BOOK NEWS: Tracing Chilean women poets' resistance to neoliberalism

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980–2020

By Bárbara Fernández-Melleda

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541497

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-chilean-women-s-poetry-under-neoliberalism-1980-2020.html

Examines how women poets have expressed resistance against neoliberalism in Chile at times of intense political upheaval

• A 4-decade chronology following on women’s poetry response to neoliberal ideology
• Takes an interdisciplinary approach to poetic work engaging with neoliberalism in Chile
• Centers on iconic works by canonical Chilean authors that deserve study in an international setting

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.

Chilean Women’s Poetry under Neoliberalism, 1980-2020 explores how the works of 6 women poets interact with the imposition and development of neoliberalism in Chile over 4 decades. The book follows a chronology that joins poetic work that criticizes the model from its inception during dictatorship times (1980s), through a democratic transition that did not live up to its expectations (1990s), until the naturalization of neoliberalism as a new normal that seems not possible to overcome (2000s). Finally, the 2010s show how the great inequalities denounced in the works from the previous 3 decades found concrete resistance through the October 2019 social revolt. This juncture brings new poetry hoping for a refoundation of Chile while also imagining the failure of a revolutionary movement. In the end, the latter came to pass.

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda brilliantly kickstarts her analytical journey when the sweeping violence of the Pinochet dictatorship installed the neoliberal model. Her book highlights various mechanisms of resistance against a repressive and individualistic social system. It also examines the asymmetry affecting Chilean literary production, perpetuating patriarchal practices that reduce or negate the contributions carried by the aesthetics of women writers. – Diamela Eltit, winner of the National Literature Prize of Chile 2018

Bárbara Fernández-Melleda is assistant professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. She has published articles on Gabriela Mistral, Elvira Hernández, Carmen Berenguer, and Nadia Prado, among other Chilean poets. She was awarded the Early Career Scheme Grant by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee for her project The Fall of Neoliberalism in the Chilean Post-Dictatorship Novel (2000–2020). Her current research interests delve into Sino-Latin American diplomatic relations, especially through the lives and works of Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Armando Uribe. In 2024, she received the General Research Fund award to begin her 3-year project entitled Pablo Neruda in China.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Mexican literature's representations of sapphic desire

Lenchitudes: Sapphic Representation in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

By Alejandra Márquez

SUNY Press, 2026

ISBN: 9798855805154

https://sunypress.edu/Books/L/Lenchitudes2

Shows how representations of sapphic desire can subvert or sustain prevailing norms of gender, sexuality, and power in Mexican texts from the 1980s to the 2010s.

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 inspiration from the 2020 Marcha Lencha—"Lesbian March"—in Mexico City, Alejandra Márquez expands the concept of lenchitudes into a critical framework for thinking about gender and sexuality more expansively and inclusively, beyond essentialist identity categories. Assembling a lesbian archive that stretches from the publication of Rosamaría Roffiel's cult classic Amora in 1989 to the 2010s, Lenchitudes argues that sapphic representation in contemporary Mexican narrative subverts but also reinforces patriarchal norms. Sapphic narratives, Márquez argues, are not inherently queer but rather can uphold binary gender roles, heteronormativity, and monogamy. Bridging literature and activism, and putting theorists such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz into conversation with Latin American scholarship, Lenchitudes boldly joins ongoing debates about the place of queerness, or lo cuir, in Latin America.

"Sure to become a reference point for research and teaching in LGBTQ+ studies in and about Latin America, Lenchitudes challenges the dominant focus on gay male representation in cuir studies without simply adding lesbian culture to the existing scholarship. In dialogue with both the epistemologies of Mexican social movements and Latin American lesbian, marica, and travesti thinkers, Márquez moves beyond an identity-based approach to gender and sexuality, exploring the entanglement of multiple sapphic representations, desires, and experiences." — Patricio Simonetto, author of A Body of One’s Own: A Trans History of Argentina

"A very important contribution to the study of Spanish-language LGBTQ+ literature and culture from Mexico. Márquez incorporates a deep knowledge of queer/cuir approaches, skillfully connecting concepts from Anglo-American theory to related, though distinct, Mexican cultural schemes to produce readings that transcend the identity politics of Mexican lesbian-feminist circles. Lenchitudes is poised to help visibilize Mexican sapphic cultures in the English-speaking world." — Brandon Bisbey, author of Between Camp and Cursi: Humor and Homosexuality in Contemporary Mexican Narrative

Alejandra Márquez is an assistant professor of Spanish at Michigan State University.

