BOOK NEWS: Literary vegetarians

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century

BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781009287265

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/vegetarianism-and-veganism-in-literature-from-the-ancients-to-the-twentyfirst-century/E5332A2457468C0DFD58C561CF957055

Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasizes that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.

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.

Content includes:

Chapter 1 - ‘everybody eating everyone else’

Chapter 2 - Pythagoreans; or, Vegetarians before ‘Vegetarianism’

Chapter 3 - Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel

Chapter 4 - Vegetarianism as Religion

Chapter 5 - Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women’s Liberation

Chapter 6 - Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene

Chapter 7 - ‘Pity the meat!’: Ideology, Metaphor, Violence

"What we have here is a monograph in food studies that transforms the field as a whole. The scope of this project is expansive, the analysis is consistently delightful, and the argument is original, making an important contribution to literary histories of vegetarianism." —Gitanjali Shahani, San Francisco State University

Theophilus Savvas is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He works on postmodernist American writing and the interconnections between history and fiction as well as literature and ecology.

BOOK NEWS: Psychic connection and porous selves in British fiction

Psychic Connection and the Twentieth-Century British Novel: From Telepathy to the Network Novel

BY MARK TAYLOR

Edinburgh UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781399524483

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-psychic-connection-and-the-twentieth-century-british-novel.html

Criticism of the novel routinely starts with the assumption that characters must think, develop, and strive for self-fulfillment as individuals. This book challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium. It describes how major writers throughout the twentieth century—many convinced by the supposed findings of parapsychology—rejected the idea of the discrete character. Treating the self as porous, they offered novels structured around the development of communities and ideas rather than individuals. By focusing on D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley, and Doris Lessing, Mark Taylor demonstrates the need to broaden our approach to character when addressing the novel of the twentieth century and beyond.

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.

• Contends that the twentieth century novel’s approach to character fundamentally shifted in response to contemporaneous theories of psychic connection
• Challenges the paradigm that individualism is innate to the novel as a medium
• Charts an unmapped trajectory in the novel’s development away from individualism
• Accessibly outlines how psychic speculation informs the conception of character in major twentieth century novels
• Offers valuable tools for analyzing literature without treating the individuated character as a necessary unit

"Taylor’s book offers a fascinating alternative history of the twentieth-century British novel. While the novel form is often seen as the definitive narrative of individualism, Psychic Connection tracks a different path through telepathy, panpsychism, and visions of collective selves, working through D. H. Lawrence, Olaf Stapledon, Aldous Huxley and Doris Lessing, and ending with a generative reading of the contemporary ‘network novels’ of David Mitchell. A cogent and consistently compelling counter-narrative." —Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck College

Mark Taylor is a specialist in twentieth-century British literature, most recently working as assistant professor in English Literature at HSE University, Moscow. His research focuses on notions of individual and collective selfhood in British literature of the previous century. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic and Science Fiction Studies.

BOOK NEWS: Bolaño's and Pynchon's hyperbolic style

Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon's and Bolaño's Late Maximalist Fiction

BY SAMIR SELLAMI

Bloomsbury, 2024

ISBN: 9781501360497

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/hyperbolic-realism-9781501360497/

What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realism engages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Roberto Bolaño's 2666 – their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty – which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. 

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.

Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bolaño react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

"Samir Sellami writes with brilliant clarity and makes difficult arguments easy to follow. Philosophers and critical theorists should study his techniques." —Kathryn Hume, Pennsylvania State University

Samir Sellami is a literary critic and, together with Tobias Haberkorn, founding editor of the Berlin Review. He holds a PhD in comparative literature and media studies from the University of Perpignan and the Federal Fluminense University in Nitéroi, Brazil. His research interests include post-avantgarde writing in the Americas, critiques of strong narrativity, aesthetic autodidacticism, and the intersectionality of genre, affect, and form.

BOOK NEWS: Examining unseen structures and uncertain spaces in crime writing

The Crossroads of Crime Writing: Unseen Structures and Uncertain Spaces

EDITED BY MEGHAN P. NOLAN AND REBECCA MARTIN 

Anthem Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781839991172

https://anthempress.com/the-crossroads-of-crime-writing-hb

Over a century ago, in his examination The Sensational in Modern English Fiction (1919), Walter Clarke Phillips declared, “Whatever sources of appeal may come or go, there is one which from the very structure of modern democratic society seldom bids for applause unheeded—that is, the appeal to fear” (p. 2). It is to this appeal that we owe the abundance of crime writing at our disposal—a trove of mystery that undoubtedly fascinates in its ability to entertain while safely reflecting the ugliest truths about ourselves and the societies in which we live. 

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 volume argues that we must examine the boundaries in fiction and non-fiction crime writing with an awareness of and turn toward the unseen structures and spatial uncertainties that so often lead to and reflect collective fears and anxieties. Drawing upon the insights and expertise of an international array of scholars, the chapters explore the interplay of the literary, historical, social, and cultural in various modes of crime writing from the 1890s to as recent as 2017. They examine unseen structures and uncertain spaces, and simultaneously provide new insights into the works of iconic authors, such as Agatha Christie, and iconic fictional figures, like Sherlock Holmes, as well as underexplored subjects, including Ukrainian detective fiction of the Soviet period and crime writing by a Bengali police detective at the turn of the twentieth century. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find new perspectives on crime writing employing theories of cultural memory and deep mapping.  

