Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
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Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
Katherine Franco looks at the "Circe" episode in Joyce's Ulysses as closet drama and a theatrical take on literary theory:
https://iupress.org/connect/blog/theorys-theatrics-in-circe-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-3/
Her JML 47.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post
EDITED BY RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN
UP of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781496843227
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Terrence-McNally
Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take 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.
Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.
"Important and outstanding.... This highly recommended collection will be an essential addition to all libraries with theater collections." - Herbert E. Shapiro, Library Journal
Raymond-Jean Frontain is an independent scholar who has published eight books and over 100 scholarly articles on the Bible as literature, gay literature, Renaissance poetry, the Indian novel, and modern drama. His previous works on Terrence McNally include The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater, Muse of Fire (2021). He is currently at work on a study of Tennessee Williams’s sexual ethic.
JML 46.4 (Summer 2023), "Evocations of Intimacy," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51258
Content includes:
Anca Parvulescu
The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Patty Argyrides
Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works
Patricia Morgne Cramer
“Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion”: The Waves as a Modernist Symposium
FREE!
Cory Austin Knudson
Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille
FREE!
Farah Ali
The Invisible Flesh: Mimesis in Jean Genet’s The Maids
Molly B. Lewis
The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard’s Drama
Sina Movaghati
A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man
Yi-chin Shih
Senses of Place: The Black Community in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band
Hsiao-wen Chen
Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Celiese Lypka
“I Look Straight into His Eyes … For the Last Time”: Intimacy and Indifference in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives
Caroline Hovanec
The Modernist Dog
Edited by Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, and Tania Ørum
Brill, 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-52011-0
https://brill.com/display/title/38041?language=en
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It includes 138 color illustrations.
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.
It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.
Of interest to teachers and students of modernism and the avant-garde, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, art history, literature, cultural history, discourse and ideology of the interwar period.
Benedikt Hjartarson is professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Iceland. He has written and edited a number of books and articles on the European avant-garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.
Andrea Kollnitz is associate professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has published a monograph on nationalist agendas in Swedish art criticism 1908-34 and edited a collection on Fashion and Modernism as well as published research on fashion caricatures, nationalist fashion and art discourses, the avant-garde artist’s role and artistic self-fashioning.
Per Stounbjerg is DPhil in Scandinavian literature and head of the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He has published on August Strindberg, genre studies, avant-garde, modernism and the aesthetics of the ugly.
Tania Ørum is professor emerita at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is general editor of the volumes of A Cultural History of the Avant Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill | Rodopi)
BY EDWIN WONG
Friesen Press, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3
Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.
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.
Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.
Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.
Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.
BY RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN
Syracuse UP, January 2021
Paper ISBN: 9780815636434
Hardcover ISBN: 9780815636250
A new generation of Irish playwrights set out to establish Dublin as a modern European capital by staging radical productions at the Dublin Gate Theatre.
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 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.
"Offers an invaluable tool for advancing knowledge in the fields of drama, performance, and Irish studies with its close attention to the underexamined institution of the Gate Theatre. . . . This book will make a significant and long-lasting impact in Irish studies, theatre studies, and accounts of mid-century modernism." —Paige Reynolds, author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle
"For many years, the accepted story of Irish theatre was that the Abbey was the writers’ theatre, and its rival, the Gate, was primarily a producing house. Making use of newly available archival sources, Ruud van den Beuken turns the old story on its head, and in so doing forces us to rethink Irish theatre. This book demands our attention." —Christopher Morash, Trinity College Dublin
Ruud van den Beuken is assistant professor of English literature at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He was awarded the 2015 Irish Society for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize.
