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Contributors

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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).

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...

Feb 9, 2016 By: The Editors

A What Are You Reading? forum on recent publications in the field.