BOOK NEWS: Reading Irish women's writing through a queer, postcolonial lens

Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns

By Naoise Murphy

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399547468

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-queering-twentieth-century-irish-women-s-writing.html

A queer, postcolonial reading of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing

• Advances queer studies debates about resistance, progress and ‘bad feelings’ from a peripheral, postcolonial location
• Provides a new reading of canonical Irish women writers that challenges reductive celebratory narratives
• Intervenes in Irish public culture and feminist/LGBT+ history, advocating queer modes of thought as a response to the difficulties of a traumatic past

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.

Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers – Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane – this book unsettles the conventional narratives of modern Irish culture. Despite attempts to impose a linear narrative of progress, feel-good accounts are clearly inadequate to the realities of contemporary Ireland. Guided by a queer refusal to move on from bad feelings, Naoise Murphy disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in the postcolonial state. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, this book pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

"Naoise Murphy considers the fate of several ‘uneasy moderns’ – women whose recalcitrance and knotty attachments to the past rendered them out-of-step with their historical moment. This brilliant analysis of haunted texts and spaces speaks back to the narrative of Ireland’s progressive and secular modernity, pointing instead to the ongoing legacies of colonialism, sectarian violence and patriarchal authority." – Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania

Naoise Murphy is a researcher specialising in twentieth-century literature and queer studies and has taught at the University of Cambridge, Maynooth University and the University of Oxford.

BOOK NEWS: Examining ecological care in postcolonial poetry from the 1970s to present

Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment: Place, Precarity and Justice

By Pramod K. Nayar

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350499089

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/postcolonial-poetry-and-the-environment-9781350499089/

Examining a wide variety of poets from the last three decades of the 20th century to the present, from Asian, African, South American and settler colonies such as Canada and Australia, Pramod K. Nayar maps a poetry of ecological care, vulnerability and resilience.

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.

While environmental fiction has been widely studied, environmental poetry has not received the same level of attention. In Postcolonial Poetry and the Environment, Nayar studies the work of over 50 poets from the Global South and the formerly colonized, including John Kinsella, Tanure Ojaide, Linda Hogan, Kofi Awonoor, Okot p'Bitek, Ben Okri, and Sherwin Bitsui. He traces an ecological consciousness that cuts across human and nonhuman, living and non-living domains. This book is interested in the making, unmaking and remaking of worlds and meanings in the age of cataclysmic climate shifts, while aware of the histories that fashioned the planet in unjust and unequal ways, and to which the poets bear witness, as well as proposing alternative ways of seeing and meaning-making.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India, and is also Distinguished Professor, School of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad. His most recent books include Vulnerable Earth (2024), Nuclear Cultures (2023) Alzheimer’s Disease Memoirs (2021), The Human Rights Graphic Novel (2021), Ecoprecarity (2019), Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic (2017), and others. His essays have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, South Asian Review, South Asia, Narrative, Celebrity Studies, Asiatic, Prose Studies, a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, Biography, among others. Nayar also holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad.

BOOK NEWS: The role of African and Caribbean newspapers in shaping Black political thought

The Moving Word: How the West African and Caribbean Press Shaped Black Political Thought, 1935–1960

By Leslie James

Harvard UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780674279414

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674279414

A revelatory account of Black Atlantic political thought in the era of decolonization, revealing how West African and Caribbean newspapers invigorated debates about imperialism, capitalism, and Black freedom.

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 the 1930s and 1940s, amid intensifying anticolonial activism across the British Empire, dozens of new West African and Caribbean newspapers printed their first issues. With small staffs and shoestring budgets, these newspapers nonetheless became powerful vehicles for the expression of Black political thought. Drawing on papers from Trinidad, Jamaica, Ghana, and Nigeria, Leslie James shows how the press on both sides of the Atlantic nourished anticolonial and antiracist movements. Editors with varying levels of education, men and women journalists, worker and peasant correspondents, and anonymous contributors voiced incisive critiques of empire and experimented with visions of Black freedom. But as independence loomed, the press transformed to better demonstrate the respectability expected of a self-governing people.

"Leslie James’s exceptional study of print culture in the Anglophone Caribbean and West Africa deepens our understanding of the central role newspapers played in the politics of decolonization. Crisscrossing the Atlantic, The Moving Word expands the cast of characters associated with Black anticolonial thought, tracks the dynamic public sphere constituted by newspapers, and documents the diminished place of periodicals after national independence. This is a must read." —Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire

Leslie James is Reader in Global History at Queen Mary University of London and the author of George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire, 1939–1959.

BOOK NEWS: Spatial literary studies, foundations to new approaches

Space and Literary Studies

Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans

Cambridge UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781009424240

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/literary-theory/space-and-literary-studies?format=HB

Our experience of the world is deeply shaped by concepts of space. From territorial borders, to distinctions between public and private space, to the way we dwell in a building or move between rooms, space is central to how we inhabit our environment and make sense of our place within it. Literature explores and gives expression to the ways in which space impacts human experience. It also powerfully shapes the construction and experience of space. Literary studies has increasingly turned to space and, fuelled by feminist and postcolonial insights, the interconnections between material spaces and power relations. This book treats foundational theories in spatial literary studies alongside exciting new areas of research, providing a dual emphasis on origins and innovative approaches while maintaining constant attention to how the production and experience of space is intertwined with the production and circulation of power.

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.

• Discusses foundational concepts in light of contemporary and emergent research in spatial literary studies
• Examines the intersection of space and literary studies through twenty-one concepts and approaches
• Makes theoretical approaches concrete with reference to a transnational and transhistorical selection of literary texts

Contents

Introduction: space and literary studies, Elizabeth F. Evans

Part I. Origins Revisited:

1. Representation, Andrew Thacker

2. Mapping: cheap maps, spatial politics and England's colonies, Kat Lecky

3. Space, disciplinary power and the novel, Philip Howell

4. Public/private: the spatial form of love and labor in the English novel, Nancy Armstrong and Matthew Taft

5. Urban/Rural, Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee

Part II. Developments:

6. Gender, space and feminist geography, Radost Rangelova

7. Plantation: toward a literary history of race, space, and capital in the Anglo-world, Jared Hickman and Aaron Begg

8. Empire, nation and the question of space. Sandeep Banerjee and Atreyee Majumder

9. Postcolonial space: African literary writing and the articulations of worlding, Madhu Krishnan

10. Borders and the liminal, Mary Pat Brady

11. Encountering the community in third space, Megan Jeanette Myers

12. Literary mobilities and the mobilization of space, Charlotte Mathieson

13. Translocality and translocalism, James Mulholland

14. Psychogeography, Joshua Armstrong

15. Mapping empire's horror: literary gis and colonial spatial logic, Alexander Sherman

Part III. Applications and Extensions:

16. Islands, oceans and the production of spatial theory, Johannes Riquet

17. Other/world(ly): a black ecology of outer space, Stefanie K. Dunning

18. Imaginary space, Siobhan Carroll

19. Digital Space, Peta Mitchell

20. Sensory geographies, Sheila Hones

21. Orientations, Eve Sorum

Elizabeth F. Evans, Wayne State University, Detroit, works on modernism, literary and cultural geography, and the digital humanities. Her first book, Threshold Modernism: New Public Women and the Literary Spaces of Imperial London (Cambridge UP, 2019), examines gender and space in writing by British and colonial authors.

BOOK NEWS: Examining domestic servants in contemporary South Asian fiction

Postcolonial Servitude: Domestic Servants in Global South Asian English Literature  

By Ambreen Hai

Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197698006

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/postcolonial-servitude-9780197698006?cc=us&lang=en&#

Postcolonial Servitude explores how a new generation of contemporary global, transnational, award-winning writers with origins in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh engages with the complexities of domestic servitude as a problem for the nation and for the novel. Servitude, to be distinguished from slavery, is a distinctive and pervasive phenomenon in South Asia, with a long history. Unprotected by labor laws, subject to exploitation and dehumanization, members of the lower classes provide essential services to employers whose homes become the servants' workplace. South Asian literature has always featured servants, usually as marginal or instrumental. This book focuses on writers who make servants and servitude central, and craft new narrative forms to achieve their goals. Identifying a blind spot in contemporary postcolonial studies, this is the first full-length study to focus on domestic servants in Anglophone postcolonial or South Asian literature and to examine their political, thematic, and formal significance.

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.

Offering fresh readings of well-known early to mid-20th-century writers, this book shows how South Asian English fiction conventionally keeps servants in the background, peripheral but necessary to the constitution of an elite or middle class. It analyzes closely the formal strategies, interventions, and modes of representation of five younger writers (Daniyal Mueenuddin, Romesh Gunesekera, Aravind Adiga, Thrity Umrigar, and Kiran Desai), who, it argues, pull servants and servitude into the foreground, humanizing servants as protagonists with agency, complex subjectivities, and stories of their own. Postcolonial Servitude reveals a cultural shift in the twenty-first century postcolonial novel, a new attentiveness, self-implication, and ethics, linked with a new poetics.

"In this examination of the ubiquitous figure of the domestic servant in South Asian fiction spanning the twentieth and twenty-first century, Hai illuminates the politics and aesthetics of representation with insight, rigor and compassion. This book will forever transform our understanding of the complexities of servitude fiction." -- Deepika Bahri, Emory University

"We have long needed a sensitive account of domestic servitude and its imbrication with the inadequately realized promise of decolonization. Postcolonial Servitude delivers that as well as a theorization of the violent structuring of intimacy in postcolonial life, while it makes a case for the capacity of fiction to reveal the complexities of these social relations at the same time as it performs the ability of criticism to deepen our understanding." -- Sadia Abbas, Rutgers University, Newark

Ambreen Hai is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor and Chair of English Language and Literature, and Director of South Asian Studies at Smith College. She is affiliated faculty in the program in the Study of Women and Gender. Specializing in Anglophone postcolonial literature from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and 19th-20th century literature of the British Empire, she has published widely on postcolonial and transnational writing, with a focus on South Asia and its diaspora.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Mosquito Narrators and the Subaltern Voice, A Closer Look at JML 48.3

Romy Rajan notes that categorizing the novel The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell "is a challenge for the critic, because of the different genres it inhabits. It is historical fiction, domestic fiction, as well as science fiction, and won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020. The generic opacity is no accident—it is at one with the novel’s part-human, part-machine, and part-insect narrator, who also updates the meaning of the subaltern."

Read more here: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/mosquito-narrators-and-the-subaltern-voice-a-closer-look-at-jml-48-3/

His JML 48.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post!

BOOK NEWS: Practical approaches to decolonial scholarship founded in humility

Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities

By Suzanne Bost

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

ISBN 978-1-5179-1821-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918217/quiet-methodologies/

How might foregrounding the writings of colonized peoples transform the ways we work in the humanities? In an era dominated by loud political rhetoric, Suzanne Bost advocates for quieter modes of scholarship: intellectual humility rather than ego, collaboration and conversation rather than singular argumentation, continual reflection and revision rather than defensiveness, and a willingness to believe in different ways of being and knowing rather than adhering to academic norms. With Quiet Methodologies, she demonstrates practical decolonial scholarship and proposes alternative approaches for fostering meaningful engagement.

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.

Turning to feminist, queer, and decolonial writings from writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and many others, Bost reflects on what we do when we work with literature, culture, and ideas. She weaves together multiple voices, methods of writing, and culturally diverse epistemologies and uses creative devices such as collage, her own original poetry, revision, lists, images, and conversation to disengage academic thought and writing from colonial theories and archives that have passed as neutral. Eschewing conventional monograph formats, her work embraces a reciprocal and heterogeneous learning process with profound ethical implications.

Part of a movement of reimagining research and education through care, Quiet Methodologies is a powerful exploration of the possibilities of criticism during crises. It encourages readers to be visionary and pragmatic, challenging current conditions and offering alternative ideas for the future of the humanities.

"Suzanne Bost’s book is a powerful exploration of literary criticism during an age of crises, when planetary, human, and other-species futurities are at stake. It privileges a careful, porous reading of texts that center the decolonial and the resistant. Bost offers a nuanced reflexivity that never crosses into navel-gazing—and asks us to reimagine how we make scholarly arguments through a method that is dialogical, critical, and even tender."—Piya Chatterjee, coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent

"Quiet Methodologies showcases post-oppositional approaches to conventional academic scholarship, creating new opportunities for provocative multispecies, cross-temporal conversations and inter-dimensional communities of knowledge creators. Replacing the combative critique that so often dominates contemporary academic life with intellectual humility, radical inclusivity, invitational pedagogies, and alchemical dialogues, Suzanne Bost offers much-needed possibilities for transformation. I can’t wait to share this book with my students!"—AnaLouise Keating, author of The Anzaldúan Theory Handbook

Suzanne Bost is professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is author of several books, including Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism.

  

BOOK NEWS: First major critical survey of Australian poetry

 

The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry

Edited by Ann Vickery

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009470230

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/european-and-world-literature-general-interest/cambridge-companion-australian-poetry?format=HB

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.

Contents:

"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).

Book News: creative women of the Iranian diaspora

 Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora

BY MEHRANEH EBRAHIMI

Syracuse UP, 2022

ISBN: 9780815636557

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/104/women-art-and-literature-in-the-iranian-diaspora/

Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of “the Other”? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy. Despite the surge in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Rancière, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.

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 is an ambitious, sharply political argument about the urgent stakes of representation that maintains a laser-sharp focus on detail when discussing the individual works in both their textual and visual registers."—Iranian Studies

"Ebrahimi’s book adds to expanding the field of Iranian diaspora studies, as it tackles the relationship between aesthetics and politics through a liberatory lens. Given our current political moment, works such as Ebrahimi’s are a welcome addition to thinking through the subversive potential of cultural representation in the Iranian diaspora."—International Journal of Middle East Studies

"This book makes an important contribution to cultural studies in that it steers us away from only making a paranoid critique of our world and instead reaches to the possibility of ethical democracy."—Dina Georgis, author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East

Mehraneh Ebrahimi is assistant professor of English at York University where she teaches courses in diaspora and world literature. Her research focus is on Middle Eastern literature in light of the ongoing "war on terror."

Book News: Ideology and form in Cold War era world literature

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures 

EDITED BY FRANCESCA ORSINI, NEELAM SRIVASTAVA AND LAETITIA ZECCHINI                  

Open Book Publishers, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-80064-190-7 PDF

(open access electronic; purchase ebook and print below)

https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0254

 

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War.

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 essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms.                 

With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

             

Francesca Orsini is professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian literatures at SOAS, University of London and was Principal Investigator of the MULOSIGE project.

Neelam Srivastava is professor of postcolonial literature and world literature in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK).

Laetitia Zecchini is senior research fellow (Chargée de recherche) at the CNRS in Paris (France) and visiting scholar at Boston University (USA).

Book News: Sisters writing post-independence Jamaica

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard: Folklore and Culture in Jamaica

BY VIOLET HARRINGTON BRYAN

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 9781496836212

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/E/Erna-Brodber-and-Velma-Pollard

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard, two sister-writers born and raised in Jamaica, re-create imagined and lived homelands in their literature by commemorating the history, culture, and religion of the Caribbean. Velma Pollard was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica. By the time she was three, her parents had moved to Woodside, St. Mary, in northeast Jamaica, where her sister, Erna, was born. Even though they both travel widely and often, the sisters both still live in Jamaica.

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 sisters write about their homeland as a series of memories and stories in their many works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They center on their home village of Woodside in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, occasionally moving the settings of their fiction and poetry to other regions of Jamaica and various Caribbean islands, as well as other parts of the diaspora in the United States, Canada, and England. The role of women in the patriarchal society of Jamaica and much of the Caribbean is also a subject of the sisters’ writing. Growing up in what Brodber calls the kumbla, the protective but restrictive environment of many women in the Anglo-Caribbean, is an important theme in their fiction. In her fiction, Pollard discusses the gender gaps in employment and the demands of marriage and the special contributions of women to family and community.

Many scholars have also explored the significance of spirit in Brodber’s work, including the topics of “spirit theft,” “spirit possession,” and spirits existing through time, from Africa to the present. Brodber’s narratives also show communication between the living and the dead, from Jane and Louisa (1980) to Nothing’s Mat (2014). Yet, few scholars have examined Brodber’s work on par with her sister’s writing. Drawing upon interviews with the authors, this is the first book to give Brodber and Pollard their due and study the sisters’ important contributions.

"Placing the lesser-known Velma Pollard in conversation with Erna Brodber, Violet Harrington Bryan illustrates how local and presumably provincial environments (such as Woodside, Jamaica) are the sites of rich creativity and postcolonial politics. The first comparison of Brodber and Pollard, this book is a key contribution to scholarship on post-independence Jamaican literature. " -- Imani D. Owens, assistant professor of English, Rutgers University–New Brunswick

Violet Harrington Bryan is professor emerita of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She is author of The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender, and her work has appeared in such journals as American Scholar, College Language Association Journal, and Louisiana Literature.

Book News: The Metrocolony in Modernist Writing

Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth-Century Literature

BY CAITLIN VANDERTOP 

Cambridge UP, 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781108835626

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/modernism-metrocolony-urban-cultures-empire-twentieth-century-literature?format=HB

While literary modernism is often associated with Euro-American metropolises such as London, Paris or New York, this book considers the place of the colonial city in modernist fiction. From the streets of Dublin to the shop-houses of Singapore, and from the botanical gardens of Bombay to the suburbs of Suva, the monumental landscapes of British colonial cities aimed to reinforce empire's universalizing claims, yet these spaces also contradicted and resisted the impositions of an idealized English culture. Inspired by the uneven landscapes of the urban British empire, a group of twentieth-century writers transformed the visual incongruities and anachronisms on display in the city streets into sources of critique and formal innovation. Showing how these writers responded to empire's metrocolonial complexities and built legacies, Modernism in the Metrocolony traces an alternative, peripheral history of the modernist city.

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 examples of interdisciplinary approaches to modernist literature, postcolonial studies and urban history
• Produces an innovative theoretical overview outlining the significance of peripheral urbanism to modernism, drawing primarily on theorists from the global South
• Intervenes in debates over the cultural, political and ecological legacies of colonial urbanism

Caitlin Vandertop is assistant professor at the University of Warwick. A former lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and research assistant at the University of Hong Kong, her work on modernism and colonial urban culture has been published in journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Novel, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Interventions.