Recent Scholarship

The Editors

Contributors

Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient: A Critical Discourse from the East (1872–1932). Edited by Zeynep Çelik

Shaj Mathew

A century before Edward Said, a robust critique of orientalism proliferated within the so-called Orient. Zeynep Çelik argues this point in an edited collection of journalism, polemic, and scholarship from the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish...

Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919–1939 by Allison Schachter

Michal Peles-Almagor

Allison Schachter’s book Women Writing Jewish Modernity gives voice to the challenges Jewish women writers faced when they turned their pen to prose in the first half of the twentieth century. Scholarship has constructed literary...

The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction by Paul Stasi

Thomas A. Laughlin

Northrop Frye argued that behind every realist narrative was a displaced mythic structure that could explain the deeper meaning of its themes and patterns. Frye’s archetypal theory was in many ways a modernist one. Had not James Joyce...

A Violent Peace: Media, Truth, and Power at the League of Nations by Carolyn N. Biltoft

Alessandro Giammei

The title of this swift, powerfully written monograph on the archives of the League of Nations in Geneva offers a prodigious portrait of its real object of study: the so-called “interwar” period in European culture. Rather than a mere history of...

Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds by Ada Smailbegović

Joshua Corey

Lisa Robertson’s 2001 book The Weather is a classic of the post-pastoral, in which the “architecture” of constantly shifting patterns of clouds and vapors supplants the nostalgia of landscape. A note at the end of the book tells us that...

Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel by Dora Zhang

Len Gutkin

With its tight focus on figuration in a hypercanonical trio of authors—Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf — Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness feels almost deliberately unfashionable. Its fine readings, its deft deployment...

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons by Hannah Frank

Matthew Levay

One cannot review Hannah Frank’s Frame by Frame without observing that it is a book marked by tragedy, specifically its author’s passing in 2017. That might have meant the end of the present volume—a lightly edited revision of Frank’s...

Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism. Edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo

Mary Ann Caws

In 2017, at the Jewish Museum in New York, the exhibition “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” abounded in marvels for me and many others. Who was missing from the paintings mattered less than the astonishing presence of figures we all cared so...

Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures by Eurie Dahn

Brooks E. Hefner

The last few years have witnessed the loss of a handful of longstanding and influential Black publications. The Chicago Defender ceased its print publication in 2019 (but remains online) and the Johnson Publishing Company—publishers of...

Iliazd: A Meta-Biography of a Modernist by Johanna Drucker

Richard Cavell

Modernity seems very much to be with us still. Yet that explosive moment on either side of 1900 is long over, and what has come after is either a pale shadow of its former self or actively contests it. It is precisely that gap that Johanna...

Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Richard A. Kaye

This collection brings new attention to modernism’s self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make...

Rethinking Faulkner in the “Black Lives Matter” Era

Greg Barnhisel

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has done an enormous amount of work to educate Americans and the rest of the world about how deeply embedded white supremacy is in our institutions, including cultural ones like art and literature. It has...

Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange by Nan Z. Da

Hsuan L. Hsu

A Chinese translation of “Rip Van Winkle.” A speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson honoring the Burlingame-Seward treaty. A translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” inscribed on a Mandarin fan. The autobiography and poetry of Yale’s...

The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

Benjamin Hagen

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study “declines to take up arms in the method wars” (9). But let’s not be fooled. This pacifism is not passive. This avoidance of “our...

Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier

Laura E. Helton

A recurring dispute on Twitter in recent years revolves around claims of archival discovery. Announcements of scholars finding documents “lost in the archive” inevitably provoke exasperated reminders, often from archivists, that such documents...

Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism by Ben Conisbee Baer

Ramsey McGlazer

Ben Conisbee Baer’s Indigenous Vanguards is about the education of modernist educators. But the book is also itself an education, combining range with rigor to alter our understanding of modernism and its limits. Baer focuses mainly on...

Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

Christopher Bush, Anne E. Fernald

We are pleased to be able to share here a selection of articles on race and modernism from past print issues of Modernism/modernity . Reflecting the history of the journal, many of these focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but we’ve also...

Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees by Lyndsey Stonebridge

Sara Silverstein

In her stateless exile, Hannah Arendt read Franz Kafka. He was “rather uncannily adequate to the reality” of statelessness, she wrote (quoted in Stonebridge, 29). In 1933 Arendt had fled Germany through a house that sat on the border with...

Changing Nationhood, Changeless Place: Bill Brandt/Henry Moore at the Hepworth Wakefield Gallery

Beryl Pong

Situated off the River Calder in West Yorkshire, the Hepworth Wakefield is a bright, airy gallery with ceiling to floor windows that draw in views of the waterfront and gardens outside; these demand to be taken in alongside the artwork within.

Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism by Sam Rose

Patrick Fessenbecker

Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism . Sam Rose. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. 224. $89.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper).

Sam Rose’s compelling new...

Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett

Marta Figlerowicz

Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature . Ed. Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. 274. $85.00 (cloth).

Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting by Gavin Parkinson

Susan Laxton

French surrealism at mid-twentieth century was marked (some would say, marred) by André Breton’s new-found interest in esoteric knowledge—a period, argues Gavin Parkinson in his latest book, in which surrealism “willingly entered a critical and...

Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth: From Miguel de Unamuno to “La Joven Literatura” by Leslie J. Harkema

Ignacio Infante

The figure of Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) looms large in the development of modern Spanish literature, as thoroughly demonstrated by Leslie Harkema’s Spanish Modernism and the Poetics of Youth . By carefully tracing the literary and...

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis by Liesl Olson

Kinohi Nishikawa

Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis . Liesl Olson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 400. $35.00 (cloth)

The endpapers of Liesl Olson’s new book...

Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film by Louise Hornby

Alix Beeston

At the Oxford University Press stall at last year’s Modern Language Association Convention in New York City, Louise Hornby’s Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film was propped up next to Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology...

Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity by Gerald Horne

Etsuko Taketani

During World War II, Malcolm Little, who would eventually become the charismatic minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, dissembled his true feelings toward war so successfully that he was banned from service. He...

The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History by Susan Scott Parrish

Robert Jackson

This book investigates a flood that sprawled across forty percent of the United States (and some of Canada), killing hundreds (and perhaps thousands, since African American deaths were not included in any “official” count), displacing nearly one...

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Greg Barnhisel

Even taking into consideration penicillin and the atomic bomb, bureaucracy may be the most consequential and pervasive of twentieth-century humanity’s gifts to ourselves. (Global warming we gave to all species.) Yes, administrative gears ground...

Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character by Marta Figlerowicz

Nan Z. Da

Here is a get-over-yourself model of literary character. Flat protagonists are those that do not become more filled out or more compelling to others over the course of the novel even though they occupy the most space. Marta Figlerowicz takes a...

The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald by Deborah Pike

Emily Christina Murphy

Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared on the cover of Hearst’s International magazine in 1922, held up as icons of the Jazz Age, of youth, talent, and burgeoning literary celebrity. This image remains one of the most...

Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space, and Visuality in Venezuela, 1948-1958 by Lisa Blackmore

Vicente Lecuna

This book explores the relationships between modernism, modernization, and dictatorship, and in the process repoliticizes the discussion of a crucial period in Venezuelan modernity. Blackmore approaches these relationships through Raymond...

Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason by Robert S. Lehman

Jesse Matz

How modernism transformed the conditions of history is the subject of Robert S. Lehman’s excellent Impossible Modernism , a book that should change the way we do history in modernist studies. Lehman surveys recent and current historicist...

Sounding Irish Radio at Midcentury

Ian Whittington

Reading through these two excellent new volumes situated at the intersection of radio studies and modern Irish literature, one feels presented with two very different instantiations of the radio listener. On the one hand, we have the dial-...

Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire by Marjorie Perloff

Scott W. Klein

Our understandings of aesthetic periods along national and generic lines are often highly contingent. Anglophones may know a good deal about seventeenth-century Dutch painting, but almost nothing about eighteenth-century Dutch poetry. Italian...

Queer Bloomsbury, edited by Brenda S. Helt and Madelyn Detloff

Ria Banerjee

Queer Bloomsbury is a book in two parts, and as such, evokes two different responses. “Part One: Ground-Breaking Essays” consists of lightly-edited reprints of essays by Carolyn Heilbrun, Christopher Reed, George Piggford, Bill Maurer...

Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation by Nicholas Sammond

Marvin McAllister

In Birth of an Industry , Nicholas Sammond traces “the connections between the animated blackface minstrel, the industrialization of the art of animation, and fantasies of resistant labor” (xii). His core argument is that early animators...

Other Things by Bill Brown

Mark Goble

Bill Brown has had things on his mind for quite some time. In The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economics of Play (1997) , he used Crane’s fiction to explore the disquietingly everyday objects...

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis

Allan Hepburn

A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina...

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

Paul Saint-Amour

The final chapter of Caroline Levine’s Forms begins by asking what the formalist cultural studies of the future might look like. Levine’s answer: “it could look something like David Simon’s superb television series, The Wire...

Recent Scholarship

Feb 17, 2021 By: The Editors

A forum for reviews of recent publications and important books we may have missed the first time around. It also includes "Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond."