In 2017, at the Jewish Museum in New York, the exhibition “Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry” abounded in marvels for me and many others. Who was missing from the paintings mattered less than the astonishing presence of figures we all cared so about, presided over by Marcel Duchamp, on whose portraits and chess fascination Aaron Tucker expands so intelligently. There was Duchamp often, relaxed and no less brilliant than always.

For many interwar writers, the women’s suffrage movement was a force as powerful as the war itself in shaping modernity. In her undeservedly forgotten novel The Call (1924) , Edith Ayrton Zangwill takes up the history of both suffrage militancy and the war, chronicling their impact on women’s professional, political, and personal lives. The novel tells the story of a young chemist, Ursula Winfield, who is initially more absorbed in questions of science than in questions of women’s rights. She...

“The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door.” So runs the refrain of William Butler Yeats’ “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” An imperialist who wrote scathing reports of colonial human rights abuses in the Congo and Brazil, Roger Casement sought German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising: the British government arrested, sentenced, and hanged Casement for high treason. In her new study, The Literary Afterlives of Roger Casement, 1899-2016, Alison Garden frames her inquiry within the language of haunting and intervenes in Casement’s very indeterminacy: “towards the repetition of an unfinished history; the particularly ghostly fashioning of Casement’s literary afterlives” (14).

When fiction narrates speech, who is talking? Even for those who typically understand modernist fiction as skeptical of straightforward representational uses of language, scholars tend to assume that fictional characters mean the words they speak: that Bartleby would prefer not to and that Molly Bloom says yes. Elizabeth Alsop’s Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction offers a subtle, significant provocation, challenging mimetic interpretations of dialogue in modernist fiction.

When it comes to writers’ lives, what remains is fragmentary and incomplete. In her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist Esther Greenwood refers to such remnants as “the tatty wreckage of my life.” The image of Plath in popular culture is linked to her poetry, but often emphasizes her suicide. Red Comet addresses these assumptions as it sheds new light on Plath’s cultural moment and relevance today. Any biography must confront the fact of an incomplete archive.

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study “declines to take up arms in the method wars” (9). But let’s not be fooled. This pacifism is not passive. This avoidance of “our metadiscourse” conditions an act of critical sabotage which defuses weapons of mass abstraction—i.e. formalism, historicism, ideology critique, postcritique, surface reading, distance reading, and so on (9). Buurma and Heffernan’s new history neither minds the gap nor suggests liberal, incremental readjustments. Rather, they make the claim—a revolutionary one—that what we “will watch,” “follow,” “see,” and “encounter” in the pages of their study “overturns,” “demolishes,” “scrambles,” “dispels,” and “dismisses” “nearly every major account of what the history of literary studies has been” (1, 6).

If “expansion” has been the watchword of the past two decades of modernist studies, as Rebecca Walkowitz and Douglas Mao have it, we could be excused for identifying Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (2013) as a signal instance of this trend. [1] The operating principle of Kalliney’s monograph is one of extension: of the geographic edges of modernist cultural production; of the chronological boundaries of the movement; of the range of cultural forms that might be brought under scholarly scrutiny; and of the forms of attention that might be applied to systems of literary influence, promotion, distribution, and debate. Post-Bourdieusian, institutionally-focused, closely-read, globally-minded, belatedly-modernist: the approach signaled by Commonwealth of Letters appears at once invigorating and emblematic of recent shifts in the field. Not yet seven years old, this volume already seems ripe for a forum on “Re/discoveries” not only because it captures the energies of its expansive scholarly moment, but because it has already had a considerable impact on multiple branches of the literary-critical tree. Count my own sub-field of radio studies among those branches that felt the shake: Kalliney’s 2007 article in PMLA, “Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature” (which laid out some of the key arguments of Commonwealth of Letters and forms the core of its fourth chapter) has quickly become a touchstone for scholars working at the intersections of media and global anglophone literature, as evidenced by a surge of recent work in the field by Julie Cyzewski, Daniel Ryan Morse, James Procter, Leonie Thomas, myself, and many others.

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press The endpapers of Liesl Olson’s new book are disorienting. We see a map of a city bisected by lines and organized into grids. Heavier lines punctuated by circles indicate public transportation routes and their stops. A jagged shoreline appears at the bottom, cutting off the geometric exactness of the lines. But the lines grow less dense toward the top of the papers, indicating where the suburbs begin (or end) on the map. In the lower nook of the binding...

Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz has gone in and out of print since it was first published by Charles Scribner’s & Sons in 1932. It was brought back in 1967 by Southern Illinois Press, and it appeared later in the Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and with an introduction by Mary Gordon, from University of Alabama Press in 1991. Handheld Press’s reprint comes at just the right time, following a great flourishing of works—from biographies to a streaming...

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.