BOOK NEWS: Reconsidering short works by the mother of the horror genre, Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales: Reconsidering the Short Fiction

Edited by Joan Passey and Robert Lloyd

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350361157

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shirley-jacksons-dark-tales-9781350361157/

The first dedicated exploration of the short fiction of Shirley Jackson for three decades, this volume takes an in-depth look at the themes and legacies of the 200-plus short stories by the mother of contemporary horror. Scholars from across the globe, and from a range of different disciplinary backgrounds, dig into the lasting impact of her work in light of its increasing relevance to contemporary critical preoccupations and the re-release of Jackson's work in 2016. 

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 new methodologies to study her work, this volume calls upon ideas of intertextuality, ecocriticism and psychoanalysis to examine a broad range of themes from national identity, race, gender and class to domesticity, the occult, selfhood and mental illness. With consideration of her blockbuster works alongside later works that received much less critical attention, Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales promises a rich and dynamic expansion on previous scholarship of Jackson's oeuvre, both bringing her writing into the contemporary conversation, and ensuring her place in the canon of horror fiction.

"Shirley Jackson's Dark Tales is a much-needed expansion of Jackson studies. These essays apply diverse critical approaches to a wide array of previously understudied stories, exploring topics such as influence, identity, space, and genre. They offer compelling new perspectives on Jackson's work, yet remain vitally aware of her position in the cultural landscape of mid-century America." --Melanie D. Anderson, Delta State University

Joan Passey is a lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK, where she has taught since 2016. She has published on Shirley Jackson in Women’s Studies, introduced the biopic Shirley for 70+ Curzon cinemas nationwide, and participated in a Q&A to promote Shirley with Birds Eye View.

Robert Lloyd is a teacher and researcher at Cardiff University, UK, and specializes in women’s literature, the supernatural, and critical theory. He completed his thesis on Shirley Jackson and hauntology in 2021, is in the process of preparing his monograph, and has published on Jackson in Women’s Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank

Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

“Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University

ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

BOOK NEWS: Exploring Sylvia Plath's daily life 1955-63

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2: 1955-1963

By Carl Rollyson

UP of Mississippi, 2024

ISBN: 9781496844286

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-2

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience, ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath was also fueled in part by the nature of her death—a suicide while she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, who was himself a noteworthy British poet. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath, projecting an array of points of view about their subject, has appeared over the last fifty-five years.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Now biographer Carl Rollyson, the author of two previous biographical studies of Plath, has surveyed the vast amount of material on Plath, including her biographies, her autobiographical writings, and previously unpublished material, and distilled that data into the two volumes of Sylvia Plath Day by Day. As the follow-up to volume 1, volume 2 commences on February 14, 1955, the day Plath wrote to her mother declaring her intention to study in England, a decision that marked a major turning point in her life. With brief signposts provided by the author, this volume follows Plath through the entirety of her marriage to Hughes, the challenges of simultaneously raising a family and nourishing her own creativity, and the major depressive episodes that ultimately led to her suicide in 1963. By providing new angles and perspectives on the life of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated poets, Sylvia Plath Day by Day offers a comprehensive image of its enigmatic subject.

"Using a journal-style approach, Rollyson documents Plath’s life in exacting and compelling detail. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 2 is a must-have addition to the library for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature in general, and Sylvia Plath in particular." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volumes 1 & 2; William Faulkner Day by Day; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Fresh insights into the 1920s experimental author Mary Butts

Mary Butts: Necessary Contradictions and Feminist Reconstructions

Edited by Joel Hawkes

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501380716

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mary-butts-9781501380716/

A scholarly and experimental collection that offers fresh insight—with a feminist focus—into the often overlooked modernist writer Mary Butts and the contested processes of recovering such an author.

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.

Scholars instrumental in the recovery of Mary Butts, along with newer writers, publishers, printers, and artists, enter into conversation exploring the work of the British author, whose body of work plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres-writing that can be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Taking its cue from Butts's experimental, rhythmic writing and the transnational artistic communities in which Butts moved in the 1920s, the collection is a non-linear exchange rather than a collection of isolated arguments-a conversation constructed from "classical" academic chapters, "knight's move" non-academic reflections, and short responses to these.

