In the first flush of text-based, web-published digital humanities projects, modernist literary studies has had a fairly thin representation, excluded largely by an accident of copyright. Literary scholarship from the Victorian period and earlier has relied on open-access text to build digital editions, digitizing, encoding, and circulating texts for scholarly and public audiences.

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press Briony Tallis, the irksome thirteen-year-old writer in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), ruins the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and, to an even greater degree, Robbie Turner, by telling a lie. Because of Briony’s untruthfulness, Robbie goes to prison, then to France at the start of the Second World War, where he dies of septicaemia on the beach at Dunkirk. During her decades-long writing career, Briony creates several stories about what happened between...

In 1973, the Municipality of Istanbul and the State Academy of Fine Arts sponsored a competition among Turkish sculptors. Fifty sculptures, each by a different artist, were to be erected in public spaces throughout the city. The purpose was to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic of Turkey. Due to practical constraints, the number of winning sculptures was reduced to twenty, which were then commissioned and erected in the specified locations. Of these twenty, only four remain in their original sites today. Three were stolen for the value of their metal. Three more were lost due to road work. Several were removed and lost when their sites were redesigned. Another was declared “meaningless” by a district mayor and jackhammered into oblivion.

The first notable aspect of Jordan Brower’s intensely researched book is that it mentions Theodore Adorno only twice, in passing, and Max Horkheimer not at all (poor Max). We get it by now: the culture industry qua oligarchy of the Hollywood studio system qua corporate personhood was propaganda, and scholars need to get on with more detailed work. As I write, the emergent rallying cry of “Stop the Oligarchy” analogizes more to the Gilded Age than to Classical Hollywood. Yet today’s anti-oligarchy sentiment is often directed at Silicon Valley tycoons, who have consumed much of Hollywood itself through streaming services, wrought a new kind of culture industry by commodifying our very attention beyond ideological propaganda, and are now trying to deaccession government itself. Brower’s account of the studio system provides an important analysis of how such oligarchical sausage once got made at the nexus of entertainment, art, and anti-trust law by charting how literary authors, the publishing industry, and classical studios adapted to each other, in every sense, for better or worse.

Impish yet magisterial, Thierry de Duve continues a career’s investigation of what he now calls “Duchamp’s telegram.” The occasion of this telegram is the piece Duchamp dubbed Fountain (1917). From the start, de Duve is clear about what Fountain signifies: it “is situated at the juncture of two art worlds, one in which a urinal cannot possibly be art and one in which this urinal is art” (13). In this book, de Duve, among the most provocative of contemporary theorists of visual art, insistently identifies himself as an art historian. The questions the art historian pursues, with all the gathered evidence of

Beaches occupy an interstitial position between water and land; their contours are rarely fixed but are rather subject to the vicissitudes of time and tide. The liminal quality of the beachscape as a geophysical formation is curiously echoed by its “vexed” and “contradictory” position as a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon (2). For while the beach is the privileged object of the touristic gaze, its longstanding association with otium and leisure, with rest and reprieve, belies its more ambivalent history as a site of colonial and anthropogenic domination. Although the beach has been thoroughly parsed within some traditions of spatial theorizing—notably in essays by French thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Didier Urbain, and Alain Corbin—it has largely eluded the attention of modernist scholars, due in part to the field’s longstanding affinities with the space of the city. And yet, as Hannah Freed-Thall writes compellingly, the modernist beachscape yields a rich cultural archive and a generative space through which to think questions of emplacement, improvisation, and relationality.

What is it like to write within a fold? Heather A. Love’s engaging new study argues that canonical modernist literature bends into a cybernetic future. Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s transhistorical notion of the “cybernetic fold,” Love asks us to consider modernism as an art of informatics, data sets, entangled human-machines, and dynamic feedback loops, well before such notions had become self-consciously articulated. Combining both media and information theory, her book expands Bernard Scott’s claim that “cybernetics came into being before it had a nam

If literary radio studies, in its first couple of decades, anointed a hero, it was probably Hilda Matheson. The first Head of Talks at the BBC, not only an accomplished bureaucrat but a practical theorist who developed the style of “intimate address” by which the broadcaster artificially produced the impression of naturalness, Matheson was a perfect candidate for celebration: lover of Vita Sackville-West, booster of literary broadcasting, martyr (or so the story goes) to the patriarchy, as represented by Director-General Sir John Reith,

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 Republic. Europe Knows Nothing about the Orient criticizes European knowledge production about Turkey through voices well known—such as Ahmed Midhat, Nâzım Hikmet, Halide Edib, and Tevfik Fikret—as well as those less so, including Şevket Süreyya and Ebüzziya. Translated into English from the original Turkish edition by Gregory Key, Nergis Perçinel, Micah Hughes, İlker Hepkaner, and Aron Aji, these modernist writers do not celebrate the arrival of European modernity so much as critique its transformation of nearly every facet of Turkish life: architecture, tourism, gender, and literature. This light paperback is therefore anything but: it is an essential companion to Orientalism (1978). While Said’s text has generated many memorable critiques, ranging from those of Aijaz Ahmad to Wael Hallaq, Çelik’s intervention gives voice to those who were “orientalized.” If orientalist scholarship constituted epistemic violence, this volume represents a trove of epistemic resistance.

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 genealogies of Jewish prose writing primarily in relation to male writers, ranging from Sholem Aleichem to Yosef Haim Brenner’s figure of the talush (the modern rootless Jew). Women Writing Jewish Modernity, in contrast, recovers the work of five interwar women writers: Fradl Shtok, Dvora Baron, Elisheva Bikhovsky, Leah Goldberg, and Debora Vogel, and reconfigures Jewish literary history