Book News: Limited-time sale on Woolf scholarly books

The University Press of Florida is offering a special sale--and free shipping--on three scholarly works by Barbara Lounsberry listed below now through 2/2/21.

Becoming Virginia Woolf

Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read

BARBARA  LOUNSBERRY

272 pp. | 6 x 9 | Paper $24.95 $18.00

“This vital study inspires one to reread Woolf’s diaries with special attention to outside influences that helped shape her writing.” —Choice

“Lounsberry ultimately helps us see, through her close attention to what she calls the first three phases in Woolf’s diary-keeping, how the Virginia Woolf we know actually became that writer. This book is foundational, one the rest of us will depend on for a long time.” —Woolf Studies Annual

Virginia Woolf’s Modernist Path
Her Middle Diaries and the Diaries She Read

BARBARA  LOUNSBERRY

280 pp. | 6 x 9 | Paper $24.95 $18.00

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

“Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this volume is a love letter for all scholars of Woolf and modernism, and for neophytes interested in the aegis of Woolf’s distinctive style. . . . Essential.”—Choice

“Lounsberry’s years of meditation on her material can be felt. . . . In the passionate diary reader we find here, Barbara Lounsberry has brought to life one more Virginia Woolf.” —Times Literary Supplement

Virginia Woolf, the War Without, the War Within
Her Final Diaries and the Diaries She Read

BARBARA  LOUNSBERRY

408 pp. | 6 x 9 | Paper $24.95 $18.00

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE

“Essential.”—Choice

“Barbara Lounsberry has done for Woolf’s diaries what the diaries once did for Woolf’s novels, and what all great literary criticism seeks to do: It takes a canonical work of literature and offers an entirely new way of seeing it.”—New Republic

ORDER FORM

 

SALE ENDS FEBRUARY 2

Book News: Dublin's post-independence theatre scene

 

Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940

BY RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN 

Syracuse UP, January 2021

Paper ISBN: 9780815636434

Hardcover ISBN: 9780815636250

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/3470/avant-garde-nationalism-at-the-dublin-gate-theatre-1928-1940/

A new generation of Irish playwrights set out to establish Dublin as a modern European capital by staging radical productions at the Dublin Gate Theatre.

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 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.

"Offers an invaluable tool for advancing knowledge in the fields of drama, performance, and Irish studies with its close attention to the underexamined institution of the Gate Theatre. . . . This book will make a significant and long-lasting impact in Irish studies, theatre studies, and accounts of mid-century modernism."  —Paige Reynolds, author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle

"For many years, the accepted story of Irish theatre was that the Abbey was the writers’ theatre, and its rival, the Gate, was primarily a producing house. Making use of newly available archival sources, Ruud van den Beuken turns the old story on its head, and in so doing forces us to rethink Irish theatre. This book demands our attention."  —Christopher Morash, Trinity College Dublin

Ruud van den Beuken is assistant professor of English literature at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He was awarded the 2015 Irish Society for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize.

Becoming Laura: A Closer Look at JML 44.1

 Take a closer look at JML 44.1. 

Author John S. Bak shares some background into his fascinating archival study of a previously unpublished Tennessee Williams introduction to the play he co-wrote with Donald Windham, You Touched Me! Read it HERE.

Bak’s essay, “Tennessee Williams’s ‘“Homage to Ophelia” (A Pretentious Foreword)’ with Commentary,” is a read-for-free feature on JSTOR. 

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) is LIVE!

 

JML 44.1 (Fall 2020) on the theme "Genealogies and Historiographies" is now live on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.44.issue-1 and on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/43684

Contents include:

Genealogies of the Modern

Michael Bedsole

Exteriority and Interiority in T.S. Eliot’s Graduate Work  

Ignasi Ribó 

“At the farthest pole from man”: Kafka’s Posthuman Outlook on War 

John S. Bak

Tennessee Williams’s “Homage to Ophelia (A Pretentious Foreword)” with Commentary

Joseph Darlington

Anthony Burgess and William S. Burroughs: Shared Enemies, Opposed Friends

Kevin McGuirk

“[T]he apple an apple”: Ammons, Bloom, and “the ten thousand things” – with Emerson and Lao Tzu 

Dream Historiographies

Clare Udras Ellis

Pursued by Time: The Chronolibidinal Aesthetics of Katherine Mansfield 

Annaliese Hoehling

Seeing History in the Baroque Ruins of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: An Indictment of Cosmopolitan Modernity

Liran Razinsky

Psychoanalysis and Autobiography: Leiris, Freud and the Obstacle to Self-Knowledge 

Jesse Zuba

Raymond Carver and the Modern Career Imaginary

Bram Mertens

Dread, Desire and Destruction: The Historical Sublime in Erwin Mortier’s Marcel (1999) 

Reviews

Elizabeth Scheer

Surveying the Damage: Marina MacKay’s Modernism, War, and Violence

Robert L. Caserio

Audacious Reconciliation

Farisa Khalid

Good, Brave Causes: British Fiction of the 1950s 

Book News: Prizewinning poet and his publisher

 John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship

BY PATRICK SAMWAY S.J.

