BOOK NEWS: An account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature

The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature

EDITED BY BENJAMIN KAHAN

Cambridge UP, 2024

ISBN: 9781108918725

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-history-of-queer-american-literature/6DBC1DA60D5B4AC05431401C40AA680D

Moby-Dick's Ishmael and Queequeg share a bed, Janie in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God imagines her tongue in another woman's mouth. And yet for too long there has not been a volume that provides an account of the breadth and depth of queer American literature. This landmark volume provides the first expansive history of this literature from its inception to the present day, offering a narrative of how American literary studies and sexuality studies became deeply entwined and what they can teach each other. It examines how American literature produces and is in turn woven out of sexualities, gender pluralities, trans-ness, erotic subjectivities, and alternative ways of inhabiting bodily morphology. In so doing, the volume aims to do nothing less than revise the ways in which we understand the whole of American literature. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates.

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.

Part I - Synchronic Histories of American Sexuality

"The Transmasculinity Narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic Eighteenth Century" By Sal Nicolazzo

"Queering the Founding; Or, the Revolution in Sex" By Don James McLaughlin

"Whither the Queer History of Slavery?" By Patrice D. Douglass

"Queering Immigration and the Social Body, 1875–1924" By Madoka Kishi

"The Queerness of World War II" By Guy Davidson

"Queer Bonds of Cold War Sexuality" By GerShun Avilez

"'The Dead Never Die': Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, Queer Temporalities, and the Literature of AIDS" By Tim Dean

"Fiction in the Post–Lawrence v. Texas Era, or Inventing Heteronormative Queerness" By Kate McCullough

"Trans-ing Transcendentalism" By Dorri Beam

"Sentimental Literature and the Erotics of Identification" By Kathryn R. Kent

"Queer Modernism and Misfit Identity" By Octavio R. González

"Imperialism and the Queer Harlem Renaissance" By Fiona I. B. Ngô

"The Mystical Sexuality of the Beats and the Berkeley Renaissance" By Julia Bloch and Ignacio Infante

"The New York School’s Queer Happiness" By Brian Glavey

"Chicana and Latina Lesbian Feminists and the Radical Making of Anthological Archives of Willfulness" By T. Jackie Cuevas

"Queer Literature after Queer Theory" By Michael D. Snediker

Part II - Diachronic Histories of American Sexuality

"Queer Historical Poetics and Queer Formalism: American Poetry before 1850" By James Mulholland

"Queer Mythology in American Poetry, 1855–1913" By Vivian R. Pollak

"Funny Emotions: Queer Lyric from the New Verse to the New American Poets" By Chad Bennett

"Queer American Poetry Now" By Stephanie Burt

"Queer American Drama: Plays, Replays, Yet-To-Be-Plays" By Penny Farfan

"The Gay Genre: Musical Theatre from Show Boat to A Strange Loop" By James F. Wilson

"The Oneiric Golden Age of Gay and Lesbian Pulp" By Stephanie Foote

"Queering Desire in American Science Fiction" By Anna Kurowicka

"Queering Comics Histories" By André Carrington

"LGBT Bestsellers" By Diarmuid Hester and Jack Parlett

"History Touches Us Everywhere: American Queer and Trans Memoir in the Long Twentieth Century" By Emma Heaney

"Whiteness and Trans Genre, Whiteness as Trans Genre" By Jules Gill-Peterson

"Queer Types for Early Asian American Literature" By Andrew Way Leong

"The Queerness of Blackness" By Amber Jamilla Musser

"Two-Spirit Writers and Queer Native American Literature" By Alicia Carroll

"Queer Southern Literature and the Dirty South" By Michael P. Bibler and Sharon P. Holland

"Queer DiaspoRican Circuits" By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

"'where sadness makes sense': The Queer Poetics of the Midwest Terrain" By Richard T. Rodríguez

"Queer New England Regionalism" By J. Samaine Lockwood

"Queer Beginnings at the End of the Frontier: Asia and the Pacific in the Making of a Modern Gay American Identity" By Amy Sueyoshi

"Queer American Literature in the World" By Marta Figlerowicz

Part III - Queer Methods

"Repression, Sublimation, and Latency from Charles Brockden Brown to James Purdy" By Melissa Hardie

"Gender Variance before Trans: A Literary History" By Xine Yao

"Female Friendship: Romantic Friends and Boston Marriages" By Lillian Faderman

"The Medical Model and Early Gay and Lesbian Writing" By Simon Stern

"'Flung out of space': Class and Sexuality in American Literary History" By Aaron S. Lecklider

"Quantifying Sex" By Joan Lubin

"The Pleasures of Reading Camp" By Teagan Bradway

"The Queerness of Religion" By Tracy Fessenden

"Tracing Queer Crip Poetics in Time" By Ellen Samuels

"Queer Print Culture: The Market and Circulation of Queer Literature" By Jaime Harker

Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019). His new monograph Sexual Aim and Its Misses is under contract with Chicago. 

BOOK NEWS: Reassessing the meanings, uses, and limitations of lesbian modernism

Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres

EDITED BY ELIZABETH ENGLISH, JANA FUNKE, AND SARAH PARKER

Edinburgh UP, 2023

ISBN: 9781474486057

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-interrogating-lesbian-modernism.html

Makiko Minow coined the phrase ‘lesbian modernism’ in 1989. Since then, scholars of lesbian modernism have produced crucial work to critique and expand the modernist canon. At the same time, there has been ongoing critical debate about what constitutes a lesbian modernist text, who counts as a lesbian modernist author, and how lesbian modernism relates to queer and trans modernism. This edited volume presents twelve newly commissioned chapters that reassess and interrogate the meanings, uses and limitations of lesbian modernism by exploring a broad range of authors, genres and histories. Individual chapters investigate what work the concept of ‘lesbian modernism’ has done in the past, how its boundaries have been defined and contested, and what voices have been included and excluded. As a whole, the book demonstrates how the concept of lesbian modernism can be mobilized in new and meaningful ways to continue to inform and enrich modernist studies.

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.

Contents

Introduction, Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker

Part 1: Interrogating Lesbian/Queer/Trans Modernism

Chapter 1: Loving/Hating/Loving Lesbian Modernism, Jodie Medd

Chapter 2: Lesbian-Trans-Feminist Modernism: Christopher St. John, Trans Masculinity and Celibate Friendship in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul, Jana Funke

Chapter 3: The Ontology of the Pluri-Singular Body in Natalie Clifford Barney’s The One Who is Legion or A.D.’s After-Life, Katharina Boeckenhoff

Part 2: Genres and Forms

Chapter 4: Imaginative Biography: Margaret Goldsmith, Vita Sackville-West and Lesbian Historical Life Writing, Elizabeth English

Chapter 5: Modernism at the Margins: Mariette Lydis’s Print Portfolio Lesbiennes, Abbey Rees-Hales

Chapter 6: Inverting the Gaze: Radclyffe Hall and Male Sexual Identities, Steven Macnamara

Part 3: Relationality, Networks and Kinship

Chapter 7: Writing Widows of Lesbian Modernism, Hannah Roche

Chapter 8: Lesbianism in/and the Family: Eva Gore-Booth and the Making of Feminist Modernism, Kathryn Holland

Chapter 9: Lesbian Joyce, Katherine Mullin

Part 4: Histories and Temporalities

Chapter 10: Elizabethan Lovemaking: College Romance and Queer Anachronism in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Lamp and the Bell, Sarah Parker

Chapter 11: The Lesbian Herstory Archives at Fifty, Robin Hackett

Chapter 12: Hidden in Plain Sight: The Reconstruction of Lesbian Modernist Sexual Histories, Jo Winning

"This impressive essay collection showcases the range and—perhaps more crucially—the continuing relevance of lesbian studies to scholars of literary modernism. Interrogating Lesbian Modernism invites readers to reflect on the past, present, and future of the figure of the ‘lesbian’ and will undoubtedly influence how we engage with modernity itself."　—Laura Doan, author of Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War

Elizabeth English is a senior lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University

Jana Funke is associate professor of English and sexuality studies at the University of Exeter.

Sarah Parker is a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

Call for Papers: Caribbean Literatures and the Environment

 

Journal of Modern Literature Call for Papers

Caribbean Literatures and the Environment

Topics addressed may include oceanic literature; literary depictions of climate change, rising seas, and pollution; and narratives of monoculture, extraction, and extinction.

JML publishes essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century global literature. Submissions should conform to MLA 8th edition style for documentation and manuscript formatting and should include a 100-150-word abstract and 3-5 keywords. 9,000-word limit, inclusive of abstract, notes, and works cited. No simultaneous submissions or previously published material.

Deadline December 1, 2024. Please submit manuscripts electronically as Word or RTF attachment to jml.editorial@gmail.com

BOOK NEWS: Study of LGBTQ themes and characters in Appalachian literary works

Doubly Erased: LGBTQ Literature in Appalachia

By Allison E. Carey

SUNY Press, 2024

ISBN: 9781438493565

https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Doubly-Erased

The first book of its kind, Doubly Erased is a comprehensive study of the rich tradition of LGBTQ themes and characters in Appalachian novels, memoirs, poetry, drama, and film. Appalachia has long been seen as homogenous and tradition-bound. Allison E. Carey helps to remedy this misunderstanding, arguing that it has led to LGBTQ Appalachian authors being doubly erased—routinely overlooked both within United States literature because they are Appalachian and within the Appalachian literary tradition because they are queer. 

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 exploring motifs of visibility, silence, storytelling, home, food, and more, Carey brings the full significance and range of LGBTQ Appalachian literature into relief. Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home are considered alongside works by Maggie Anderson, doris davenport, Jeff Mann, Lisa Alther, Julia Watts, Fenton Johnson, and Silas House, as well as filmmaker Beth Stephens. While primarily focused on 1976 to 2020, Doubly Erased also looks back to the region's literary "elders," thoughtfully mapping the place of sexuality in the lives and works of George Scarbrough, Byron Herbert Reece, and James Still.

"[Carey] offers a scholarly but accessible analysis of a relatively unexplored subject, and one might very well expect this book to encourage the development of an emergent specialization within literary and queer studies." — CHOICE

"Doubly Erased contributes significantly to Appalachian literary scholarship by providing close, well-framed analyses of LGBTQ authors' works. Carey clearly articulates the complexity of the region and its inhabitants, eschewing essentialization of the people and reductive caricatures. I foresee this book having a profound positive impact not only for the Appalachian LGBTQ community but also for the Appalachian community writ large, however one defines that." — Theresa L. Burriss, coeditor of Appalachia in the Classroom: Teaching the Region

Allison E. Carey is professor of English and chair of the English Department at Marshall University.

BOOK NEWS: How mid-century authors sought to prevent policies of expulsion

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human

BY DAVID HERD

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192872258

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-against-expulsion-in-the-post-war-world-9780192872258

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a post-war period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made.

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.

Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of rights and recognition — new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking — through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

"Writing Against Expulsion is one of those books that arrives in the world and immediately feels necessary. David Herd asks and brilliantly answers two questions about the condition of unwelcome migrants and the UK government: 'how did we get here' and 'how do we move away from where we are?' Drawing on and building from the works of writers such as Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, the poet Charles Olson, as well as his own work with Refugee Tales, Herd re-casts conversations around 'political non-persons' to allow space for imagination, humanity and truth. A profound and inspiring book." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

"Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a lucid and compelling report on the individual at the mercy of the bureaucracy of immigration control, `the geo-political non-person`, and how the condition of this figure relates to the aftermath of the 1939-45 War and the subsequent moment of decolonisation. It takes us through the political, philosophical and literary contexts with fluency, passion and rigour. Its engagement with the texts through which the argument progresses is extensive and thoroughly persuasive, and allows the reader to witness the personal journey Herd himself travelled in understanding the issues that are the subject of this wonderful and important book." -- Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021

David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including All Just, described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as "one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade," and Walk Song, a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India, and Australia and held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He is professor of poetry at the University of Kent and co-organizer of the project Refugee Tales.

BOOK NEWS: Looking at cities through the stories people tell about them

City Scripts: Narrative of Postindustrial Urban Futures 

EDITED BY BARBARA BUCHENAU, JENS MARTIN GURR, AND MARIA SULIMMA

Ohio State UP, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-8142-1552-4

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215524.html

Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.