This conversation lies at the intersection of "feminism" and "reconstruction": Chapters cover Butts's writing techniques and forms, her position in the modernist canon, contested sites of feminism in her work, critical reception of that work, queer and post-critical readings, and the success of, and the need for, a feminist recovery of the author. The collection aims to be a feminist engagement, while asking questions of what this might look like, why it is needed, and how such an approach offers fresh insight into an erudite, playful, difficult, contradictory, and experimental body of work. Ultimately, the collection asks, how should we reconstruct the author and her work for the contemporary reader?

"Mary Butts wrote marvelous prose—shimmering, intractable, wayward, and piercing. Original in tis range of content as in its design and never sidestepping difficulties, this impressive new collection demonstrates that Butts—trenchant and extreme, bold and generous—has become a voice we need more that ever to reckon with." —Ralph Pite, University of Bristol

Joel Hawkes is a lecturer in English at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is editor of The Collected Essays of Mary Butts (2021) and has published a number of articles and book chapters about Mary Butts. Through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for The Mary Butts Letters Project, with the support of the Butts Estate, he made Butts’s letters available in a print collection and open-access website, marybutts.com.

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) is now LIVE!

 

JML 47.4 (Summer 2024) with clusters on Virginia Woolf and literary misfits is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/53384

Content includes:

Woolf

Kate M. Nash

The Ecology of Virginia Woolf’s London Scene

 

Gabriel Quigley

Moments of Rupture: Woolf, Whitehead, Deleuze 

Timothy O’Leary

Years and Years: The Distribution of the Sensible in Woolf and Ernaux 

Misfits

Abhipsa Chakraborty

Vernacular Acoustics: Caste, Embodiment, and the Politics of Listening in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935)

Carly Overfelt 

“To Suggest the Sound”: Impressibility and the Language of Whiteness in Charles W. Chesnutt’s Long Fiction 

Lillianna G. Wright

“A Fascination, Strange and Compelling”: Marriage as the Prevention of Queerness in Nella Larsen’s Passing 

Ryan James McGuckin 

E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View 

FREE

Tim Clarke

The Consolations of Decadence in John Fante’s Ask the Dust 

Susan Poursanati and Maryam Neyestani

Sisyphean or Medusan: The Absurd Hero in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea  

Reviews  

Anna Nygren

Rewriting the Narrative of Modernisms 

Andrew Hui

The Once and Always Baroque

Benjamin Schreier

How to Be a Critic

Afterword

Daniel T. O’Hara

Memorial Tributes

BOOK NEWS: New insights into the formation and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

BY SUE THOMAS

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350275799

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jean-rhyss-modernist-bearings-and-experimental-aesthetics-9781350275799/

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics.

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.

Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

"This book offers a virtuosic and revelatory exploration of Jean Rhys's intertextual and intermedial practice. Sue Thomas not only uncovers the depth and eclecticism on Rhys's allusions to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical cultures, but argues for their centrality to her decolonial and feminist politics and her radical aesthetics." --Anna Snaith, King's College London

Sue Thomas is emeritus professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of, among other books, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of English in Jane Eyre (2008) and Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures (2014). She has published extensively on Jean Rhys, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's writing, feminist theory, postcolonial writers, and Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. She is a member of the editorial boards of Jean Rhys Review, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and Meridian, and an advisory editor of New Literatures Review: Decolonising Literatures.

BOOK NEWS: Unique biography examines Sylvia Plath's daily life

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932-1955

BY CARL ROLLYSON

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496835000

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/S/Sylvia-Plath-Day-by-Day-Volume-1

Since Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, she has become the subject of a constant stream of books, biographies, and articles. She has been hailed as a groundbreaking poet for her starkly beautiful poems in Ariel and as a brilliant forerunner of the feminist coming-of-age novel in her semiautobiographical The Bell Jar. Each new biography has offered insight and sources with which to measure Plath’s life and influence. Sylvia Plath Day by Day, a two-volume series, offers a distillation of this data without the inherent bias of a narrative.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Volume 1 commences with Plath’s birth in Boston in 1932, records her response to her elementary and high school years, her entry into Smith College, and her breakdown and suicide attempt, and ends on February 14, 1955, the day she wrote to Ruth Cohen, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, to accept admission as an “affiliated student at Newnham College to read for the English Tripos.”

