Leading off this issue, Kristin Rivero revisits the role of mediation in Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and anthropological research. On the related topic of mediation, Elvin Meng considers media affinities between interwar psychical research and Vladimir Nabokov’s idiosyncratic conception of narrative fiction as a spatial (rather than temporal) medium. Allan Antliff explores Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anarchist championing of Walt Whitman’s sexual libertarianism before and during World War I and the subsequent eclipse of this Whitman by the figure of the parochial nationalist poet of US global hegemony. Brimming with insights into an overlooked archive, Pablo García Martínez’s article examines the trajectory of Catalan art critic and editor Joan Merli after his exile to Argentina during the Spanish Civil War. Andrew Hodgson takes up the curious case of Carl Julius Salomonsen, chief medical officer of Denmark, who after World War I theorized that modernist art and writing were pathogens of a contagious psychopathy transmitted through the eye (look out!). Working with the archive of the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse (1919-40) at Cambridge University Library, Clara Jones reconstructs the intellectual and administrative labor of the prize’s all-women committee of literary judges. Finally, Rachael Stanley reads Jean Rhys’s writing of erotic desire through ekphrasis and Joseph Kuhn offers new insights into William Faulkner’s A Fable in the context of Weimar political theology.
This issue also features a brilliant slate of book reviews, including Anca Parvulescu’s review of Laura Doyle’s Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance and reviews of new work on contemporary Irish women’s writing and modernism, Baroque modernity, and much more.
Be sure also to check out recent Print Plus blog posts!
Visualities celebrates its five-year anniversary
Orientations: Queer Domestic Architectures: Theorizing Kinship and Communal Modernism
Future Pasts: Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication: A Dialogue
—Stephen Ross