Book News: Sale on all Syracuse UP titles through Feb. 15

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Book News: guide to studying poetry of the new century

The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry

EDITED BY TIMOTHY YU 

Cambridge UP, 2021

ISBN: 9781108741958 Paperback

https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/american-literature/cambridge-companion-twenty-first-century-american-poetry?format=PB

A new poetic century demands a new set of approaches. This Companion shows that American poetry of the twenty-first century, while having important continuities with the poetry of the previous century, takes place in new modes and contexts that require new critical paradigms. Offering a comprehensive introduction to studying the poetry of the new century, this collection highlights the new, multiple centers of gravity that characterize American poetry today. Essays on African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries respond to the centrality of issues of race and indigeneity in contemporary American discourse. Other essays explore poetry and feminism, poetry and disability, and queer poetics. The environment, capitalism, and war emerge as poetic preoccupations, alongside a range of styles from spoken word to the avant-garde, and an examination of poetry's place in the creative writing era.

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.

• Offers a wide-ranging introduction to the study of American poetry in the twenty-first century
• Each essay explores continuity with twentieth-century poetry but also emphasizes the rapidly changing context and paradigms for reading poetry in the twenty-first century
• Brings the study of American poetry into the present by highlighting and reflecting the growing diversity of American poetic production

Timothy Yu is author of Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, editor of Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets, and author of a poetry collection,100 Chinese Silences. He is the Martha Meier Renk-Bascom Professor of Poetry and professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Book News: Guide to Borges, Now in English

Borges: An Introduction

BY JULIO PREMAT

Translated by Amanda Murphy

Vanderbilt UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-8265-0225-4 Paperback

ISBN: 978-0-8265-0226-1 Hardcover

https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826502254/borges/

This book, available for the first time in English, offers a thorough introductory reading of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most remarkable and influential writers of the twentieth century. Julio Premat, a specialist in the field of Borges studies, presents the main questions posed by Borges's often paradoxical writing, and leads the novice through the complexity and breadth of Borges's vast literary production.

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.

Originally published in French by an Argentine ex-pat living in Paris, Borges: An Introduction includes the Argentine specificities of Borges’s work—specificities that are often unrecognized or glossed over in Anglophone readings.

This book is a boon for university students of philosophy and literature, teachers and researchers in these fields who are looking to better understand this complex author, and anyone interested in the advanced study of literature. Somewhere between a guidebook and an exhaustive work of advanced research, Borges: An Introduction is the ultimate stepping-stone into the deeper Borgesian world.

Julio Premat is a professor at the Université Paris 8, a member of the Laboratoire d’Etudes Romanes, and a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

Amanda Murphy is a translator and an associate professor of English and translation studies at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.

Book News: Analyzing Alice Walker's multifaceted oeuvre

Understanding Alice Walker

BY THADIOUS M. DAVIS 

U of South Carolina P, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64336-237-3 hardback │ 978-1-64336-238-0 paper│ 

978-1-64336-239-7 ebook

https://uscpress.com/Understanding-Alice-Walker

Understanding Alice Walker serves both as an introduction to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner’s large body of work and as a critical analysis of her multifaceted canon. Thadious M. Davis begins with Walker’s biography and her formative experiences in the South and then presents ways of accessing and reading Walker’s complex, interconnected, and sociopolitically invested career in writing fiction, poetry, critical essays, and meditations. 

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.

Although best known for her novel The Color Purple and her landmark essays In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, Walker began her career with Once: Poems, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. She has remained committed not merely to writing in multiple genres but also to conveying narratives of the hope and transformation possible within the human condition and as visualized through the lens of race and gender.

Davis traces Walker’s literary voice as it emerges from the civil rights and feminist movements to encourage an individual and collective search for justice and joy and then evolves into forceful advocacy for world peace, spiritual liberation, and environmental conservancy. Her writing, a rich amalgamation of the cutting-edge and popular, the new-age and difficult, continues to be paradigm shifting and among the most important produced in the last half of the twentieth century and among the most consistently prophetic in the first part of the twenty-first century.

“In Thadious Davis, Alice Walker has found an ideal reader, one who places the author and her work in personal, historical, and political contexts, one whose critical analysis reveals depth and meaning beyond the obvious, and one whose brilliance complements that of the writer.” — Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University 

“This brilliant book provides a dazzlingly crystalline and panoramic portrait of Alice Walker’s expansive body of work. It incorporates insights on Walker’s biography, examining stages in her epic journey as a writer whose life and work have profoundly impacted the world and been devoted to helping its healing.”  — Riché Richardson, Cornell University 

“a succinct and searching study of Alice Walker’s expansive corpus and evolving imagination. Thadious Davis provides her readers a comprehensive and illuminating overview of Walker’s writings across multiple themes and genres, but also of the contexts—local and global—that have given it form.”                 — Deborah McDowell, University of Virginia

“Davis reveals an immense scholarly patience with Alice Walker and her works, reading and discussing and analyzing them in a deep and well-organized reconstruction of the author's background against American history and events around the globe.” — Geneva Cobb Moore, author of Bodily Evidence: Racism, Slavery, and Maternal Power in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Emerita, and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature; Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance; and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context.

Book News: British Fiction in the Turbulent 1970s

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

By J. RUSSELL PERKIN

McGill-Queen's UP, 2021

ISBN: 9780228006244

https://www.mqup.ca/politics-and-the-british-novel-in-the-1970s-products-9780228006244.php?page_id=73&

The 1970s in Britain saw a series of industrial disputes, a referendum on membership in the European Economic Community, conflict about issues of immigration and citizenship, and emergent environmental and feminist movements. It was also a decade of innovation in the novel, and novelists often addressed the state of the nation directly in their works.

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 Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s Russell Perkin looks at social novels by John Fowles and Margaret Drabble, the Cold War thrillers of John le Carré, Richard Adams's best-selling fable Watership Down, the popular campus novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, Doris Lessing's dystopian visions, and V.S. Naipaul's explorations of post-colonial displacement. Many of these highly regarded works sold in large numbers and have enjoyed enduring success - a testament to the power of the political novel to explain a nation to itself. Perkin explores the connections between the novel and politics, situating the works it discusses in the rich context of the history and culture of the decade, from party politics to popular television shows.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s elucidates a period of literary history now fifty years in the past and offers a balanced perspective on the age, revealing that these works not only represented the politics of the time but played a meaningful role in them.

"Russell Perkin's emphasis on the ways in which fiction reflects political currents and discussions in the 1970s offers an original and much-needed contribution to our understanding of this tumultuous and neglected period." Caroline Zoe Krzakowski, Northern Michigan University

J. Russell Perkin is professor of English at Saint Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Book News: Sexual policing in Hemispheric American Literature

Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature

BY JENNA GRACE SCIUTO

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 9781496833440 Hardcover

ISBN 9781496833457 Paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Policing-Intimacy

In Policing Intimacy: Law, Sexuality, and the Color Line in Twentieth-Century Hemispheric American Literature, author Jenna Grace Sciuto analyzes literary depictions of sexual policing of the color line across multiple spaces with diverse colonial histories: Mississippi through William Faulkner’s work, Louisiana through Ernest Gaines’s novels, Haiti through the work of Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat, and the Dominican Republic through writing by Julia Alvarez, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario. This literature exposes the continuing coloniality that links depictions of US democracy with Caribbean dictatorships in the twentieth century, revealing a set of interrelated features characterizing the transformation of colonial forms of racial and sexual control into neocolonial reconfigurations.

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.

A result of systemic inequality and large-scale historical events, the patterns explored herein reveal the ways in which private relations can reflect national occurrences and the intimate can be brought under public scrutiny. Acknowledging the widespread effects of racial and sexual policing that persist in current legal, economic, and political infrastructures across the circum-Caribbean can in turn bring to light permutations of resistance to the violent discriminations of the status quo. By drawing on colonial documents, such as early law systems like the 1685 French Code Noir instated in Haiti, the 1724 Code Noir in Louisiana, and the 1865 Black Code in Mississippi, in tandem with examples from twentieth-century literature, Policing Intimacy humanizes the effects of legal histories and leaves space for local particularities. By focusing on literary texts and variances in form and aesthetics, Sciuto demonstrates the necessity of incorporating multiple stories, histories, and traumas into accounts of the past.

Jenna Grace Sciuto is associate professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her work examines the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in circum-Caribbean literature.

Book News: Paris's Postwar Shadows

Shadows in the City of Light: Paris in Postwar French Jewish Writing

EDITED BY SARA R. HOROWITZ, AMIRA BOJADZIJA-DAN, AND JULIA CREET

 

SUNY Press, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8174-6 Paper

ISBN: 978-1-4384-8173-9 Hardcover

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6980-shadows-in-the-city-of-light.aspx

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them.

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.

For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris’s dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.

Sara R. Horowitz is professor of humanities and comparative literature at York University and the author of Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction, also published by SUNY Press. 

Amira Bojadzija-Dan is research associate at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at York University. 

Julia Creet is professor of English at York University and the author of The Genealogical Sublime. 

Together, they are also coeditors of H. G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy.