BOOK NEWS: Examining department stores in French and Egyptian literature

Emporialism: Department Store Fictions and the Politics of the Mediterranean

By Amr Kamal

SUNY Press, 2025

ISBN: 9781438499468

https://sunypress.edu/Books/E/Emporialism

A comparative study of iconographic and fictional representations of department stores in France and Egypt, as sites of imperial and Mediterranean cultural memory, from 1869 to the present.

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 examines what Amr Kamal calls the phenomenon of emporialism, or the convergence between the spaces and imaginaries of empires and emporia in the context of a modern Mediterranean divided among the British, French, and Ottoman empires. By "emporia," Kamal refers to the commercial network of nineteenth-century department stores, which gained prominence after the Suez Canal project. Taking as a focal point French and Egyptian department stores, the author examines emporialism as a set of phenomenological experiences, discursive and social praxes, and mechanisms of control and resistance, born from the intersection of modernity, colonialism, and mass consumption. Drawing on archival evidence, Kamal reads iconographic and literary representations of emporia in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, from the nineteenth century to the present, addressing works by Émile Zola, Huda Shaarawi, Jacqueline Kahanoff, and others. Emporialism, Kamal argues, served to rewrite the history of the Mediterranean, to reinvent national belonging, and to interrogate issues of modernity and social justice.

"A major critical study of the phenomenon of the department store in modern consumer culture, Emporialism offers a stimulating intervention in the fields of Egyptian literature, French literature, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Blending historical, literary, and visual analysis, Kamal rigorously draws out and cross-examines the interplay of imperialism, Orientalism, and commerce in transnational contexts, while the illustrations help highlight the rich iconography of the emporium." — H. Hazel Hahn, editor of Cross-Cultural Exchange and the Colonial Imaginary: Global Encounters via Southeast Asia

"The word 'Emporium' today carries with it a quaint and nostalgic reference to a luxurious and remote past. But if the great nineteenth-century 'department stores' have been eclipsed today by the Amazons of the Internet, Amr Kamal's genealogical, multinational study invests them with an 'aura'—in the sense given the word by Walter Benjamin. In its disappearance, Emporialism casts an illuminating light upon contemporary consumer culture." — Samuel Weber, author of Preexisting Conditions: Recounting the Plague and Singularity: Politics and Poetics

Amr Kamal is associate professor of French, Arabic, and comparative literature at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center.

BOOK NEWS: Totality in contemporary global realist fiction

New Global Realism: Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel

By Gabriele Lazzari 

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781350385672

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/new-global-realism-9781350385672/

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book examines writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India, and Mexico.

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.

By theorizing four modalities of totalization employed by contemporary realist writers, this book explores the current resurgence of realism and challenges critical approaches that consider it naive or formally unsophisticated. Instead, it argues that realist novels offer a self-conscious and serious representation of the world we inhabit while actively envisioning new social designs and political configurations. Through comparative studies of novels by Fernanda Melchor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Vivek Shanbhag, Nicola Lagioia, Igiaba Scego, Yaa Gyasi and Roberto Bolaño, this book further explains why realism can be a powerful antidote to the skepticism about the possibility of making truth-claims in humanist research.

"This is a very exciting book; timely, intellectual, and moving in all the right directions of the future of literary study." --Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick

Gabriele Lazzari is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey, UK.

NEW ISSUE: JML 48.4 "History and Geography" is now LIVE

 

Journal of Modern Literature 48.4 (Summer 2025) on the theme "History and Geography" is now LIVE on Project MUSE at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/55722.

Content includes:

James Dutton

A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities’ Unfinishable History

Laura L. Behling

“[T]his trivial and vulgar occasion”: P.R. Stephensen’s Lampoons of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness

Andrés Ibarra Cordero

Backwardness in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library

Hannah Loeb

“Like leaves against the sunlight”: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” 

Cilliers van den Berg

Patterns of Meaning and the Claims of History: S.J. Naudé’s The Third Reel

Denis Topalović 

The Rings of Sarajevo: W.G. Sebald and the Bosnian War

FREE!

Aaron Shaheen

The Restitution of Harold Krebs: A Cartographic Reading of Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” 

Duncan Hay

Downriver’s Flâneur(s): Space and Representation in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair

Ryan Johnson

Confused Categories: Russia and the East-West Divide in William Plomer’s Sado

Reviews 

Jack Dudley

Methodological Pluralism and the Cause of Progress: A Review Essay of Jesse Wolfe’s Love, Friendship, and Narrative Form After Bloomsbury

Laura de la Parra Fernández

Postwar Interiorities: Review of The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel

Hong Zeng and Ping Zhang

The Impact of Taoist and Zen Literature and Arts on Western Modernism: A Dialogue with Zhaoming Qian

BOOK NEWS: Examining domestic servants in contemporary South Asian fiction

Postcolonial Servitude: Domestic Servants in Global South Asian English Literature  

By Ambreen Hai

Oxford UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780197698006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOK NEWS: Defamiliarizing reading via "deformative" Latin American fiction

Deformative Fictions: Cruelty and Narrative Ethics in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
By Ashley Hope Pérez

Ohio State UP, 2024

ISBN: 978-0-8142-5906-1

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215654.html

Tapping a rich vein of Latin American literature, Deformative Fictions by Ashley Hope Pérez excavates works that unsettle, defamiliarize, and disrupt access to the conventional pleasures of reading and interpretation. Close readings highlight the nuances of texts that have been misread, underread, or fetishized because they depart from literary norms, including fiction by Roberto Bolaño and Silvina Ocampo. 

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.

Interweaving rhetorical and narratological analysis with reflections on the ethical stakes of writing, reading, and interpreting deformative fictions and fictional cruelty, Pérez issues a resounding entreaty for us to expand our understandings of the value of narrative beyond the logics of utility and comfort. Doing so, she contends, allows readers to embrace the full possibilities of the relationships among authors, readers, and the worlds we inhabit on and off the page. In defamiliarizing the act of reading, deformative fictions reacquaint us with its ethical weight.

“Pérez brings a rich genealogy of Latin American literature into the narrative studies tradition, convincingly arguing why we should read works that refuse to offer us comfort. She offers critical food for thought for researchers and teachers alike, employing a beautiful writing style that illustrates complex ideas with ease.” —Doug P. Bush, author of Capturing Mariposas: Reading Cultural Schema in Gay Chicano Literature

Ashley Hope Pérez is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the novels What Can’t Wait The Knife and the Butterfly, and Out of Darkness and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Banned Together: Authors and Allies on the Fight for Readers’ Rights.

BOOK NEWS: Spirit forces in global contemporary novels

Worldly Spirits, Extra-Human Dimensions, and the Global Anglophone Novel 

BY HILARY THOMPSON

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350373815

https://www.bloomsbury.com/worldly-spirits-extrahuman-dimensions-and-the-global-anglophone-novel-9781350373815/

Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings—were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses—as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of "magical realism," Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds.

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.

Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction.

A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Hilary Thompson is associate professor of English at Bowdoin College. She is author of Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium (2018) and has published multiple articles on Amitav Ghosh and on global anglophone literature, biopolitics, and the Anthropocene.

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: WWI poetry from a global perspective

 A History of World War One Poetry

EDITED BY JANE POTTER 

Cambridge UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781009100649

https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/literature/english-literature-1900-1945/history-world-war-one-poetry?format=HB

Situating First World War poetry in a truly global context, this book reaches beyond the British soldier-poet canon. A History of World War One Poetry examines popular and literary, ephemeral and enduring poems that the cataclysm of 1914-1918 inspired. 

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.

Across Europe, poets wrestled with the same problem: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology, involving millions of combatants and countless civilians. For literary scholars this has meant discovering and engaging with the work of men and women writing in other languages, on other fronts, and from different national perspectives. Poems are presented in their original languages and in English translations, some for the very first time, while a Coda reflects on the study and significance of First World War poetry in the wake of the Centenary. A History of World War One Poetry offers a new perspective on the literary and human experience of 1914-1918.

• Provides examples of transnational poetic creation in time of global conflict to demonstrates how the canon of First World War Poetry, largely based around the British soldier-poetry, needs to be widened and diversified by presenting the poetry of the war in its global environment
• Analyzes a range of First World War poetry in the original language and in English translation in an accessible and scholarly manner
• Considers poetry from diverse perspectives, including artistic movements, individual poets and nations, and publishing history

Jane Potter is Reader in Arts at the Oxford International Centre for Publishing, Oxford Brookes University. Her publications include Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War (2005), Wilfred Owen: An Illustrated Life (2014), and with Carol Acton, Working in a World of Hurt: Trauma and Resilience in the Narratives of Medical Personnel in War Zones (2015).

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

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

EDITED BY FRANCESCA ORSINI, NEELAM SRIVASTAVA AND LAETITIA ZECCHINI                  

Open Book Publishers, 2022

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

(open access electronic; purchase ebook and print below)

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

 

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

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

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

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

             

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

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

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

Book News: Sisters writing post-independence Jamaica

Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard: Folklore and Culture in Jamaica

BY VIOLET HARRINGTON BRYAN

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN: 9781496836212

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book News: Japanese Modernism's roots in Buddhism

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction:
Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism

BY MICHIHIRO AMA

SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8141-8 hardback

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8142-5 paperback

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-7022-the-awakening-of-modern-japanes.aspx

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction is the first book to treat the literary practices of certain major modern Japanese writers as Buddhist practices, and to read their work as Buddhist literature. Its distinctive contribution is its focus on modern literature and, importantly, modern Buddhism, which Michihiro Ama presents both as existing in continuity with the historical Buddhist tradition and as having unique features of its own. Ama corrects the dominant perception in which the Christian practice of confession has been accepted as the primary informing source of modern Japanese prose literature, arguing instead that the practice has always been a part of Shin Buddhist culture. 

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.

Focusing on personal fiction, this volume explores the works of literary figures and Buddhist priests who, challenged by the modern development of Japan, turned to Buddhism in a variety of ways and used literature as a vehicle for transforming their sense of selfhood. Writers discussed include Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Shiga Naoya, Kiyozawa Manshi, and Akegarasu Haya. By bringing Buddhism out of the shadows of early twentieth-century Japanese literature and elucidating its presence in both individual authors’ lives and the genre of autobiographical fiction, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction demonstrates a more nuanced understanding of the role of Buddhism in the development of Japanese modernity.

Michihiro Ama is Karashima Tsukasa Associate Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at the University of Montana. He is the author of Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898–1941.