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 stakes are especially high in cities where economic, ecological, and social futures are delimited by histories of large-scale extraction and racialized industrial labor. Contributors thus focus on cities in postindustrial areas of Germany and the United States, examining how narratives about cities become scripts and how these scripts produce real-life results. This approach highlights how uses of narrative and scripting appeal to stakeholders in urban change. These actors continually deploy narrative, media, and performance, with consequences for urban futures worldwide.

“There are tremendous political and economic challenges to creating more just and resilient cities, but City Scripts is a reminder that the stories we tell about cities can be just as important as a new policy or funding scheme. The essays in this volume, along with a great conceptual introduction, are a vital entry point to understanding the importance of literary and cultural analysis in the broader field of urban studies.” —Robert R. Gioielli, author of Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago

“When reading this book, urban planners in the US and Germany will understand why transdisciplinary city narratives often provide better information on what citizens need than do master plans and voluminous technical reports on sustainable development. While declining industrial cities in the US and in Germany have long been branded as losers of economic transformation and capitalism, the case studies at the heart of this book tell other stories—of successful interventions and revitalization.” —Klaus R. Kunzmann, Bartlett School of Planning, University College London

“City Scripts reenergizes discussions at the intersection of urban studies and literary and cultural studies. Innovatively reading material spaces using narratological tools developed through the analysis of fictional texts, it will be a rich and productive resource for scholars across disciplines.” —Erin James, author of Narrative in the Anthropocene

Barbara Buchenau is professor of North American cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Jens Martin Gurr is professor of British and Anglophone literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Maria Sulimma is junior professor of North American literature and cultural studies at the University of Freiburg.

BOOK NEWS: Modernist studies meet critical animal studies

Beastly Modernisms: The Figure of the Animal in Modernist Literature and Culture

EDITED BY ALEX GOODY AND SASKIA MCCRACKEN

Edinburgh UP, 2023 

ISBN: 9781474498029

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-beastly-modernisms.html

A contemporary collection of scholarly essays exploring the vibrant intersections of modernist studies and critical animal studies

• Presents the diverse range of intersections between modernist and critical animal studies
• Includes cutting-edge research contributions from a heterogenous and interdisciplinary range of modernist scholars
• Offers a key research resource for scholars in modernist studies, critical animal studies and cognate areas
• Provides a classroom-ready collection of essays relevant to undergraduate and graduate courses on modernist writing and critical animal studies

The intersection of modernist studies and critical animal studies is a new and progressive field of enquiry that locates crucial questions about what it means to live with animals at the foundation of modernity. Beastly Modernisms gathers essays from leading figures in the field alongside new and emerging scholars who, together, revisit canonical figures and decentre the canons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches, the contributions work with cultural history and theoretical frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century literature and culture. 

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 chapters in Beastly Modernisms present a diverse range of approaches and topics, exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China, animals and gender in surrealism to African-American texts, Sámi reindeer to rat propaganda, modernist jellyfish to metamodernist beasts, 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories, and chart the current and future state of modernist animal studies.

"Overall, these scholars offer a fascinating analysis of the ways in which writers use nonhuman animals to explore and contest the traditional limits of modernism. All of the volume’s essays are informed by sophisticated theoretical positions, but most are clearly written enough for determined undergraduates—although graduate students may find the volume more useful." – R.D. Morrison, Morehead State University

"A major contribution to animal studies as well as modernist studies, Beastly Modernisms gathers international perspectives that strategically redeploy modern profusions of beastliness—whether within, without, or betwixt and between (sometimes human) animals—in ways geared to advance timely feminist, antiracist, and decolonial critiques." – Susan McHugh, University of New England

Alex Goody is professor of twentieth-century literature & culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019),Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).

Saskia McCracken completed her PhD on Virginia Woolf’s Darwinian animal tropes at the University of Glasgow. Her research has been published in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture: 1880-1950 (2021), Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2022), Animal Satire (2022), and Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the Human, and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (2024). She also transcribed the first manuscript draft of Flush: A Biography for the Cambridge edition.