BOOK NEWS: Expanding the metamodernist lens via feminist narrative theories

Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology 

By Katherine J. Weese

Ohio State UP, 2025

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1599-9

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215999.html

In Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology, Katherine J. Weese explores intersections among rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist narrative theories and post-postmodern theory to argue that an expanded rhetorical poetics offers the most comprehensive model for illuminating recent works that employ unnatural devices for feminist purposes. This pluralist narratological framework is a vital counterpoint to theorists’ tendency to read twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels through a post-postmodernist or metamodernist lens that overlooks unnatural, feminist, and rhetorical narrative theories.

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.

Examining Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Hotel World, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins and Life after Life, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Weese demonstrates how various narratological theories inform rather than compete with one another. Through an expanded rhetorical poetics, including a refined version of James Phelan’s MTS (mimetic, thematic, synthetic) model, she reframes post-postmodern theorists’ concerns with communicative function through a narratological lens to make the case that exploring the rhetorical function of unnatural devices challenges and extends the claims of narrow metamodern readings.

“With enormous skill, Weese shows how an antimimetic narrative can address issues of power and injustice in the real world. She succeeds at a bold and original integration of feminist, rhetorical, and unnatural theories, mapping how they—explicitly or implicitly—interrelate.” —Ellen Peel, author of Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction

“Weese provides a salutary intervention into current debates over the nature and history of ‘post-postmodern’ fiction and a timely contribution to narrative theory as she synthesizes several key strands of rhetorical, unnatural, and feminist approaches. An essential book for students and scholars of narrative.” —Brian Richardson, author of A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century

Katherine J. Weese is venable professor of English at Hampden-Sydney College. Her research has appeared in Storyworlds, Journal of Narrative Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, and Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

BOOK NEWS: Literary perspectives on labor and gender

Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature: New Literary Perspectives on the Times, Spaces and Forms of Women’s Work

Edited by Emily J. Hogg and Charlotte J. Fabricius

Edinburgh UP, 2025

ISBN: 9781399541336

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-feminized-work-and-the-labor-of-literature.html

In a world wherein work is increasingly feminized, historical and contemporary literature can reveal what ‘women’s work’ entails. Reading across different genres, time periods and geographical locations, this book explores gendered working lives through novels, poetry, comics, editorial work and book collecting. It moves from the library of an early modern noblewoman to protest comics in the 2017 Women’s March, from Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich and Buchi Emecheta to writing from the 2020s about motherhood and explores topics as various as gossip, poetic scraps and household management as well as gender-based violence and the creation of feminist solidarity. In doing so, it shows how literary perspectives on labor and gender can provide insights into work that is otherwise made invisible and can help us to better understand the challenges of today’s insecure work-lives.

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.

• Explores literary representations of ‘women’s work’ to generate new understandings of contemporary working conditions
• Takes a literary approach to understanding contemporary feminized working conditions
• Develops a transhistorical approach to the study of literature and notions of gendered work
• Surveys literary representations of feminized work across a range of genres and periods, including twentieth and twenty-first century novels, poetry, autofiction, and activist comics, while also considering gendered labor in the production and circulation of literature, including in contemporary publishing, and Early Modern book collecting

"What is the relation between work and books, between women’s labor and women’s writing? And how does women’s work cut across standard divisions of space and time? This collection of case studies, prefaced by an incisive and comprehensive introduction, offers illuminating answers." – Rita Felski, University of Virginia

Emily J. Hogg is associate professor of contemporary anglophone literature at the Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark. She is the co-editor of Feminized Work and the Labor of Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (2021).

Charlotte J. Fabricius is a postdoc with the project ‘Feminized: A New Literary History of Women’s Work’ at the Center for Uses of Literature, University of Southern Denmark. She holds a PhD in cultural studies and works in the intersection of global and digital anglophone literature, comics studies, and feminist critique. She is the author of Super-Girls of the Future: Girlhood and Agency in Contemporary Superhero Comics (2023).

