Reviews

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-twirling shortwave enthusiast, stationed in (perhaps) Cork, and tuning in to transmissions Irish in affiliation but emanating from Dublin, Addis Ababa, New York City, Belfast, Geneva, London, and Berlin—transmissions that dazzle by their variety and that impart...

However much we may agree or disagree with the modernist English literary critic, William Empson—or, at times, even scratch our heads at him—it is generally accepted that he was a marvel. He possessed a decidedly unbridled critical talent, one that emerged fully only once the globalization of modernist literary production and art intersected with a corresponding epistemological demand: th

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 opera looms large in the received history of nineteenth-century

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, and Brenda Helt ordered chronologically from Heilbrun’s 1968 “The Bloomsbury Group” to Helt’s 2010 “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects.’”

Finally appearing in English translation twenty years after its first appearance in German, Gabriele Brandstetter’s Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes retains its groundbreaking force.

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 developed unruly, cartoon minstrels in response to their increasingly depersonalized workplace. On a broader scale, the project works to situate animation within “a larger and longer history of racial iconography and taxonomy in the United States” (4). To make...

Is listening the constitutive act of modernity? It seems so. Thanks to a flood of scholarship on aural culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002) , Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past (2003), and a 2011 special issue of American Quarterly (edited by Kara Keeling and Josh Kun) being just three examples—the act of listening has worked its way into the texture of cultural studies generally and modernist studies specifically.

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 which populate their imagined worlds, not just as descriptive details of the modern, but as strange historical presences telling stories about technology, race, and the lived experience of capitalism that few had found there before.

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 MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into...

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.” Notice, not like an analysis of The Wire but like The Wire itself, which Levine goes on to treat as an exemplary “theorization of the social” (133). Rather than analyze the show’s most sympathetic characters, she says, the formalist critic might do better to emulate their...