This volume features authors and subjects that are global in scope with original, innovative work on crime writing. The breadth of coverage—of both time and place—is an indicator of a text in which seasoned readers, advanced students, and academics will find specialized explorations of individual works and authors, while the critical and theoretical approaches and the topical coherence of the collection offer to a wide audience a scholarly overview of crime writing, as a still-growing area of popular interest and a still-evolving field of intellectual exploration.

This distinctive collection investigates boundaries in crime fiction, paying attention to hidden narratives, structures, and spaces. Comprising wide-ranging essays examining topics such as ecology, politics, Black and Indian detective fiction, and true crime, Nolan and Martin’s edited volume makes a powerful contribution to the ever-diversifying field of crime fiction criticism.  — Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire

Nolan and Martin have interestingly brought together analyses of texts likely unfamiliar to English readers and re-evaluations of ones that are overly familiar, making seen how the less visible geo-spatial and genre-spatial organizations have profound bearing on the social contributions of crime fiction. — Malcah Effron, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Meghan P. Nolan, MFA, MA, PhD, is an associate professor of English and Chair of the Honors program at SUNY Rockland Community College. She is a multigenre writer, who focuses on (Neo-)Victorian and Modern literature/crime writing and fragmented perceptions of self-hood through many published academic works, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Rebecca Martin, PhD, is professor emerita of English at Pace University in New York. In addition to her PhD, which focused on the eighteenth-century Gothic novel in England, she holds a graduate certificate in film studies from CUNY Graduate Center, and her interest in crime writing focuses on the hardboiled tradition.

SPECIAL FEATURE: A Closer Look at JML 47.3, Joyce's theory theater in "Circe"

Katherine Franco looks at the "Circe" episode in Joyce's Ulysses as closet drama and a theatrical take on literary theory: 

https://iupress.org/connect/blog/theorys-theatrics-in-circe-a-closer-look-at-jml-47-3/

Her JML 47.3 essay is available FREE, linked in the post

JML 47.3 (Spring 2024) is now LIVE!

 Journal of Modern Literature 47.3 (Spring 2024), with a special guest-edited cluster “Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel,” and a cluster on “Ireland’s Modernists,” is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52819.

Content includes:

Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Doug Battersby

Introduction: Affective Forms of the Modernist Novel

Kirsty Martin

D.H. Lawrence and Shyness

Doug Battersby

Elizabeth Bowen’s Equivocal Modernism

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle

Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Heart

Rick de Villiers

True Feints: Samuel Beckett and the Sincerity of Loneliness 

Ulrika Maude

“Other kinds of emotions”: Ishiguro’s Late-Modernist Affect 

Derek Attridge

Joycean Form, Emotion, and Contemporary Modernism: Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Ireland’s Modernists

Katherine Franco

Staging the Surface: James Joyce’s Theater for Theorization in “Circe” 

FREE

Karl O’Hanlon

Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Danielle N. Gilman

Elizabeth Bowen’s Critical “Scrap Screen” 

Jivitesh Vashisht

“He will now think he hears her”: Indirect Perception and the Return to Proust in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio

Mantra Mukim

Timbral Poetics: Samuel Beckett and the Impossible Voice

BOOK NEWS: Examining the literary telephone

Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place

BY SARAH JACKSON 

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350259607

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/literature-and-the-telephone-9781350259607/

Literature and the Telephone explores the ways that the telephone taps into the operations of reading and writing, opening up our understanding of how, where and why literary communication takes place.

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.

Addressing the telephone's complex, multiple and mutating functions, and drawing on recent work by writers and thinkers including Sara Ahmed, Stacy Alaimo, Judith Butler, Nicholas Royle, and Eyal Weizman, this open access book considers the linguistic, technical and conceptual disruptions of the literary telephone as well as the poetic and political possibilities of the exchange.

Focusing on the telephonic effects of post-war writing by authors such as Mourid Barghouti, Caroline Bergvall, Tom Raworth, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, and Rita Wong, Sarah Jackson proposes that the uncanny logic of the telephone, and its capacity for ordering and disordering the text, speaks to some of the most urgent concerns of our era.

Examining topics ranging from surveillance and migration to warfare and electronic waste, Jackson argues that the literary telephone offers new ways of conceiving ethical and creative technological futures, as well as different modes of reading, writing and listening across cultures.

"Not just a book about telephony and literature, but a book about how the telephone has active contributed to the deconstruction of literature and culture, while steadily working to deconstruction our own lives. Jackson acts as a deft operator of a complex interational switchboard, taking us through the developments of this process of deconstruction, by way of an exciting range of texts by twentieth-century and twenty-first-century novelists, poets, and theorists." --Nicoletta Asciuto, University of York

"Jackson's elegant study reconceptualizes the relationship between reading, writing, listening, and calling, with an awareness of the wider ethical, political, and spatial possibilities of the exchange, In the true spiring of pioneering work like Nicholas Royle's Telepathy and Literature and Avital Ronell's Telephone Book, it is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the uncanny ramifications between the literary and the tele-technological." --Laurent Milesi, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Sarah Jackson is associate professor in modern and contemporary writing at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker (2016), AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018-­2020) and NTU VC Outstanding Researcher (2017). Her publications include Tactile Poetics (2015), Pelt (2012), and a special issue of parallax on the ‘unidentifiable literary object’ (2019).