Sylvia Plath Day by Day is for readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the woman and her work. The entries are suitable for dipping into and can be read in a minute or an hour. Ranging over several sources, including Plath’s diaries, journals, letters, stories, and other prose and poetry—including new material and archived material rarely seen by readers—a fresh kaleidoscopic view of the writer emerges.

"The details in Rollyson’s Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 are a dream come true for the reader, fan, and scholar of Sylvia Plath. The seeds of so much of her creative writing are present, but Rollyson deftly does not foreshadow how events impact Plath’s life and when she transforms experiences from life to art. He lets each moment stand on its own importance." —Peter K. Steinberg, coeditor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 is a must-have book for any reader interested in Plath. Detailed yet highly readable, it paints a portrait of a young woman who would become, as will be chronicled in volume 2, one of the seminal authors in the twentieth century." —Paul Alexander, author of Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume 1: 1932–1955 fills the lacunae of existing biographies and uncovers new insights into its subject, as when Plath writes about her experiences at Smith, hearing ‘nasty little tag ends of conversation directed at you and around you, meant for you, to strangle you on the invisible noose of insinuation.’ Or her months in New York at Mademoiselle, which grow less mysterious here. Again, Carl Rollyson has provided us with an indispensable book on Sylvia Plath." —Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life 

Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.

BOOK NEWS: Caribbean women fictionalize the past

Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past 

BY TEGAN ZIMMERMAN

UP of Mississippi, 2023

ISBN: 9781496846358

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Matria-Redux

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women.

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.

Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses.

Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

"The first sustained study of Caribbean historical fiction by diasporic women." —Jennifer Donahue, author of Taking Flight: Caribbean Women Writing from Abroad

"A tour de force, Matria Redux offers readers the most recent analytical literary frameworks for decolonizing Caribbean women’s subjecthood as portrayed in the historical and material realms of the past."  —Valérie K. Orlando, author of Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean

 

Tegan Zimmerman is adjunct professor in women and gender studies at Saint Mary’s University. Her work has been published in such journals as Feminist Theory; MELUS; Journal of Romance Studies; Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal; and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice.

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: Stein's responses to the politics of authorship

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation: Democracy, Rights and Modernist Authorship, 1909–1933

BY ISABELLE PARKINSON

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474484329

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-gertrude-stein-and-the-politics-of-participation.html

Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation offers a new way of reading Stein’s key publications: as responses to the politics of authorship and aesthetic participation

• Tackles the problem of Stein’s politics and challenges the scholarly tradition that reads Stein’s writing as ‘democratic’ by setting her texts firmly in the context of twentieth-century democracy
• Explores intersections between discourses of the author and the rights-bearing subject and between aesthetic and democratic participation
• Explores the way discourses of biological sciences and pseudo-sciences such as eugenics, as well as those of politics, law and education are mediated in literary conceptions of authorship

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 book explores the politics of the right to write in Gertrude Stein’s practice and its reception. It examines how conceptions of authorship intersected discourses of democracy and rights in the period 1909-1933. The persistent debates across a broad range of publication contexts over Gertrude Stein’s right to participate in modernist authorship provide an instructive example of the way literary culture reflected contemporary political discussion. This study explores how representations of Stein that figured her either as barely human or as the ultimate democratic subject reproduced debates about who should participate in public life, refracted an emerging discourse of human rights, and echoed fears about the consequences of mass democracy as political franchise was extended.

"Isabelle Parkinson provides keen-eyed reappraisals of Stein's political writing, and of the political claims made by others about Stein's writing. Gertude Stein and the Politics of Participation is a sober, multidimensional guide to some of the most vexing problems of modernism and mass democracy." – Jeremy Braddock, Cornell University

Isabelle Parkinson is a teaching fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published on Gertrude Stein’s authorial identity and on the role of the anthology in constructing an avant-garde canon. Her work has appeared in, among others, the Journal of Modern Literature, Postmodern Cultures, and Bloomsbury’s Historicising Modernism series.

Book News: Critical takes on and creative homages to Mansfield's short fiction

 Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories

EDITED BY GERRI KIMBER AND TODD MARTIN

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399509947

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-katherine-mansfield-and-the-garden-party-and-other-stories.html

The last collection of short stories published in her lifetime, The Garden Party and Other Stories would solidify Katherine Mansfield’s place as the most prominent modernist short story writer of her generation. Early reviewers of the collection commented on the similarities it shared with her previous collection, Bliss and Other Stories; however, while contemporary reviews were mixed, many emphasized the psychological power of her stories, praising how she was able to bring her characters to life in a way simple action could not. While it contains some of Mansfield’s most sophisticated and well-loved stories, several of the stories in The Garden Party initially appeared in the Sphere, and thus were often dismissed as inferior. Mansfield herself felt some of these stories fell short of her desired effect, though recent scholarship has revealed their greater complexity. 

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 volume, by both seasoned and newer Mansfield scholars, work to continue this conversation. The collection also includes Mansfield-inspired short fiction, two translations of memorial poems dedicated to Mansfield by Chinese and French contemporaries with accompanying notes, and a recently re-discovered book review by Mansfield. In addition, Sydney Janet Kaplan provides a reflection on her personal meeting with Christopher Isherwood, a writer heavily influenced by the life and work of Mansfield.

Content includes:

CRITICISM

Redefining ‘Photographic Realism’ in the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield

Daisy Birch

Knowing What We Feel about Katherine Mansfield: Sentimentality and Expression in ‘The Garden Party’

Jay Dickson

Dickens, Death and Mary Ann: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Life of Ma Parker’

Martin Griffiths

‘Passion in Movement’: Katherine Mansfield – Gesture, Motion, and Dance

Richard Cappuccio

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Marriage à la Mode’: ‘far too facile’?

Anna Kwiatkowska

The Quest for Autonomy Amid Shifting Gender Expectations and Relationships in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Calvin Goh

‘Forgive my Hat’: Clothing as a Condition of Narratability in The Garden Party and Other Stories

Samantha Dewally

Katherine Mansfield’s Desperate Housewives and Metonymic Desire

Sovay Hansen

‘If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness’: The Political Language of Flowers in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories

Sharon Gordon

CREATIVE WRITING

‘How Loud the Birds’

Ailsa Cox

‘The Marquee’

Paula McGrath

‘Endless Sea’

Bronwyn Calder

Twenty Immortal Minutes: A Poem by Xu Zhimo

Stuart Lyons

A Poem by Philippe Chabaneix

Gerri Kimber

CRITICAL MISCELLANY

Returning to ‘Kathy’: Christopher Isherwood’s Katherine Mansfield Fascination

Sydney Janet Kaplan

Katherine Mansfield’s Daily Herald Review of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue

John G. Peters

REVIEW ESSAY

Redrawing Katherine Mansfield’s Critical Horizons

Elyse Blankley

Gerri Kimber is a visiting professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

A professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin’s primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.

Book News: Women modernists challenging gendered ideas of the senses

 

Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology

BY ALLYSON C. DEMAAGD

UP of Florida, 2022

ISBN: 9780813069166

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069166

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.  

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.

Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the “masculine” senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the “feminine” senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered “lower,” were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd’s analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration.            

Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.  

“DeMaagd’s timely study examines the changing sensescape in modernist aesthetics and gives the long-denigrated ‘lower’ senses of smell, taste, and touch their interpretive due, not only uncovering the gendering of sensory experience but also demonstrating the extent to which sensory practices crucially involve questions of class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and species.”—Vicki Tromanhauser, SUNY New Paltz  

“Redressing the focus on visual senses that has dominated discussions of modernist (usually male) writers, Dissensuous Modernism argues that these modernist women writers call upon the underacknowledged senses of touch, feel, and smell in questioning gendered hierarchies of embodied and institutional power.”—Linda A. Kinnahan, editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry  

Allyson C. DeMaagd is an independent scholar and college success manager at Mid-Shore Scholars.

Book News: Charting new territories in Rhys studies

Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Edited by Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, and Kerry-Jane Wallart

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

ISBN: 9781501371653

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501371653/

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

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.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Juliana Lopoukhine is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L’Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.

Frédéric Regard is professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).

Book News: Southern women writers' short story collections and their framing strategies

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers

BY HEATHER A. FOX

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840516 hardcover, 9781496840509 paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Arranging-Stories

A riveting history of how southern women writers negotiated authorial control in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century periodical market

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter—the authors featured in this book—publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own.

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.

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection’s textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories’ arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works.

"Drawing heavily on archival materials, including reproductions of many photographs, letters, manuscript pages, and other materials, Arranging Stories is a treasure trove of previously unreleased materials that sheds important light on these authors and their works. It draws attention to the amount of agency that these authors wielded over their work, in ways that we haven't previously considered."  - Monica Carol Miller, author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion

"With impeccable research, Arranging Stories reveals the struggles of early women writers working for acceptance and agency within a patriarchal publishing world dominated by White men."  - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Heather A. Fox is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Her work in southern studies has appeared in south, Southern Studies, Janus Head, The Explicator, and the Faulkner Journal.

Book News: Transatlantic view of Eudora Welty

The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty

By DANIELE PITVAY-SOUQUES 

EDITED BY PEARL AMELIA MCHANEY

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN 978-1-4968-4058-5

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Eye-That-Is-Language

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty’s view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty’s fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty’s work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty’s masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as “A Curtain of Green,” “Flowers for Marjorie,” “Old Mr. Marblehall,” “A Still Moment,” “Livvie,” “Circe,” “Kin,” and The Optimist’s Daughter, One Writer’s Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include “Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples” (1979), “A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty” (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty’s brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal.

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.

Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques’s European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty’s narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

"These readings of Welty’s works provide a coherent and significant picture of Welty as a modernist writer who was not just of her time but ahead of her time. By placing Welty’s work in the context of twentieth-century philosophers, scientists, and artists, Danièle Pitavy-Souques will give readers a renewed appreciation for Welty’s work and firmly position Welty as a major force in the literary canon." --Sarah Gilbreath Ford, author of Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

Danièle Pitavy-Souques (1937–2019) was professor emerita at the University of Burgundy, France; a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award and the French Legion of Honor for her work on international women's rights; and a European powerhouse of Welty studies. She published two books and more than a dozen essays on Welty, and she made major contributions to southern and Canadian studies.

Pearl Amelia McHaney is Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature Emerita at Georgia State University and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Society Phoenix Award for outstanding achievement in Welty studies. She is author of A Tyrannous Eye: Eudora Welty’s Nonfiction and Photography and editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer, Occasions: Selected Writings by Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty: The Contemporary Reviews, and A Writer’s Eye: Collected Reviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book News: Reappraising Muriel Spark's early works

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form

BY JAMES BAILEY

Edinburgh UP, March 2021

ISBN: 9781474475969 hardback

9781474475990 ePub

9781474475983 PDF

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muriel-spark-s-early-fiction.html

A compelling reappraisal of Spark’s approach to literary experimentation

• Offers a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, which challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing
• Interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique
• Presents nuanced re-readings of some of Spark’s major works, as well as lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories
• Draws upon detailed archival research to offer a unique insight into the social contexts and personal preoccupations that informed Spark’s writing

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction.

Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction is a magnificent achievement, bursting with revealing and original insights into Spark’s fiction and the enduring preoccupations and working methods of this most singular author. The result is a welcome addition to the process Spark scholars have embarked upon in recent years: extricating (or ‘desegregating’) the author from the various literary-critical categories that once confined her. Bailey’s approach is flexible and multi-faceted by contrast, and draws on an impressively extensive use of previously unexamined archival material. The reader is provided with illuminating explorations of ‘instances of narrative daring’ during the first two decades of Spark’s career which range from under-examined early short stories to key texts such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Driver’s Seat, and place the emphasis on her enduring commitment to highlight the ways women become inscribed in oppressive cultural narratives. It is a rich and readable monograph which lives up to its ambition to establish a more complex and appropriate framework to discuss Spark in our current critical era, and will therefore be essential reading for those embarking on future studies of one of the most brilliant and unusual writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

– Bran Nicol, University of Surrey

James Bailey is honorary research fellow in English literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-editor, with Emma Young, of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) as well as author of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing and European Journal of English Studies.