Project MUSE®: Journal of Modern Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Modern Literature.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 22, no. 2 (1998/99) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Modern LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Modern Literature1529-14640022-281XLatest articles in Journal of Modern Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Intimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Animal Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986195
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Much of the current critical interest in regionalist writing stems from the unique perspective it affords on center-periphery dynamics in postbellum US culture. While early-twentieth-century critics tended to describe the genre in mimetic or expressivist terms, as being about or of geographically locatable cultures in decline (e.g., coastal Maine or the Appalachian Mountains), most contemporary scholars theorize it through an historicist and relational lens, as an arena in which the pressing socio-political questions of the post-Civil-War era were being rehearsed and interrogated.1 And no question was more pressing for late-nineteenth-century Americans, as they tarried with the challenges of immigration at home and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallIntimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Animal Fiction2026-03-30text/htmlen-USIntimate Strangers: Regionalism and the Construction of Nonhuman Subjectivities in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's Animal Fiction2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®870292026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30X-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher's Detective Fiction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986196
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When a doctor recommended that Langston Hughes visit Rudolph Fisher for an X-ray, he declined. Hughes was not concerned about the X-ray itself. Instead, he worried that his friend "would be full of clever witticisms of a sort that I could never find repartee for" (328). Even among the group comprising the Harlem Renaissance, Fisher stands out for his ingenuity and accomplishments. Fisher wrote the satirical novel The Walls of Jericho (1928), addending it with a glossary of Harlem slang. He contributed the first mystery novel by an African American writer with all Black characters, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932).1 In his essay, "The Caucasian Storms Harlem" (1927), he keenly assessed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallX-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher's Detective Fiction2026-03-30text/htmlen-USX-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher's Detective Fiction2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®933262026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Narrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth's Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986197
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On a first reading, the cultivation of what Philip Roth's tragic protagonist Bucky Cantor in Nemesis (2010) idealizes as "an overall sense of physical well-being" (N 22) and the maintenance of health cannot be separated from Michel Foucault's analysis of bodily discipline in which "one is, first of all, called upon to be accountable to oneself; to continuously demonstrate to oneself one's competency to take care of the self and others" (Petersen 199). In his 1975 lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault discusses the dialectic between political control and the dissolution of the patriarchal Law under the exceptional societal conditions instantiated by the twelfth-century bubonic plague pandemic. He details how
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallNarrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth's Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange2026-03-30text/htmlen-USNarrative Equilibrium and Biopolitical Aesthetic Image in Philip Roth's Nemesis: Health as Hermeneutical Exchange2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®617782026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30No Creature of Habit? Gregor's Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita's Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986198
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Ballet adaptations of modernist works by authors such as Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf have been thriving in the last twenty years in Western Europe. Why? Modernist literature's exploration of the mind and its experiments with language seem, on the surface at least, at odds with the non-verbal medium of dance and its emphasis on the body and movement. But as other scholars have started to show, turning to this largely untold history of dance adaptations generates a new understanding of both the place of the body in modernist literature and the continuing relevance of modernist literature in the twenty-first century.1 Dance adaptations have uniquely foregrounded the moving body in quintessential
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallNo Creature of Habit? Gregor's Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita's Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis2026-03-30text/htmlen-USNo Creature of Habit? Gregor's Dancing Dis/Abilities in Arthur Pita's Adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®892162026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30"As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only": Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986199
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In a notebook dated November 1924, Virginia Woolf broke off her editing of Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—interrupting the latest version of a passage on Lady Bruton—with the first draft of an essay on Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. This piece, which marks Woolf's only dedicated critique of ballet as an art form, was published anonymously in The Nation and Athenaeum the following month, presumably at the request of Leonard Woolf, the periodical's literary editor.1 Like many of her Bloomsbury contemporaries, Woolf was an attentive follower of the Ballets Russes, both in the pre-war years when Michel Fokine and Vaslav Nijinsky were the company's key figures, and in the post-war period dominated by the ballets of Léonide
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmall"As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only": Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911)2026-03-30text/htmlen-US"As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only": Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911)2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®969382026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Abortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986200
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In a moment of draconian restrictions on abortion care in the United States, we need close, sustained attention to the ways we narrate abortion, and what we believe and claim to know about abortion experiences as a consequence of these narratives. My work begins with the understanding that attention to abortion narratives makes visible a reimagined iteration of Eve Sedgwick's central claim in Epistemology of the Closet: that "many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured—indeed, fractured—by a chronic, now endemic crisis" of narrating abortion (1). Just as Sedgwick identifies the epistemological import of narratives of the closet and of fictional
