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The phenomenon of celebrity burst upon the world scene about a century ago, as movies and modern media brought exceptional, larger-than-life personalities before the masses. During the same era, modernist authors were creating works that defined high culture in our society and set aesthetics apart from the middle- and low-brow culture in which celebrity supposedly resides. To challenge this ingrained dichotomy between modernism and celebrity, Jonathan Goldman offers a provocative new reading of early twentieth-century culture and the formal experiments that constitute modernist literature's unmistakable legacy. He argues that the literary innovations of the modernists are indeed best understood as a participant in the popular phenomenon of celebrity.

Presenting a persuasive argument as well as a chronicle of modernism's and celebrity's shared history, Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity begins by unraveling the uncanny syncretism between Oscar Wilde's writings and his public life. Goldman explains that Wilde, in shaping his instantly identifiable public image, provided a model for both literary and celebrity cultures in the decades that followed. In subsequent chapters, Goldman traces this lineage through two luminaries of the modernist canon, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, before turning to the cinema of mega-star Charlie Chaplin. He investigates how celebrity and modernism intertwine in the work of two less obvious modernist subjects, Jean Rhys and John Dos Passos. Turning previous criticism on its head, Goldman demonstrates that the authorial self-fashioning particular to modernism and generated by modernist technique helps create celebrity as we now know it.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book

Modernismo arose in Spanish American literature as a confrontation with and a response to modernizing forces that were transforming Spanish American society in the later nineteenth century. In this book, Cathy L. Jrade undertakes a full exploration of the modernista project and shows how it provided a foundation for trends and movements that have continued to shape literary production in Spanish America throughout the twentieth century.

Jrade opens with a systematic consideration of the development of modernismo and then proceeds with detailed analyses of works-poetry, narrative, and essays-that typified and altered the movement's course. In this way, she situates the writing of key authors, such as Rubén Darío, José Martí, and Leopoldo Lugones, within the overall modernista project and traces modernismo's influence on subsequent generations of writers.

Jrade's analysis reclaims the power of the visionary stance taken by these creative intellectuals. She firmly abolishes any lingering tendency to associate modernismo with affectation and effete elegance, revealing instead how the modernistas' new literary language expressed their profound political and epistemological concerns.

Analyzes nineteenth-century seafaring narratives and their importance to ideas of modernity

At once a literary-philosophical meditation on the question of modernity and a manifesto for a new form of literary criticism, Modernity at Sea argues that the nineteenth-century sea narrative played a crucial role in the emergence of a theory of modernity as permanent crisis.

Breaks new critical ground by exploring philosophical and aesthetic issues germane to the writings of three major modern literary figures.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, understandings of time, place, and civilization were subjected to a barrage of new conceptions. Ronald Berman probes the work of three writers who wrestled with one or more of these issues in ways of lasting significance.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Orwell all grappled with fluid notions of time: Hemingway’s absolute present, Fitzgerald’s obsession with what might be and what might have been, and Orwell’s concerns with progress. For these authors, progress is also tied to competing senses of place--for Fitzgerald, the North versus the South; for Hemingway, America versus Europe. At stake for each is an understanding of what constitutes true civilization in a post-war world. Berman discusses Hemingway’s deployment of language in tackling the problems of thinking and knowing. Berman follows this notion further in examining the indisputable impact upon Hemingway’s prose of Paul Cézanne’s painting and the nature of perception.

Finally, Berman considers the influence on Orwell of Aristotle and Freud’s ideas of civilization, translated by Orwell into the fabric of 1984 and other writings.

Ronald Berman is Professor of English at the University of California at San Diego and past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of six books, including “The Great Gatsby” and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas and Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway: Language and Experience.

Modernity in Motion offers a groundbreaking exploration of Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s richly layered body of work spanning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Through the lens of transnational Indigenous studies, this compelling study reveals how Vizenor’s concept of transmotion, which he defines as the interplay between local and global identities, reconstructs modernity as a dynamic force of transformation.

Close readings illuminate Vizenor’s radical storytelling, which bridges seemingly disparate worlds: the White Earth Reservation, Nazi-occupied Paris, post-Hiroshima Japan, and beyond. By weaving these far-flung geographies into unexpected constellations, Vizenor challenges readers to rethink Indigenous history, sovereignty, and creative expression within a global framework.

Positioned at the intersection of tribal-centric and world literature paradigms, Modernity in Motion is essential reading for scholars of Indigenous studies and comparative literature.

Exploring monsters as critical guides to understanding what it means to be human in a perilous world

Thirty years after the publication of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s groundbreaking Monster Theory, the field it helped create has grown into a dynamic and influential area of interdisciplinary scholarship. Monster Theory Returns gathers twenty-six original essays exploring an extraordinary range of monstrous figures, from demons and vampires to microbes and emerging posthuman forms, illuminating urgent questions of belonging, political violence, environmental change, and the boundaries of the human itself.

Combining historical depth with a global perspective, these lively essays show that monsters are far more than figures of fear. They are powerful cultural tools for thinking through crises in a perilous and rapidly changing world.

Contributors: U. Melissa Anyiwo, U of Scranton; Benjamin Ash, Arizona State U; Stephen T. Asma, Columbia College, Chicago; Michael M. Chemers, U of California, Santa Cruz; Eli Cumings, Columbia U; Rebecca Duncan, Linnaeus U; Michael Dylan Foster, U of California, Davis; Renée Fox, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kaja Franck, U of Hertfordshire; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory U; Brandon R. Grafius, Ecumenical Theological Seminary; Anya Heise-von der Lippe, U of Tübingen; Mary Kate Hurley, Ohio U; Anson Koch-Rein, U of North Carolina; Agnieszka Kotwasińska, U of Warsaw; Riva Lehrer; Sherry C.M. Lindquist,  Western Illinois U; Iyad Malouf, Tel Aviv U; Asa Simon Mittman, California State U, Chico; Kirsten Møllegaard, U of Hawai‘i at Hilo; Alan S. Montroso, U of Maryland; David Robinson; Margrit Shildrick, Stockholm U; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U; Emily Zarka, Arizona State U

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A surprising evaluation of the role of the physical body in the construction of British identity

Eighteenth-century medicine used the word “monstrosities” to describe physically deformed bodies—those irreducible to the “proper body” in their singular, sometimes startling difference. Considering British society in confrontation with such monstrosities, Paul Youngquist reveals the cultural politics of embodiment in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the histories of medicine, economics, liberalism, and nationalism, his work shows that bodies are not simply born but rather built by cultural practices directed toward particular social ends.

Radical Black feminist refusal through the works of mid-twentieth-century African American women writers
 

Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction offers new and insightful readings of African American women’s writings in the 1930s–1950s, illustrating how these writers centered Black women’s satisfaction as radical resistance to the false and incomplete promise of liberal racial integration. Eve Dunbar examines the writings of Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks to show how these women explored self-fulfillment over normative and sanctioned models of national belonging. 

Paying close attention to literary moments of disruption, miscommunication, or confusion rather than ease, assimilation, or mutual understanding around race and gender, Dunbar tracks these writers’ dissatisfaction with American race relations. She shows how Petry, West, Childress, and Brooks redeploy the idea of monstrous work to offer potential modalities for registering Black women’s capacity to locate satisfaction within the domestic and interpersonal.

While racial integration may satisfy the national idea of equality and inclusion, it has not met the long-term needs of Black people’s quest for equity. Dunbar responds, demonstrating how these mid-century women offer new blueprints for Black life by creating narrative models for radical satisfaction: Black women’s completeness, joy, and happiness outside the bounds of normative racial inclusion.