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.
Cory Austin Knudson discusses how Georges Bataille’s notion of “animality” can help us understand Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, in this post for the Indiana University Press blog: https://iupress.org/connect/blog/the-beast-turning-human-a-closer-look-at-jml-46-4/
His essay is available FREE for a limited time, linked in the post.
Patricia Morgne Cramer explains how Woolf indicts British public-school culture for harming gifted men through her depiction of Bernard, Louis, and Neville in The Waves. Read it HERE.
Her JML 46.4 essay is FREE for a limited time, linked in the post.
JML 46.4 (Summer 2023), "Evocations of Intimacy," is now LIVE on Project Muse at https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51258
Content includes:
Anca Parvulescu
The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Patty Argyrides
Hauntingly Beautiful: Embodied Reading, Virginia Woolf, and Woolf Works
Patricia Morgne Cramer
“Everyone chooses their love after their own fashion”: The Waves as a Modernist Symposium
FREE!
Cory Austin Knudson
Animality and the Limits of Discourse in Djuna Barnes and Georges Bataille
FREE!
Farah Ali
The Invisible Flesh: Mimesis in Jean Genet’s The Maids
Molly B. Lewis
The Life-Giving Efficacy of Beauty and Desire in Stoppard’s Drama
Sina Movaghati
A Beast to Be Slain: The Tiger and the Unquenched Desire of Man
Yi-chin Shih
Senses of Place: The Black Community in Alice Childress’s Wedding Band
Hsiao-wen Chen
Black Cosmofeminism: Commodity, Sexuality, and the Transnational Mixed-Race Subject in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
Celiese Lypka
“I Look Straight into His Eyes … For the Last Time”: Intimacy and Indifference in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight
Karalyn Kendall-Morwick
Imagining Justice for Sentient Lives
Caroline Hovanec
The Modernist Dog
BY MARTINA MASTRANDREA
Brill, 2022
ISBN: 978-90-04-51037-1
https://brill.com/display/title/58680
F. Scott Fitzgerald on Silent Film recalibrates the celebrated author’s early career and brings fresh understanding to the life of one of America’s truly great literary figures. Scholars have previously focused on Fitzgerald’s connection with Hollywood when he worked in Tinseltown as a screenwriter in the 1930s. However, this ground-breaking research reveals the key role that Silent Hollywood played in establishing Fitzgerald’s burgeoning reputation in the early to mid-1920s. Vividly written and drawing on a wealth of new sources, this book documents Martina Mastandrea’s exciting discovery of the first film ever adapted from a work by Fitzgerald.
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.
"Mastandrea’s methodology aligns with current scholarship, which looks at Fitzgerald’s work through interdisciplinary perspectives. She ambitiously and ably interweaves textual, visual, multimodal, and multilingual materials, many of which have been previously overlooked [...]. In her investigation, Mastandrea conveys the excitement that can accompany the detective work in the researcher’s process [...]. Gender roles and how the adaptations adjusted them due to conventions, censorship, and intended audiences are recurring subjects in Mastandrea’s study [...]. Her interpretations of the sheer number and variety of sources explored are convincing and, more importantly, create a more nuanced picture of Fitzgerald’s relationship to film and of the way his stories and characters took shape in this medium. Mastandrea’s restoration of the silent cinema adaptations provides scholars with new material to explore her discussion of their impact on the presentation and reception of a newly established author should encourage a reevaluation of these films and of this early period in Fitzgerald’s life and work." – Lara Rodríguez Sieweke, Umeå University
Martina Mastandrea, PhD, SAS, University of London, is an independent scholar and English teacher in Venice, Italy. She has published articles and reviews on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Louisa May Alcott. She is the winner of the 2020 Blake Emerging Scholar Award and the joint award winner of the 2021 EAAS Rob Kroes Award.
BY TIAO WANG AND RONALD SCHLEIFER
Palgrave Macmillan, 2023
ISBN: 978-3-031-00915-0
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-00913-6
Modernist Poetics in China examines organizations of consumerist economics, which developed at the turn of the twentieth century in the West and at the turn of the twenty-first century in China, in relation to modernist poetics. Consumerist economics include the artificial “person” of the corporation, the vertical integration of production, and consumption based upon desire as well as necessity. This book assumes that poetics can be understood as a theory in practice of how a world 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.
Tracing the relation of economics to poetics, the book analyzes the impersonality of indirect discourse in Qian Zhongshu and James Joyce; the impressionist discourses of Mang Ke and Ezra Pound; and discursive difficulty in Mo Yan and William Faulkner. Bringing together two notably distinct cultures and traditions, this book allows us to comprehend modernism as a theory in practice of lived experience in cultures organized around consumption.