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallAbortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature2026-03-30text/htmlen-USAbortion Epistemology: Ambivalence in the Abortion Plot in Modern Literature2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®495342026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30"Preserved Through Childbirth": Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway's Virginity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986201
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Is there something inherently virgin about Clarissa Dalloway, the eponymous protagonist of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), despite her marriage and adult daughter? H.L. Pangborn writes in the 1925 Literary Digest International Book Review, for instance, that "[t]he chilly, somewhat 'undersexed' Mrs. Dalloway, who preserves a certain 'virginity' through thirty years of marriage … is in fact an impressively skilful bit of portraiture" (Pangborn 617). This summative line echoes language of sexual coldness introduced in Mrs. Dalloway itself. Within the novel, Clarissa's old flame Peter Walsh thinks of her as both "impenetrable" and "cold as an icicle," and from early on she is placed in starkly non- or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmall"Preserved Through Childbirth": Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway's Virginity2026-03-30text/htmlen-US"Preserved Through Childbirth": Reading Deep in Mrs. Dalloway's Virginity2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®936442026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30H.D.'s Nonbinary Poetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986202
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During the poet H.D.'s second March 1933 analytic session with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, he escorted her into an "inner room" in Berggasse 19 that was "filled with glass cases of the most lovely little Greek bronzes," including "his favorite:" a statue of "Pallas" Athena (H.D. qtd. in Friedman, Analyzing Freud 38–9).1 Freud's remark that the bronze Athena is "'perfect,'" though "'she has lost her spear'" (qtd. in H.D., "Writing" 68–9), has long led scholars to read "The Master"—H.D.'s deeply ambivalent 1934–1935 poem about the analysis—as revaluing "woman" over and against her diminishment by early psychoanalysis (McCabe 160).2 For example, in an influential 1990 study, Susan Stanford Friedman justifiably takes the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallH.D.'s Nonbinary Poetics2026-03-30text/htmlen-USH.D.'s Nonbinary Poetics2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®954772026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Frank O'Hara Has Collapsed!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986203
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Frank O'Hara did not have to wait too long for the "catastrophe" of "his personality" to seem beautiful, interesting, and modern. He is one of the most studied and celebrated post-war American poets. Indeed, he is a beloved poet. As Lytle Shaw notes, an identificatory "cathexis has decisively flavored O'Hara criticism" (10). When we love Frank O'Hara, what do we love about him? His charm (as effect/affect/affectedness)? The lyric presentation of the cultivated quotidian? The distillation of a kind of disinterested intimacy? Why is it, as Felix Bernstein argues, that every poet in New York likes Frank O'Hara and, for better or worse, sounds like Frank O'Hara? Brian Glavey is suspicious of the way his students love
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallFrank O'Hara Has Collapsed!2026-03-30text/htmlen-USFrank O'Hara Has Collapsed!2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®864122026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30Queering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt's Rapture's Road
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986204
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Let us begin by stating the obvious: being queer in Ireland has not always been easy, nor is it so even today. Despite the important contributions of queer individuals—and of the queer imagination more broadly—to Irish revolutionary thought,1 queerness was long framed as "foreign" or antithetical to Irish nationalism. As Katie Conrad puts it, "The concept of the homosexual as an uncontainable … threat reveals a profound anxiety about the stability of the Irish 'nation' at times and places of crisis" (134). The privations of colonial rule fostered an ideal vision of Irish masculinity rooted in muscular martyrdom, and following independence, Ireland's recourse to conservative Catholicism left little room for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallQueering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt's Rapture's Road2026-03-30text/htmlen-USQueering Irish Joy: Seán Hewitt's Rapture's Road2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®863372026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30"This Is Your Brain on Poetry"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986205
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In his essay, "Poems Out of Our Heads," featured in the 2008 PMLA issue devoted to "The New Lyric Studies," Oren Izenberg calls for more studies of poetry through the lenses of "disciplines that give accounts of how the mind works," such as neuroscience and other scientific fields. We not only need to account for why a poem can endlessly renew its received meanings but also why it can be so difficult to understand. Jessica Lewis Luck's Poetics of Cognition: Thinking through Experimental Poems is one of these studies that Oren called for and probably one that would go far beyond what he expected of such an approach.Poetics of Cognition draws on the past few decades of research in psychology and medical brain science
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmall"This Is Your Brain on Poetry"2026-03-30text/htmlen-US"This Is Your Brain on Poetry"2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®151052026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30How to Do the History of Queer American Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986206
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The first thing one is likely to notice about The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature is its heft: the volume resembles, proverbially enough in the realm of queer history, a brick—and a violet brick at that. This isn't unexpected for a Cambridge history, though it is worth noting that the page count of this volume significantly exceeds that of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014), which has a global scope, and approaches the length of The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021). I point this out not to reduce the significance of any such volume to a crude measurement of length—however queerly comical the staging of such a contest might be—but to emphasize the delightfully campy
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/97/image/coversmallHow to Do the History of Queer American Literature2026-03-30text/htmlen-USHow to Do the History of Queer American Literature2026-03-302026TWOProject MUSE®294182026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-30