Book News: Graham Greene's aesthetics and form

Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

BY MARTYN SAMPSON

Fordham UP, 2021
ISBN: 9780823294671
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294671/between-form-and-faith/

What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.

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.

• Using a provocative blend of literary theory and recent Christian theology, this book upholds the radical intersection of the religious and the secular in the fiction of Graham Greene, one of England's finest writers.
• Explores Greene according to issues of form and content in an in-depth and radically new way. While much critical attention has focused on the thematics of Greene’s fiction, whether religious or secular, its form has not received sustained analysis.
• Demonstrates and dramatizes how Greene can actually have a significant impact on polarized critical methodologies. This serves to raise the status not only of Greene, but also potentially that of other religious writers, too.
• Deconstructs different kinds of prejudice among critics and readers whose dispositions are secular or religious in nature, Catholic and otherwise by considering how fiction relates not only to broad intellectual debates, but also to the minutiae of human relationships.

"Martyn Sampson expands our understanding of both Graham Greene’s Catholic imagination and the status of theological aesthetics by focusing on the formal dimensions of Greene’s literary production over the easily abstracted theological content of his work. Sampson uses the term ‘impulses’ to interrogate the imaginative pressures of faith, belief, and doubt that drove Greene’s work throughout his long literary career. He argues, in the end, that Greene’s conception of what a Catholic novel might be is more about a genre that brings the secular and the religious closer than apart, an embrace of possibility and risk at the heart of the human condition. What is remarkable in this study is Sampson’s deep reading of the discourses of critical theory placed in conversation with the vast range of Greene’s scholarship over the past decade. Between Form and Faith is an impressive achievement" — Mark Bosco, S.J., Georgetown University, author of Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination

"Here is a book of genuine intellectual heft. In his analysis of Graham Greene, Martyn Sampson brings together the insights of contemporary critical theory with those of modern theology to turn the notion of a ‘Catholic Novel’ on its head, treating faith not as a body of beliefs external to the fictions and so to be affirmed or denied, but as a dimension of the novels’ imagined worlds. This insightful and innovative book should become essential reading for literary and theological scholars." — Richard Greene, University of Toronto

Martyn Sampson earned his PhD from the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he taught English. He served as director of the 2018 and 2019 Graham Greene International Festivals.

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) is LIVE!

JML 45.2 (Winter 2022) on the theme "Reclaiming Tradition and Contingency" is now live on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47651.

Contents

Charlotte Fox 

“Reclaiming” tradition: An exploration of literary influence in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk 

K. Joudry

The Gospel According to Bolo 

Emily Anderson

An “unseemly joke”: Service-author Stories and Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)

Rachel Gaubinger 

The “Voiceless Language” of Sisters: Queer Possibility in E.M. Forster’s Howards End 

FREE

Niklas Cyril Fischer 

E.M. Forster, Realism, and the Style of Progressive Nostalgia

Gurumurthy Neelakantan 

Philip Roth’s Politics of Freedom in the American Trilogy 

Caroline Gelmi 

Vachel Lindsay and the Primitive Singing of the New Poetry

André Furlani

Walking toward Genre: The Pedestrian Excursus

Jack Quirk 

The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts” 

John Attridge

Contingent Sociality and Same-sex Desire in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu 

Reviews

Jake O’Leary

Politics and Literature in Interwar Britain’s Only Women-Controlled Weekly Review

Robert Harris

Making Him New: Ezra Pound in the Twenty-First Century

Chen Lin

The “wholeness” of T.S. Eliot: A Review of T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination

Book News: Analyzing the understudied women playwrights of the US South

Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender

BY CASEY KAYSER

UP of Mississippi, 2021

ISBN 978-1-4968-3591-8

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/M/Marginalized

Winner of the 2021 Eudora Welty Prize

In contrast to other literary genres, drama has received little attention in southern studies, and women playwrights in general receive less recognition than their male counterparts. In Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender, author Casey Kayser addresses these gaps by examining the work of southern women playwrights, making the argument that representations of the American South on stage are complicated by difficulties of identity, genre, and region.

