BOOK NEWS: Celebrate Bloomsday with new Cambridge edition of Ulysses with notes

The Cambridge Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes

By James Joyce

Edited by Catherine Flynn

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009568449

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/irish-literature/cambridge-ulysses-1922-text-essays-and-notes-library-edition?format=HB

James Joyce's Ulysses is considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. This new edition – first published in 2022 to celebrate the centenary of the book's first publication – helps readers to understand the pleasures of this monumental work and to grapple with its challenges. Copiously equipped with maps, photographs, and explanatory footnotes, it provides a vivid and illuminating context for the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, as well as Joyce's many other Dublin characters, on June 16, 1904. Featuring a facsimile of the historic 1922 Shakespeare and Company text, this version includes Joyce's own errata as well as references to amendments made in later editions. Each of the eighteen chapters of Ulysses is introduced by a leading Joyce scholar. These richly informative pieces discuss the novel's plot and allusions, while exploring crucial questions that have puzzled and tantalized readers over the last hundred years.

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.

• Provides the 1922 Shakespeare and Company edition with Joyce's own errata notes and an essay on the errata and subsequent editions
• Includes maps and contextual images that help readers visualize the events of the book
• Includes a chronology of Joyce's life and contemporaneous events

Catherine Flynn is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of James Joyce and the Matter of Paris (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and the editor of The New Joyce Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Before studying literature, she practiced as an architect in Vienna, Austria, and in her native Ireland.

BOOK NEWS: Defamiliarizing reading via "deformative" Latin American fiction

Deformative Fictions: Cruelty and Narrative Ethics in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
By Ashley Hope Pérez

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5906-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215654.html

Tapping a rich vein of Latin American literature, Deformative Fictions by Ashley Hope Pérez excavates works that unsettle, defamiliarize, and disrupt access to the conventional pleasures of reading and interpretation. Close readings highlight the nuances of texts that have been misread, underread, or fetishized because they depart from literary norms, including fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Silvina Ocampo. 

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.

Interweaving rhetorical and narratological analysis with reflections on the ethical stakes of writing, reading, and interpreting deformative fictions and fictional cruelty, Pérez issues a resounding entreaty for us to expand our understandings of the value of narrative beyond the logics of utility and comfort. Doing so, she contends, allows readers to embrace the full possibilities of the relationships among authors, readers, and the worlds we inhabit on and off the page. In defamiliarizing the act of reading, deformative fictions reacquaint us with its ethical weight.

“Pérez brings a rich genealogy of Latin American literature into the narrative studies tradition, convincingly arguing why we should read works that refuse to offer us comfort. She offers critical food for thought for researchers and teachers alike, employing a beautiful writing style that illustrates complex ideas with ease.” —Doug P. Bush, author of Capturing Mariposas: Reading Cultural Schema in Gay Chicano Literature

Ashley Hope Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the novels What Can’t Wait The Knife and the Butterfly, and Out of Darkness and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Banned Together: Authors and Allies on the Fight for Readers’ Rights.

Book News: New view of Proust's magnum opus

The World According to Proust

BY JOSHUA LANDY

Oxford UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780197648681

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780197648681?cc=gb&lang=en&

100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way.

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.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest--a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging--through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.

Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.

Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program "Philosophy Talk." His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).

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: A distinctly modern vulnerability

The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds

BY NIR EVRON

SUNY Press, November 2020

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8067-1

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6967-the-blossom-which-we-are.aspx

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 Blossom Which We Are traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of human vulnerability—our intimate dependence on the fragile and time-bound cultural frameworks that we inhabit—as it manifests in the realm of the novel. Nir Evron juxtaposes seminal works from diverse national literatures to demonstrate that the trope of cultural extinction offers key insights into the emotional and ideological work performed by the realist novel. With an analysis that ranges from the works of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott, Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March and Yaakov Shabtai’s Past Continuous, and finally to the current state of the humanities, this book seeks to recover literary criticism’s humanistic mission, bringing the best that has been thought and said to bear on urgent contemporary concerns.

“This book is gorgeously written. What might appear on its face as the yoking together of three culturally remote and only tangentially related texts turns out to function as a genealogy of and meditation upon the emergence of the experience of the culturally tangential.” — Irene Tucker, author of The Moment of Racial Sight: A History

Nir Evron is assistant professor of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Book News: Modernists and Greek Tragedy

Tragedy and the Modernist Novel

BY MANYA LEMPERT
Cambridge University Press, September 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 9781108496025
https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/tragedy-and-modernist-novel?format=HB

This study of tragic fiction in European modernism brings together novelists who espoused, in their view, a Greek vision of tragedy and a Darwinian vision of nature. To their minds, both tragedy and natural history disclosed unwarranted suffering at the center of life. Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, and Samuel Beckett broke with entrenched philosophical and scientific traditions that sought to exclude chance, undeserved pains from tragedy and evolutionary biology. Tragedy and the Modernist Novel uncovers a temporality central to tragic novels' structure and ethics: that of the moment. These authors made novelistic plot the delivery system for lethal natural and historical forces, and then countered such plot with moments of protest - characters' fleeting dissent against unjustifiable harms.

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.

• Explains how modern novelists thought about ancient and modern tragedy
• Unveils the similarities between Greek tragedy and Darwinian evolution
• Explores modernist authors' depictions of nihilism, suicide, and political violence and apathy as cautionary tales for readers today, showing how fiction can endorse and condemn different ethical and political positions

‘This is an extraordinarily erudite book about literary modernism and the relationship between it and the history and theory of tragedy. Lempert's overall discussion of Greek tragedy is absolutely riveting and her close-reading of form is extraordinarily sensitive. Lempert has produced an extraordinarily bold argument that is likely to attract a great deal of attention not only from modernist scholars but from others further afield.' 

--Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California

‘The themes of this book could hardly be more resonant and enduringly relevant to modernist literary studies. This book pits tragedy and modern writing against nihilism – a way of renouncing or not caring about existence – finding a way for moments of light to counter total eclipse of meaning without callow resolution or pat consolation.' 

--Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne

 

Manya Lempert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona. She specializes in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, ancient and modern tragedy and philosophy, and theories of evolution.