Scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present.
Welcome to the Journal of Modern Literature news and information site.
Check here for updates about our latest issues, calls for papers, submission guidelines and tips, as well special online-only content. Our issues themselves are available at Project Muse and are archived on JSTOR . Check out the "Read for Free" page to enjoy some featured content.
More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.
In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, Sarah Coogan explores the webs of financial and familial obligations in Joyce's Ulysses and challenges typical assumptions about these debts. Read it HERE.
Her JML 46.3 essay is available for FREE; see link in the post.
In a special feature for the Indiana University Press blog, Cristina Ionica discusses how Beckett's works activate empowering forms of solidarity by using angry, action-oriented forms of laughter. Read it HERE.
Her JML 46.3 essay is available for FREE; see link in the post.
JML 46.3 (Spring 2023), "Joyce and Beckett," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/50460
Content includes:
Madigan Haley
Modernism’s World Drama: Joyce, Wagner, and the Anti-Systemic Stirrings of a Global Artwork
Michele Chinitz
James Joyce’s Liebestod: Fascism as Civil War
Patrick Eichholz
Joyce, Nussbaum, and the Value of Disgust
Roy Benjamin
Purification Rituals in Joyce
Tristan Power
“That English Paper”: Cannibals, Slaves, and Bits of Fun in Ulysses
Sarah Coogan
“I am other I now”: Identity, Intertextuality, and Networks of Debt in Ulysses
FREE!
Shantam Goyal
New Reading: Notes on a Critical Phenomenology of Reading with Finnegans Wake
Trask Roberts
Deconfining Translation in Samuel Beckett’s Le Dépeupleur and The Lost Ones
Cristina Ionica
“For the Sake of Harmony”: Beckett’s Enactment of the Violence of Abstraction in The Lost Ones
FREE!
Ruben Borg
Agency after the Subject: Beckett with Merleau-Ponty
Llewellyn Brown
Quietism and Literary Creation
John Greaney
Beckett and/in Context: A Review of Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath
Jean-Michel Rabate
A Proposal for a Modest Modernism: A Review of Eliot and Beckett’s Low Modernism by Rick de Villiers
Trask Roberts
Painful Productions: A Review of Hannah Simpson’s Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness
Andrew Gaedtke
Reflex Modernism
BY DEREK RYAN
Cambridge UP, 2022
ISBN: 9781009182973
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature reveals how the Bloomsbury group's fascination with beasts – from pests to pets, tiny insects to big game – became an integral part of their critique of modernity and conceptualization of more-than-human worlds. Through a series of close readings, it argues that for Leonard Woolf, David Garnett, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, profound shifts in interspecies relations were intimately connected to questions of imperialism, race, gender, sexuality and technology. Whether in their hunting narratives, zoo fictions, canine biographies or (un)entomological aesthetics, these writers repeatedly test the boundaries between, and imagine transformations of the human and nonhuman by insisting that we attend to the material contexts in which they meet. In demonstrating this, the book enriches our understanding of British modernism while intervening in debates on the cultural significance of animality from the turn of the twentieth century to the Second World 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.
Derek Ryan is senior lecturer in modernist literature at the University of Kent. His previous publications include Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and the co-edited volumes The Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group (2018) and Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern (2019).
BY JOSHUA LANDY
Oxford UP, 2022
ISBN: 9780197648681
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780197648681?cc=gb&lang=en&
100 years after Proust's death, In Search of Lost Time remains one of the greatest works in World Literature. At 3,000 pages, it can be intimidating to some. This short volume invites first-time readers and veterans alike to view the novel in a new way.
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.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was arguably France's best-known literary writer. He was the author of stories, essays, translations, and a 3,000-page novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). This book is a brief guide to Proust's magnum opus in which Joshua Landy invites the reader to view the novel as a single quest--a quest for purpose, enchantment, identity, connection, and belonging--through the novel's fascinating treatments of memory, society, art, same-sex desire, knowledge, self-understanding, self-fashioning, and the unconscious mind.
Landy also shows why the questions Proust raises are important and exciting for all of us: how we can feel at home in the world; how we can find genuine connection with other human beings; how we can find enchantment in a world without God; how art can transform our lives; whether an artist's life can shed light on their work; what we can know about the world, other people, and ourselves; when not knowing is better than knowing; how sexual orientation affects questions of connection and identity; who we are, deep down; what memory tells us about our inner world; why it might be good to think of our life as a story; how we can feel like a single, unified person when we are torn apart by change and competing desires. Finally, Landy suggests why it's worthwhile to read the novel itself-how the long, difficult, but joyous experience of making it through 3,000 pages of prose can be transformative for our minds and souls.
Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program "Philosophy Talk." His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).
BY CARL ROLLYSON
UP of Mississippi, 2022
ISBN: 9781496835017
https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/W/William-Faulkner-Day-by-Day
William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between.
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.
Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.
"William Faulkner Day by Day is a welcome addition to Faulkner studies. It is an essential source for Faulkner specialists—and interesting reading for all Faulkner enthusiasts. Faulkner the man as well as the writer is presented in all the various phases of his life. The book is informative, revealing, and, in quite a few rewarding instances, surprising." - Robert W. Hamblin, editor of A William Faulkner Encyclopedia
"In short, this is a book that anyone interested in William Faulkner will enjoy immensely. It is full of the man’s insights, humor, and contradictions. Reading it is an opportunity to witness an entire life, laid out day by day, from the young man starting out, to the old man nearing the end of life." - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review
Carl Rollyson is professor emeritus of journalism at Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of many biographies, including The Life of William Faulkner; The Last Days of Sylvia Plath; American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath; Amy Lowell Anew: A Biography; A Real American Character: The Life of Walter Brennan; Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated. He is also coauthor (with Lisa Paddock) of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, Revised and Updated. His reviews of biography have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Criterion, and he writes a weekly column on biography for the New York Sun.
BY BENJAMIN BATEMAN
Oxford UP, 2023
ISBN: 9780192896339
Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human.
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.
Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.
Benjamin Bateman is senior lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature at The University of Edinburgh and author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Oxford UP, 2017). He previously held a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he also served as director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities.