Through analysis of the dramatic texts, the rhetoric of reviews of productions, as well as what the playwrights themselves have said about their plays and productions, Kayser delineates these challenges and argues that playwrights draw on various conscious strategies in response. These strategies, evident in the work of such playwrights as Pearl Cleage, Sandra Deer, Lillian Hellman, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Shay Youngblood, provide them with the opportunity to lead audiences to reconsider monolithic understandings of northern and southern regions and, ultimately, create new visions of the South.

“Nuanced and tempered throughout, Marginalized: Southern Women Playwrights Confront Race, Region, and Gender is a provocative study that greatly extends our understanding of the various minefields that southern women writers navigate when they write for the stage.”

—Will Brantley, author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston

"Its greatest contribution, I think, is its advice to critics, readers, and consumers of American theatre: the American South is not a monolith, indivisible and uniform, and southern women’s plays should neither be overlooked nor misread. They are far too smart for that."

—Amy R. Martin, Southern Review of Books

CASEY KAYSER is assistant professor at University of Arkansas. She is coeditor of Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century and Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Pedagogy, Mississippi Quarterly, and Midwestern Folklore.

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: Enriching our understanding of literary empathy

Modernist Empathy: Geography, Elegy, and the Uncanny

BY EVE C. SORUM

Cambridge UP, 2019

ISBN: 9781108595667

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-empathy/83F710997D411394B54BD1912C59A983

This book shows how reading modernist literature gives us a fresh and necessary insight into both the tensions within the empathetic imagination and the idea of empathy itself. Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, Mary Borden, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf encourage us to enter other perspectives even as they question the boundaries between self and other and, hence, the very possibility of empathy. Eve Sorum maintains that we must think through this complex literary heritage, focusing on the geographic and elegiac modes of the empathetic imagination, and revealing empathy as more fraught, threatening, and even uncanny than it first appears. Modernist Empathy thereby forges a theory of literary empathy as an act not of orientation, but of disorientation, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of both modernist literature and the concept of literary empathy. 

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.

Eve Sorum is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and was a Fulbright Scholar in Burkina Faso in 2013–14. She has published articles and essays on a range of topics, including the masochistic aesthetics of T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, poetic self-elegies, and the democratic nostalgia of W. H. Auden.

Book News: How the Cold War shaped Asian literary production

Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization

BY JINI KIM WATSON

Fordham UP, 2021

ISBN 9780823294831

https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294831/cold-war-reckonings/

Cold War Reckonings shows how the Cold War shaped culture and political power in the decolonizing world and gave rise, paradoxically, to authoritarian regimes of the so-called free world.

How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nationstates. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a rich account of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’s rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia.

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.

Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.

“Cold War Reckonings is not only a sophisticated work of cultural criticism, but also an astounding articulation of political theory. Analyzing literary and cinematic texts alongside occasions like PEN regional meetings, Jini Kim Watson offers an altogether original story about the Cold War and decolonization in Asia, on the one hand, and about the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism, on the other. The book profoundly shifts our understanding of the Cold War, arrested decolonization, postcolonial sovereignty, and the developmental state within capitalist modernity. In short, it offers a new theory of the state in general, and of the capitalist authoritarian state in particular.” 

–Jodi Kim, University of California, Riverside

“Jini Kim Watson’s Cold War Reckonings is an important, brilliant, and extremely engaging book that is beautifully written and bold and innovative in its arguments. Watson shows how the social and political promises of decolonization were derailed by the developmentalism that permitted certain sectors of postcolonial states to seize power by vowing ‘to fast-forward the time of national development.’ Treating thirdworld dictatorial regimes neither as unprepared political actors nor as dupes, Watson shows the overlapping interests between global capitalism and authoritarianism in some of Asia’s ‘capitalist success stories.’” 

–Joseph Slaughter, Columbia University

Jini Kim Watson is associate professor of English and comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form and editor, with Gary Wilder, of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present.

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.