University of Notre Dame Press, October 2020

Hardcover ISBN 9780268108410

https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268108410/john-berryman-and-robert-giroux/

This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914–2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914–1972), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry. From their first meeting as undergraduates at Columbia College in New York City in the early 1930s, Giroux and Berryman became lifelong friends and publishing partners. Patrick Samway received unprecedented access to Giroux’s letters and essays. By incorporating either sections or whole letters of the correspondence between Berryman and Giroux into this book, Samway makes available for the first time a historical account of their relationship, including revealing portraits of their personal lives.

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.

As Giroux edited over a dozen books by Berryman, his letters to the poet were often filled with editorial details and pertinent observations, emanating from his genuine affection for his friend, whose talent he never doubted, even as Berryman endured prolonged periods of hospitalization due to his alcoholism. Giroux gave Berryman the greatest gift he could: sustained encouragement to continue writing without trying to manipulate or discourage him in any way. But Giroux also had a deep-seated secret desire to surpass the essays written about Shakespeare by Berryman, as well as the book on Shakespeare written by their mutual professor Mark Van Doren. Giroux’s volume, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was finally published in 1982. Samway’s fascinating account of a gifted but troubled poet and his devoted yet conflicted editor will interest fans of Berryman and all readers and students of American poetry.

"Samway . . . charts in this revelatory literary study the close relationship between John Berryman and Robert Giroux. . . . Promising to show 'one of the most extraordinary personal and professional relationships in the history of American poetry,' Samway succeeds with a work both definitive and effortlessly readable." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“A fascinating, in-depth analysis of the editor who saw Berryman through the publication of all of his major works.” —Paul Mariani, author of Dream Song

“The new insights gained from bringing Giroux into play are genuinely significant. The illumination of the mid-century literary publishing scene, far beyond Giroux’s involvement with Berryman, is revelatory.” —Peter Maber, author of William Marshall

Patrick Samway, S.J., professor emeritus of English at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, is the author or editor/co-editor of fifteen books, including The Letters of Robert Giroux and Thomas Merton (2015) and Flannery O’Connor and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Partnership (2018), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Book News: Restoring the radical potential of dialogue

Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent

By JUAN MENESES

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0676-4 

Cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0675-7 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/resisting-dialogue

Is dialogue always the productive political and communicative tool it is widely conceived to be? Resisting Dialogue reassesses our assumptions about what a politically healthy society should look like. Juan Meneses argues that, far from an unalloyed good, dialogue often serves as a subtle tool of domination, perpetuating the underlying inequalities it is intended to address.

Meneses investigates how “illusory dialogue” is employed as an instrument that forestalls—instead of fostering—articulations of dissent that lead to political change. He does so through close readings of novels from the English-speaking world written in the past hundred years—from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and more. Resisting Dialogue demonstrates how these novels are rhetorical exercises with real political clout capable of restoring the radical potential of dialogue in today’s globalized world. Expanding the boundaries of postpolitical theory, Meneses reveals how these works expose the pitfalls of other dialogic interventions in relation to some of the most prominent questions of modern history: cosmopolitanism at the end of empire, the dangers of rewriting the historical record, the affective dimension of neoliberalism, the racial and nationalist underpinnings of the “war on terror,” and the visibility of environmental violence in the Anthropocene.  

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.

Ultimately, Resisting Dialogue is a complex, provocative critique that, melding political and literary theory, reveals how fiction can help confront the deployment of dialogue to preempt the emergence of dissent and, thus, revitalize the practice of emancipatory politics. 

Deepening and widening a furrow first plowed by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Resisting Dialogue marks a refusal to underwrite ‘postpolitics’ as politics by insisting that unspeakable political ambition take its place, without apology, so that our voyage from a troubled modernist literature to the Anthropocene maps, simultaneously, a continuous trajectory and a jarring, disjunctive continuity.

— Grant Farred, Cornell University

Resisting Dialogue draws on literature to develop a fresh vocabulary of political activism and thetic force. Contrarianism, deadlock, impasse, silence, resilience, persistence, the power of unexceptional figures of history to block and oppose the status quo—these immobilizing postures acquire a make-over as acts of agency that contest the eclipse of political agency besetting progressive theories of the Political.

— Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic

Juan Meneses is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Book News: Poetry, a laughing matter?

Lyric as Comedy: The Poetics of Abjection in Postwar America

BY CALISTA MCRAE

Cornell University Press, October 2020

Hardback ISBN: 9781501750977

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750977/lyric-as-comedy/#bookTabs=1

A poet walks into a bar... In Lyric as Comedy, Calista McRae explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, she finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn.

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.

Lyric as Comedy draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. McRae reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging.

The close readings in Lyric as Comedy also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, McRae captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

"This is an immensely pleasurable book to read. McRae is a beautiful reader of poetry, and her attention to form and her serious thinking through of her material is evident on every page. I cannot overstate the quality of McRae's subtle way of reading."

--Gillian White, University of Michigan, author of Lyric Shame

"Calista McRae wittily and incisively examines how the inwardness and embarrassment of mid-century lyric resembles the abjection of stand-up comedy. A tightly-argued, beautifully written book, Lyric as Comedy reveals the complexity and slipperiness of the speaking 'I' on the page or the stage. McRae shows how pervasive and important comic technique is, even in apparently quite serious poems."

--Rachel Trousdale, Framingham State University, editor of Humor in Modern American Poetry

Calista McRae is Assistant Professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.