

Part 2: Genres and Forms

Chapter 4: Imaginative Biography: Margaret Goldsmith, Vita Sackville-West and Lesbian Historical Life Writing, Elizabeth English

Chapter 5: Modernism at the Margins: Mariette Lydis’s Print Portfolio Lesbiennes, Abbey Rees-Hales

Chapter 6: Inverting the Gaze: Radclyffe Hall and Male Sexual Identities, Steven Macnamara

Part 3: Relationality, Networks and Kinship

Chapter 7: Writing Widows of Lesbian Modernism, Hannah Roche

Chapter 8: Lesbianism in/and the Family: Eva Gore-Booth and the Making of Feminist Modernism, Kathryn Holland

Chapter 9: Lesbian Joyce, Katherine Mullin

Part 4: Histories and Temporalities

Chapter 10: Elizabethan Lovemaking: College Romance and Queer Anachronism in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Lamp and the Bell, Sarah Parker

Chapter 11: The Lesbian Herstory Archives at Fifty, Robin Hackett

Chapter 12: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Reconstruction of Lesbian Modernist Sexual Histories, Jo Winning

"This impressive essay collection showcases the range and—perhaps more crucially—the continuing relevance of lesbian studies to scholars of literary modernism. Interrogating Lesbian Modernism invites readers to reflect on the past, present, and future of the figure of the ‘lesbian’ and will undoubtedly influence how we engage with modernity itself."　—Laura Doan, author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War

Elizabeth English is a senior lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University

Jana Funke is associate professor of English and sexuality studies at the University of Exeter.

Sarah Parker is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

BOOK NEWS: How mid-century authors sought to prevent policies of expulsion

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human

BY DAVID HERD

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192872258

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-against-expulsion-in-the-post-war-world-9780192872258

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a post-war period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made.

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.

Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of rights and recognition — new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking — through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

"Writing Against Expulsion is one of those books that arrives in the world and immediately feels necessary. David Herd asks and brilliantly answers two questions about the condition of unwelcome migrants and the UK government: 'how did we get here' and 'how do we move away from where we are?' Drawing on and building from the works of writers such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, the poet Charles Olson, as well as his own work with Refugee Tales, Herd re-casts conversations around 'political non-persons' to allow space for imagination, humanity and truth. A profound and inspiring book." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

"Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a lucid and compelling report on the individual at the mercy of the bureaucracy of immigration control, `the geo-political non-person`, and how the condition of this figure relates to the aftermath of the 1939-45 War and the subsequent moment of decolonisation. It takes us through the political, philosophical and literary contexts with fluency, passion and rigour. Its engagement with the texts through which the argument progresses is extensive and thoroughly persuasive, and allows the reader to witness the personal journey Herd himself travelled in understanding the issues that are the subject of this wonderful and important book." -- Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including All Just, described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade," and Walk Song, a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India, and Australia and held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He is professor of poetry at the University of Kent and co-organizer of the project Refugee Tales.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist studies meet critical animal studies

Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture

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

• Presents the diverse range of intersections between modernist and critical animal studies
• Includes cutting-edge research contributions from a heterogenous and interdisciplinary range of modernist scholars
• Offers a key research resource for scholars in modernist studies, critical animal studies and cognate areas
• Provides a classroom-ready collection of essays relevant to undergraduate and graduate courses on modernist writing 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.

BOOK NEWS: Global, multidisciplinary approaches to memory

Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches

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.

BOOK NEWS: An exploration of epigraphs and how they work

Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs

BY JARED A. GRIFFIN

Vernon Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781648891144

https://vernonpress.com/book/1157

Common and Uncommon Quotes: A Theory and History of Epigraphs is a prolegomenon to the study of epigraphic paratextuality. Building on the work of Gerard Genette’s paratextual studies, this volume contextualizes and traces the practice of epigraphy in Anglophone literary history, from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. This study explores how epigraphs are used by author-functions as a hermeneutic for their text and to establish ethos with their audience, and how that paratextual relationship changed as publishing opportunities and literacy rates grew over four centuries. The first broad-reaching study of this kind, Common and Uncommon Quotes seeks to understand how epigraphs work: through their privilege on the page, their appeal to conjured ideas of the past, and their calls to citizenship.

Jared Griffin’s Common and Uncommon Quotes is exactly the sort of scholarship I enjoy. It’s thoughtful, engaging, and relevant across a broad range of fields and disciplines. As I read Common and Uncommon Quotes, I continually returned to my research, re-considering the significance of the epigraphs in the texts that figure most prominently in my own work. Griffin’s greatest strength might be his ability to cast the epigraph – almost universally overlooked and ignored – as a broadly significant critical concept that has application for literary historians, genre critics, and rhetoric scholars. I appreciated the genuine sense of curiosity that animates his research, and Griffin achieves that rare balance between rigor and approachability that is so difficult to find in much scholarship. For my own research, I appreciated Griffin’s rhetorical analysis of the role of epigraphs: the discussions of the impact of epigraph on the writer’s authority, their assumed relation to the canon, the position of the audience, and the expectations of the individual reader sparked a thoughtful consideration of the role of epigraphs in my own research into the role of rhetorical theory in the development of the novel in English. I suspect other scholars will have the same response: epigraphs and their impact are so universal that it’s remarkable such scholarship hasn’t been considered and pursued more broadly. —Jack M. Downs, Washington State University

Jared A. Griffin is associate professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He earned his PhD in English, with distinction, from Texas Christian University in 2009. He also holds an MEd in English Education and a BA in English. Griffin is the Language Editor for the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, and he writes a syndicated weekly newspaper column about English etymology and current events. Griffin first studied epigraphy in graduate school, where he worked on theorizing the function of epigraphs in pre-19th century American texts, especially during the American Revolution. He is currently working on a database to archive epigraphs and epigraphed texts, and he has presented on biblical epigraphy at conferences. 

BOOK NEWS: A Black feminist spiritual history

We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism

BY MARINA MAGLOIRE

U of North Carolina P, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-4696-7489-6

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469674896/we-pursue-our-magic/

Drawing on the collected archives of distinguished twentieth-century Black woman writers such as Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, Marina Magloire traces a new history of Black feminist thought in relation to Afro-diasporic religion. Beginning in the 1930s with the pathbreaking ethnographic work of Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston in Haiti and ending with the present-day popularity of Afro-diasporic spiritual practices among Black women, she offers an alternative genealogy of Black feminism, characterized by its desire to reconnect with ancestrally centered religions like Vodou.

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.

Magloire reveals the tension, discomfort, and doubt at the heart of each woman’s efforts to connect with ancestral spiritual practices. These revered writers are often regarded as unchanging monuments to Black womanhood, but Magloire argues that their feminism is rooted less in self-empowerment than in a fluid pursuit of community despite the inevitable conflicts wrought by racial capitalism. The subjects of this book all model a nuanced Black feminist praxis grounded in the difficult work of community building between Black women across barriers of class, culture, and time.

"Magloire's examination is wholly unique to the field and makes a significant treatment that is even more necessary now as the study of Black women's spiritual practices has again come into vogue. A wonderfully complex and well-researched book."—Kinitra Brooks, Michigan State University

"An engaging and thoroughly researched book that brings together well- and lesser-known figures to explore religion, spirituality, and feminism among African American women writers, artists, and scholars. For scholars interested in gender, religion, diaspora relations, and comparative diaspora studies, We Pursue Our Magic is essential."—Tiffany Patterson, Vanderbilt University

Marina Magloire is assistant professor of English at Emory University.