BOOK NEWS: The Resurgence of the Archetypal Feminine

Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature

By April C. Heaslip

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496856968

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Regenerating-the-Feminine

Mythologists work as cultural animateurs, tracking patterns and trends, identifying archetypal and symbolic wounds and remedies. Reading cultural and environmental events via texts and patterns from such a perspective enables dynamic dialogue and action. Regenerating the Feminine: Psyche, Culture, and Nature examines the history of the lost and degraded archetypal feminine of Western cultures, whose resurgence in scholarship, the arts, and social justice practices is now on the rise. Drawing on various methodologies to deepen our understanding of this regenerative phenomenon, author April C. Heaslip charts the significance of interconnected expressions dramatically impacting our sense of self, community, history, health, culture, and creativity.

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 study examines the feminine’s resurgence via emerging imaginal archetypal paradigms in literary fiction, memoir, and cinematic expression. Utilizing literary and film studies, depth psychology, archaeomythology, history, and religious studies to examine the cultural and personal phenomenon of feminine renewal, this book explores how remythologizing regeneration—as well as remapping complex and neglected personal and collective wasteland landscapes—revitalizes the relationship between psyche, culture, and nature.

Tending to the return of the feminine and the complex cultural and eco wastelands, this post-Jungian inquiry remythologizes notions of wholeness, amplifies feminist revisions of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s” journey, and provides transdisciplinary best practices in support of personal individuation, cultural revitalization, and ecological healing.

"Regenerating the Feminine makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields of women’s studies, popular culture, psychoanalysis, feminist theology, and more. Not only does this book offer original thought to all these areas, but it draws these disciplines together in new, imaginative ways that suggest future avenues of research."  —Susan Rowland, author of Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide

April C. Heaslip is a mythologist, educator, and artist. Her work has been published in journals and edited collections such as Myths Shattered and Restored: Proceedings of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology; Evolving God–Images: Essays on Religion, Individuation, and Postmodern Spirituality; and more.

BOOK NEWS: The entwined relationship of movement and writing for Black women authors

The Souths in Her: Black Women Writers and Choreographers and the Poetics of Transmutation

By Nicole M. Morris Johnson

Columbia UP, 2026

ISBN: 9780231219686

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-souths-in-her/9780231219686/

Since the Middle Passage, the intellectual and physical freedom of Black women in the United States and the Caribbean has been constrained. Yet Black women writers, artists, choreographers, and performers have contested pervasive political, cultural, and discursive silencing by drawing on the traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths: the Southern United States and the Caribbean, as well as Africa.

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 Souths in Her—a phrase borrowed from Ntozake Shange—Nicole M. Morris Johnson shows how key Black women artists transformed the enclosing narrative frames imposed on them, developing new forms of creative expression informed by the lived experiences and submerged histories of women across the Africana southern world. She analyzes the intertwined relationship between movement and writing in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Dianne McIntyre, Maryse Condé, and Shange, among others. Morris Johnson demonstrates that although the central role of motion reinforced perceptions of primitivity that relegated Black women and the South to a space outside modernity, it was in fact crucial to their formal innovations. For these writers and choreographers, unexpected encounters with unfamiliar traditions and creative visions of multiple Souths catalyzed formal experimentation and movements for liberation. Considering the violence routinely inflicted on Black women alongside their artistic innovations, this book reveals a transmuted South that is rich in techniques for weaving liberatory works. Illuminating Black women’s singular contributions to Black modernity, The Souths in Her offers new frames for understanding their embodied and textual creative expression.

"The Souths in Her offers an important exploration of how Black women artists have used self-expression to counter misperceptions about them and their legacies in the South. Through rich analysis of Black women writers and choreographers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, Maryse Condé, Ntozake Shange, and Jamaica Kincaid, alongside contemporary artists like Allison Janae Hamilton, Urban Bush Women, and Akwaeke Emezi, this book showcases how they achieve new “expressive horizons” and chart new territory to move freely." —Soyica Diggs Colbert, author of Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

"Taking her title from Ntozake Shange, Nicole M. Morris Johnson explores various Souths: the worlds that Black women artists, primarily writers and choreographers, made to counter silencing. Authoritative and beautifully written, The Souths in Her understands Black women’s art as emancipatory in its broadest and bravest forms, delving into feminist cultural expression out of the Middle Passage to illuminate its creative power and impressive diasporic reach." —Thadious M. Davis, author of Understanding Alice Walker

