BOOK NEWS: Updated edition of Forster's *A Room with a View*

 A Room with a View By E.M. Forster

Randi Saloman, editor

Broadview Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781554814473

https://broadviewpress.com/product/a-room-with-a-view/#tab-description

This updated edition of E.M. Forster’s 1908 classic renders A Room with a View newly accessible to contemporary readers. What may appear to be a straightforward romance, lighter and brighter than the novels Forster would go on to write, has darker undertones as well. The protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, struggles with the constraints of gender and class expectations, and may seem to triumph over them—but A Room with a View deliberately resists the easy satisfactions of a happy ending. Instead, Forster leaves us with the uneasy sense that there is more to the story, and it is our job to discover it in the nuanced twists and turns of his narrative.

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.

Meticulously detailed footnotes and thoughtfully chosen appendices bring the early-twentieth-century Florence of the novel to life. Contemporary reviews of the book, along with relevant essays and other non-fiction writings by Forster and his contemporary, Virginia Woolf, add helpful literary and historical context.

“Readers being introduced (or re-introduced) to E.M. Forster’s Room with a View are treated by Randi Saloman to a beautiful volume, with a deeply informative and accessible introduction that guides us through Forster’s career; illuminating footnotes throughout the novel; and a feast of delights in the appendices. Literary and biographical-minded readers will learn from Forster’s letters, journals, and essays, whereas the visual-minded can linger on images from a contemporary travel guide; stills from the Merchant Ivory film version of the novel; and photographs of Forster, both as a sensitive young novelist and as an éminence grise of English letters.” — Jesse Wolfe, California State University, Stanislaus

“This edition of A Room with a View is the most sensitive, comprehensive, and suggestive that I can imagine. It provides the student with a clear sense of the text’s history and social context, elucidates complex knots of culture lucidly, and vivifies the central issue of sexual knowledge and consent in Forster’s time and ours. The appended materials are excellent in both selection and scope, providing many new avenues into the text and its adaptations.” — Gabriel Hankins, Clemson University

“A wonderful and elegant annotated edition that provides incisive analysis and support to the reader without crowding the core text. Saloman’s judicious use of notes is supremely effective and greatly enhances the experience of reading this classic novel. Broadview’s edition will appeal not only to students, but to curious readers of all stripes.” — Bob Davidson, University of Toronto

Randi Saloman holds the MacDonough Family Faculty Fellowship at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh UP) and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel.

Book News: The "craft labor" metaphor and literary production

Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture

BY CHRISTOPHER KEMPF

Johns Hopkins UP, 2022

ISBN: 978-1421443560

https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12763/craft-class

The hidden history of the creative writing workshop and the socioeconomic consequences of the craft labor metaphor.

In a letter dated September 1, 1912, drama professor George Pierce Baker recommended the term "workshop" for an experimental course in playwriting he had been planning with former students at Harvard and Radcliffe. This was the first time that term, now ubiquitous, was used in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Today, the MFA (master of fine arts) industry is a booming one, with more than 200 programs and thousands of residencies and conferences for aspiring writers nationwide. Almost all of these offerings operate on the workshop model.

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.

In Craft Class, Christopher Kempf argues that the primary institutional form of creative writing studies, the workshop, has remained invisible before our scholarly eyes. While Baker and others marshaled craft toward economic critique, craft pedagogies consolidated the authority of elite educational institutions as the MFA industry grew. Transcoding professional-managerial soft skills—linguistic facility, social and emotional discernment, symbolic fluency—in the language of manual labor, the workshop nostalgically invokes practices that the university itself has rendered obsolete. The workshop poem or short story thus shares discursive space with the craft IPA or hand-loomed Pottery Barn rug—a space in which one economic practice rewrites itself in the language of another, just as right-wing corporatism continuously rewrites itself in the language of populism.

Delineating an arc that extends from Boston's fin de siècle Society of Arts and Crafts through 1930s proletarian workshops to the pedagogies of Black Mountain College and the postwar MFA, Craft Class reveals how present-day creative writing restructures transhistorical questions of labor, education, and aesthetic and economic production. With the rise of the workshop in American culture, Kempf shows, manual and mental labor have been welded together like steel plates. What fissures does that weld seal shut? And on whose behalf does the poet punch in?

Challenging conventional histories of arts and crafts ideology, Craft Class offers a provocative genealogy of the creative writing workshop. Creative writers, in addition to scholars of contemporary American literature, will find this well-written book appealing.   -- John Marsh, Pennsylvania State University, author of Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys: Poverty, Labor, and the Making of Modern American Poetry

Kempf performs a wonderful excavation of the meaning of the 'workshop' for the discipline of creative writing, demonstrating how it arose as a deeply human response to the problem of alienated labor in an industrial capitalist society. In a series of brilliantly chosen and illuminating case studies, he discloses the true historical significance of the craft ideal nurtured in such spaces, reawakening us to the utopian energies that circulate in the writing classroom even now.   -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

Christopher Kempf is a visiting assistant professor in creative writing at the University of Illinois. Recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, and a PhD in English literature from the University of Chicago, he is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost and Late in the Empire of Men.

Book News: Literary studies' engagement with #MeToo

#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

EDITED BY MARY K. HOLLAND AND HEATHER HEWETT

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781501372735

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/metoo-and-literary-studies-9781501372735/

Literature has always recorded a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness about these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.

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.

#MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, who offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also committed to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world.

This collection of timely, wide-ranging, and diverse essays demonstrates the power of #MeToo to reframe prior debates and silences in literary studies. The editors make a compelling case for #MeToo storytelling as part of a long history of representing sexual violence in literature. The essays interweave literary studies, social activism, and pedagogy in generative new readings. #MeToo and Literary Studies is essential reading and invaluable equipment for scholars, teachers, and students engaging with rape culture, misogyny, and literature. 

--Leigh Gilmore, author of Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives

Mary K. Holland is professor of English at The State University of New York at New Paltz. She is the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor, with Stephen J. Burn, of Approaches to Teaching David Foster Wallace (2019).

Heather Hewett is associate professor and chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of the English Department at The State University of New York, New Paltz. Her work on feminism, gender, and contemporary literature has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well as mainstream and literary publications.