“In the last generation in China, we have lived through one of the most miraculous transformations of culture and experience in human history, with opportunities of enhanced well-being, knowledge, and possibilities of life open to many people throughout our country. In Modernist Poetics in China, a Chinese scholar and an American scholar, working together, trace these transformations in our poetry and fiction, notably in the work of Shi Zhi, Qian Zhongshu, and our Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan. Written in English, the book carefully unpacks the rich meanings of our Chinese language in order to introduce Chinese literary modernism to the world.” –Yu Jianhua, senior professor, Shanghai International Studies University
“Modernist Poetics in China is a must read for those hoping to better understand the transpacific estuary of Chinese and English Modernism, shot through with the brackish undercurrents of entrepreneurial, corporate and consumer capitalism. By revealing striking parallels between the jarring economic changes facing English modernists in the early twentieth century and Chinese poets writing in the last decades of the twentieth century, Tiao Wang and Ronald Schleifer unsettle many under-theorized dichotomies and narratives of American or Chinese exceptionalism. By doing so, they have opened a new and essential space to (re)think the global economic and material conditions of Chinese poetics today.” –Jonathan Stalling, Newman Chair of US-China Issues and professor of international studies, University of Oklahoma
“Modernist Poetics in China fills a gap in the existing scholarship on modernism and it does so exceptionally well. The book has many strengths. The conjoining of canonic Western modernist writers and their Chinese counterparts adds an important new chapter to the evolving study of modernism as a global phenomenon. The investigation of the political economy of modernism in its cultural manifestations beyond the Euro-American focus of most scholarship opens many new avenues in our understanding of modernism in China and beyond. This demonstrates that modernism as we know it in the West is “a complex of epistemological, social, and affective engagements” in any post-traditional society that chooses the path of corporate-consumerist economics. This is a capital step forward. It not only allows us to understand the Chinese experience since Deng Xiaoping but also offers analytical ways and means for understanding any society that follows the same historical evolution.” –John Xiros Cooper, professor emeritus, University of British Columbia
Tiao Wang is associate professor of English Language and Literature at the School of Foreign Languages, Harbin Institute of Technology, China. She has published 23 articles, 9 of which are in English, focused on American and European modernism. She is also co-translator of Yong Bao Teng Tong (2017), a translation of Pain and Suffering by Ronald Schleifer (2014).
Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor and adjunct professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma. His publications in literary modernism include Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880–1930 (2000), Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and A Political Economy of Modernism: Literature, Post-Classical Economics, and the Lower Middle-Class (2018).
EDITED BY ERIK MORTENSON AND TONY TRIGILIO
Clemson UP, 2023
ISBN: 9781638040514
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781638040514
The Beats and the Academy marks the first sustained effort to train a scholarly eye on the dynamics of the relationship between Beat writers and the academic institutions in which they taught. Rather than assuming the relationship between Beat writers and institutions of higher education was only a hostile one, The Beats and the Academy begins with the premise that influence between the two flows in both directions. Beat writers' suspicion of established institutions was a significant aspect of their postwar countercultural allure. Their anti-establishment aesthetic and countercultural stance led Beat writers to be critical of postwar academic institutions that tended to dismiss them as a passing social phenomenon. Even today, Beat writing still meets resistance in an academy that questions the relevance of their writing and ideas. But this picture, like any generalization, is far too easy.
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 Beat relationship to the academy is one of negotiation, rather than negation. Many Beats strove for academic recognition, and quite a few received it. And despite hostility to their work both in the postwar era and today, Beat works have made it into syllabi, conference presentations, journal articles, and monographs. The Beats and the Academy deepens our understanding of this relationship by emphasizing how institutional friction between the Beats and institutions of higher education has shaped our understanding of Beat Generation literature and culture—and what this relationship between Beat writers and the academy might suggest about their legacy for future scholars.
Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, translator, writer, and English faculty member at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. Mortenson has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books, including Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Mortenson is also an avid translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, and Two Lines, and he is currently translating the work of Necmi Zekâ for a book-length project. Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.
Tony Trigilio is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author and editor of fifteen books, including, most recently, Craft: A Memoir (forthcoming, Marsh Hawk Press, 2023) and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (Marsh Hawk, 2021). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is the author of Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois UP, 2012 [paper] and 2007 [cloth]) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000). He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014), and coeditor of Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers UP, 2008). He is a founding member of the Beat Studies Association.
BY ANJILI BABBAR
Syracuse UP, 2023
ISBN: 9780815611578
https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/5582/finders/
Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.
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.
Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of “finder”—a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form—Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.
"Babbar's rigorous, serious, and insightful Finders is the most comprehensive study into the exciting phenomenon of Northern Irish crime fiction. A must-read for literary scholars and the casual fan of the most explosive sub genre of Celtic Noir."—Adrian McKinty, author of The Chain
"This is an astonishing achievement. . . . Historically rich and geographically expansive, Babbar’s study, in smooth, erudite prose, casts an astute eye over the complexities and distinctiveness of Irish crime fiction."—Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast
"Babbar provides a wonderfully comprehensive survey of the major authors in the contemporary Irish noir field. She accomplishes a minor miracle in synthesizing so many texts in an interesting, provocative, and engaging way."—Andrew Kincaid, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
"Babbar’s hopeful readings broaden the critical lens in distinctive and valuable ways by exploring Irish crime fiction’s acute insights about the thorniest matters of community faith and self."—Brian Cliff, coeditor of Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction
Anjili Babbar is associate professor of English at the Community College of Baltimore County. She has published on topics ranging from Irish crime fiction to representations of Irish folklore in popular culture.