"The Souths in Her is a brilliantly conceptualized examination of women writers and artists of African descent from the Caribbean and the United States whose contributions boldly confront confining narratives that have typically centered Black masculinity. Morris Johnson's beautifully written book refines and expands these methodologies to center Black women, Africa, and its diasporas. An outstanding and exciting achievement in Southern studies." —Riché Richardson, author of Emancipation's Daughters: Reimagining Black Femininity and the National Body

Nicole M. Morris Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

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: How Black women poets' prominence comes at a price

Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition

BY LAURA ELIZABETH VRANA 

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1575-3

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215753.html

From 1987, when Rita Dove won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, to 2021, when Amanda Gorman skyrocketed to celebrity status after performing during Biden’s inauguration and the Super Bowl, Black women have seemingly attained secure, stable positions at the forefront of American poetry. But this prominence comes at a price. As figures like Dove and Elizabeth Alexander have become well known, receiving endorsements and gaining visible platforms from major prizes, academic institutions, and publishing houses, the underlying terms of evaluation that greet Black women’s poetics often remain superficial, reflecting efforts to co-opt and contain rather than meaningfully consider new voices and styles. 

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 Pitfalls of Prestige, Laura Elizabeth Vrana surveys how developments in American literary institutions since 1980 have shaped—and been shaped by—Black women poets. Grappling with the refulgent works of the most acclaimed contemporary figures alongside lesser-known poets, Vrana both elucidates how seeming gestures of inclusion can actually result in constraining Black women poets’ works and also celebrates how these writers draw on a rich lineage and forge alternative communities to craft continually innovative modes of transgressing such limits, on the page and in life.

“Few scholars have so convincingly dissected the logic and the priorities by which awards-granting institutions distribute prestige, and none has done so while also providing the incisive close readings of complex, challenging poetry that Vrana has here. Pitfalls of Prestige is an impressive achievement.” —Keith D. Leonard, author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights

“Vrana documents the poetic lineages that Black women construct as they navigate the politics of the contemporary poetry landscape, and pressures the false binary between ‘formalist’ and ‘experimental’ verse. Pitfalls of Prestige is a compelling read that will significantly enhance scholarly understandings of contemporary Black women’s poetry.” —Emily Ruth Rutter, author of The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry

Laura Elizabeth Vrana is associate professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Alabama. She coedited The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas and has published on contemporary Black poetics, including in the anthologies Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era.

BOOK NEWS: Contemporary Black women writers embrace Africanist understandings of embodiment and disability

Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women's Writing

By Anna LaQuawn Hinton

UP of Mississippi, 2025

ISBN: 9781496855046

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/R/Refusing-to-Be-Made-Whole

In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black women’s writing but that it also shapes the formal elements characteristic of the Black women’s literary tradition.

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.

Refusing to Be Made Whole analyzes texts published after the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing particularly on the late 1970s onward when Black women’s writing flourished. Through the lens of writings by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Sapphire, and Sarah E. Wright, Hinton addresses prominent critical discourses within Black feminist literary studies. Hinton approaches the intersections of Africanist spirituality, race, gender, class, and disability, conversations about representation, community, motherhood, and sexuality through a Black feminist disability studies framework. Refusing to Be Made Whole embraces the complex and multifaceted nature of Black women’s writing, arguing that through this collision of race, gender, and spirituality, Black women writers speak healing and wellness into their readers’ lives and their own.

"Refusing to Be Made Whole takes seriously the Black feminist reckoning with disability, providing an apt guide to the tradition using the tenets of Black disability studies. This book deftly rereads the Black feminist literary tradition with an eye toward disability, and it was an absolute joy to read. Simply put, this is the book all Black feminist and disability scholars need." - Therí A. Pickens, author of Black Madness: Mad Blackness

"Anna LaQuawn Hinton’s Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing brings together—and extends—theoretical paradigms from disability studies, Black studies, feminist studies and queer studies through careful, innovative readings of canonical and lesser-known texts written by Black women, demonstrating how the contemporary literature of Black women and the theoretical work of disability studies are mutually transformative when engaged together. This rich and exciting work showcases the author’s deep engagement with (and sense of accountability to) multiple scholarly fields, and anyone writing on any of the authors discussed here—even if they are not a disability scholar—should consult this book in the future." - Julie Avril Minich, author of Radical Health: Unwellness, Care, and Latinx Expressive Culture

 

Anna LaQuawn Hinton is assistant professor of disability studies and Black literature and culture in the English Department at the University of North Texas. She has published in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and CLA Journal, as well as The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body and The Palgrave Handbook of Reproductive Justice and Literature.

Forster's musical Lucy Churchill and proto-nuclear aesthetics: A Closer Look at JML 47.4

In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, author Ryan James McGuckin discusses female musicality in A Room with a View, and sees in the novel's inconclusive romance—as well as in Forster's 1958 essay "A View without a Room"—hints that the fear of nuclear annihilation forecloses hope about the future. Read it at https://iupress.org/connect/blog/e-m-forsters-nuclear-aesthetics-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-4/

McGuckin's JML 47.4 essay, “E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View,” is available to read for FREE.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring the feminist spiritualities of Caribbean women writers

Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Resistance in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diasporas

BY JOSHUA R. DECKMAN

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493411

https://sunypress.edu/Books/F/Feminist-Spiritualities

Feminist Spiritualities aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding Black/Latinx experiences within a critical framework of decolonial thought, women of color feminisms, politicized emotional structures, and anti-imperial politics. Joshua R. Deckman considers literary and cultural productions from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and their diasporas in the United States, exploring epistemic spaces that have historically been marked as irrational and inconsequential for the production of knowledge—including social media posts, song lyrics, public writings, speeches, and personal interviews. Analyzing works by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Mayra Santos-Febres, Rita Indiana Hernández, Ana-Maurine Lara, Elizabeth Acevedo, María Teresa Fernández, Nitty Scott, Lxs Krudxs Cubensi, and Ibeyi, Deckman shows how these authors develop afro-epistemologies grounded in Caribbean feminist spiritualities and manifest a commitment to finding joy and love in difference. 

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.

Literary, anthropological, and more, Feminist Spiritualities weaves through a series of fields and methodologies in an undisciplined way to contribute new close readings of recent works and fresh assessments of well-known ones.

"Feminist Spiritualities provocatively invites us to sit with the decolonizing potential of Afro‐Caribbean ancestral spiritual practices and how they shape feminist and queer practices of shared love, joy, and pain across difference in the islands and their diasporas. A twist on decolonial thought inspired by the possibilities of other worlds and solidarities emerging from within Afro‐Caribbean creative imaginaries." — Alaí Reyes‐Santos, author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Joshua R. Deckman is assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Stetson University.

BOOK NEWS: Probing gender and sexuality in spy fiction

Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage: Spying Undercover(s)

EDITED BY ANN REA 

Bloomsbury, 2023

ISBN: 9781350271364

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/sexuality-and-gender-in-fictions-of-espionage-9781350271364/

An exploration of how espionage narratives give access to cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality before and following the Second World War, this book moves away from masculinist assumptions of the genre to offer an integrative survey of the sexualities on display from important characters across spy fiction. Topics covered include how authors mocked the traditional spy genre; James Bond as a symbol of pervasive British Superiority still anxious about masculinity; how older female spies act as queer figures that disturb the masculine mythology of the secret agent; and how the clandestine lives of agents described ways to encode queer communities under threat from fascism. 

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.

Covering texts such as the Bond novels, John Le Carré's oeuvre (and their notable adaptations) and works by Helen MacInnes, Christopher Isherwood and Mick Herron, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage takes stock of spy fiction written by women, female protagonists written by men, and probes the representations of masculinity generated by male authors. Offering a counterpoint to a genre traditionally viewed as male-centric, Sexuality and Gender in Fictions of Espionage proposes a revision of masculinity, femininity, queer identities and gendered concepts such as domesticity, and relates them to notions of nationality and the defense work conducted at crucial moments in history.

Contents:

1. "Camp Camouflage: The Art of Espionage in Mr. Norris Changes Trains" (Megan Faragher, Wright State University, Ohio)
2. "Vanished Ladies: Using Helen MacInnes's Above Suspicion to Look at Women in Spy Fiction" (Kyle Smith, Perth College UHI, Scotland)
3. "While Still We Live: Gender, Secret Agents, and National Ethics" (Michael T. Williamson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
4. "'Some Other Man Who Would Have to be Set Aside:' Burgess, Maclean, and the Adversarial Spy in Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love" (Oliver Buckton, Florida Atlantic University)
5. "Bond, Colonialism and the 'Other'" (Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth)
6. "'Learn, Babies, Learn': Race, Representation, and John Birch Society Activists Julia Brown and Lola Belle Holmes" (Veronica Wilson, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
7. "'A New Domesticity' and Masculinity in John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Len Deighton's The Ipcress File" (Ann Rea, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown)
8. "A Queer Thing: The Older Woman Spy" (Rosie White, Northumbria University)
9. "'What's the character?' Adapting Agency and Gender in The Little Drummer Girl" (Rachel Hoag, West Virginia University)
10. "'Extolling the Virtues of Alpaca Cloth or Buttons Made of Tagua Nut': The Influence of Douglas Hayward and Tailoring in John le Carré's The Tailor of Panama (Llewella Chapman, University of East Anglia)
11. "'Darling Men, Lover Boys and Rogues:' Connie Sachs, Molly Doran and the Precarity of of Institutional Memory in John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Mick Herron's Dead Lions" (Paul Lohneis, University of West London)
12. Coda: Ann Rea, Stella Rimington, "The 'Open Secret' and the 'Mission to Inform'”

Ann Rea is professor of English literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. She is co-editor of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series with Nick Hubbleand she also edited the essay collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse in 2015.

Book News: First scholarly collection examining Edwidge Danticat's full range of works

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat

EDITED BY MAIA L. BUTLER, JOANNA DAVIS-MCELLIGATT, AND MEGAN FEIFER

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496839886

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/N/Narrating-History-Home-and-Dyaspora

Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat contains fifteen essays addressing how Edwidge Danticat’s writing, anthologizing, and storytelling trace, (re)construct, and develop alternate histories, narratives of nation building, and conceptions of home and belonging. The prolific Danticat is renowned for novels, collections of short fiction, nonfiction, and editorial writing. As her experimentation in form expands, so does her force as a public intellectual. Danticat’s literary representations, political commentary, and personal activism have proven vital to classroom and community work imagining radical futures. Among increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and containment and rampant ecological volatility, Danticat’s contributions to public discourse, art, and culture deserve sustained critical attention. These essays offer essential perspectives to scholars, public intellectuals, and students interested in African diasporic, Haitian, Caribbean, and transnational American literary studies. This collection frames Danticat’s work as an indictment of statelessness, racialized and gendered state violence, and the persistence of political and economic margins.

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 first section of this volume, “The Other Side of the Water,” engages with Danticat’s construction and negotiation of nation, both in Haiti and the United States; the broader dyaspora; and her own, her family’s, and her fictional characters’ places within them. The second section, “Welcoming Ghosts,” delves into the ever-present specter of history and memory, prominent themes found throughout Danticat’s work. From origin stories to broader Haitian histories, this section addresses the underlying traumas involved when remembering the past and its relationship to the present. The third section, “I Speak Out,” explores the imperative to speak, paying particular attention to the narrative form with which such telling occurs. The fourth and final section, “Create Dangerously,” contends with Haitians’ activism, community building, and the political and ecological climate of Haiti and its dyaspora.

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora is an in-depth interdisciplinary collection of essays that engages the corpus of Edwidge Danticat in all its dimensions: novelist, short fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, activist, and public intellectual. The book also brings these different aspects of her work together by bringing to light the alternate histories and historiographies this extraordinary storyteller maps out in her work. " - Carine M. Mardorossian, author of Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism

"Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora accomplishes a sustained interrogation of Danticat's canon—including her most recent works—in ways that lay the critical foundation not only for a reappraisal of the author's writing, but also for her place within the larger discursive nexus of African diaspora writing or immigrant literature. Such a work is long overdue, and it makes a case for itself as the most exhaustive treatment of Danticat's expanding literary output." - Maxine Lavon Montgomery, editor of Conversations with Edwidge Danticat

Maia L. Butler is assistant professor of African American literature at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is also affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies. She is a literary geographer researching and teaching in African American/diasporic, Anglophone postcolonial, and American (broadly conceived) studies, with an emphasis on Black women’s literature and feminist theories.

Joanna Davis-McElligatt is assistant professor of Black literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is affiliate faculty in women’s and gender studies. She is coeditor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy.

Megan Feifer is assistant professor of English at Medaille College in New York. Her research and teaching addresses Afro-Caribbean diasporas in the US, multiethnic literatures, postcolonial literature and theory, and feminist theories.

Black women writers' reinvention of jazz discourse

The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature 

BY PATRICIA G. LESPINASSE

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496836021

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Drum-Is-a-Wild-Woman

In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum.

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 Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject.

This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.

"The works discussed all present the urge toward subjectivity and female agency. . . . Valuable for those studying jazz history, feminist studies, and contemporary women’s fiction."  - B. Wallenstein, CHOICE

Patricia G. Lespinasse is director of undergraduate studies, associate professor of Africana studies and African American and African diaspora literature, and a faculty affiliate in the Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric and in the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS) program at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is associate editor of The New Black Renaissance: The Souls Anthology of Critical African-American Studies. And, she teaches courses in blues and jazz literature, Caribbean literature, Africana studies, race, gender, and American film.

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: 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.

Book News: Reconsidering realism in contemporary British fiction

Rethinking Contemporary British Women’s Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism

BY EMILIE WALEZAK

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350171350

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/rethinking-contemporary-british-womens-writing-9781350171350/

Providing close readings of well-known British realist writers including Pat Barker, A.S. Byatt, Rose Tremain, Sarah Hall, Bernadine Evaristo, and Zadie Smith, this book uses new directions in material and posthuman feminism to examine how contemporary women writers explore the challenges we collectively face today. Walezak redresses negative assumptions about realism's alleged conservatism and demonstrates the vitality and relevance of the realist genre in experimenting with the connections between individual and collective voices, human and non-human meditations, local and global scales, and author and reader.

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.

Considering how contemporary realist writing is attuned to pressing issues including globalization, climate change, and interconnectivity, this book provides innovative new ways of reading realism, examines how these writers are looking to reinvent the genre, and shows how realism helps reimagine our place in the world.

Emilie Walezak is professor of Contemporary English at the University of Nantes, France. A specialist of contemporary British women writing, she has devoted several articles to the works of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Sarah Hall, Rose Tremain and Jeanette Winterson. She is the author of Rose Tremain. A Critical Introduction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Book News: Afro-futurist Women

The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination

BY MAXINE LAVON MONTGOMERY

Bloomsbury Academic, 2021

ISBN: 9781350124509

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/postapocalyptic-black-female-imagination-9781350124509/

Exploring postapocalypticism in the Black literary and cultural tradition, this book extends the scholarly conversation on Afro-futurist canon formation through an examination of futuristic imaginaries in representative twentieth and twenty-first century works of literature and expressive culture by Black women in an African diasporic setting.

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 author demonstrates the implications of Afro-futurist literary criticism for Black Atlantic literary and critical theory, investigating issues of hybridity, transcending boundaries, temporality, and historical recuperation.

Covering writers including Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, and Beyoncé, this book examines the ways Black women artists attempt to recover a raced and gendered heritage, and how they explore an evolving social order that is both connected to and distinct from the past.

Maxine Lavon Montgomery is professor of English at Florida State University. Her recent publications include The Fictions of Gloria Naylor (2011) and, as editor, Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (2017).

Book News: Women's History Month Sale

SAVE 40% now through April 15, 2022, on women's studies titles from Syracuse University Press: https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-subject/women-s-and-gender-studies/

Use discount code 05WHM22. 

Book News: Contemporary women writers and artists and their uniquely feminine ethics of desire

The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art

BY FERNANDA NEGRETE

State University of New York Press, September 2020

Hardcover: 978-1-4384-8021-3, $95

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6962-the-aesthetic-clinic.aspx

The Aesthetic Clinic examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience.

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 Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the “aesthetic clinic” of the book’s title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman’s individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete’s reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

“Intellectually ambitious, original, cross-disciplinary, and coherently argued, there is much to admire in this book.” 

— Margaret Iversen, author of Photography, Trace, and Trauma

At the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Fernanda Negrete is assistant professor of French and executive director of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture.