As a companion to our 2021 lists of books and articles by contingent historians, here’s a list of books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal article published by contingent literary studies scholars in 2021. The contents were collected by Rebecca Colesworthy and Laura Hartmann-Villalta.
Tofik Dibi, Djinn, translated and with an introduction by Nicolaas P. Barr (SUNY Press)
A bestseller upon its publication in Dutch in 2015, Djinn tells the poignant, at times heartbreaking, story of former Dutch Partliamentarian Tofik Dibi’s coming-of-age as a gay Muslim man with humor and grace. From his Amsterdam childhood to his experiences in New York City clubs and internet chatrooms to his unlikely political ascent, Djinn explores contemporary issues of race, religion, sexuality, and human rights in and beyond Europe.
Jordan S. Carroll, Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press)
Carroll argues that transgressive editors . . . taught their readers to approach even the most scandalizing texts with the same cold calculation and professional reserve they employed in their occupations. Reading the Obscene calls into question some of the most sensational claims about obscenity, suggesting that when transgression becomes a sign of class distinction, we must abandon the idea that obscenity always overturns hierarchies and disrupts social order.
David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh University Press)
Horror’s longstanding reputation as a popular but culturally denigrated genre has been challenged by a new wave of films mixing arthouse minimalism with established genre conventions . . . films such as The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, Get Out, The Invitation, Hereditary, Midsommar, A Ghost Story, and mother! represent an emerging nexus of taste, politics, and style that has often earned outsized acclaim from critics and populist rejection by wider audiences.
Jeremy Colangelo, Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature (University of Michigan Press)
[Colangelo] examines ability, as a category of embodiment and embodied experience, and in the process opens up a new area of inquiry in the growing field of literary disability studies. It argues that the construction of ability arises through a process of exclusion and forgetting, in which the depiction of sensory information and epistemological judgment subtly (or sometimes un-subtly) elide the fact of embodied subjectivity. The result is what Colangelo calls “the myth of the diaphanous abled body.”
Amy K. King, Grotesque Touch: Women, Violence, and Contemporary Circum-Caribbean Narratives (University of North Carolina Press)
Analyzing films, television shows, novels, short stories, poems, book covers, and paintings, King shows how contemporary media reuse salacious and stereotypical depictions of relationships between women living within the plantation system to confront its legacy in the present. The vestiges of these relationships–enslavers and enslaved women, employers and domestic servants, lovers and rivals–negate characters’ efforts to imagine non-abusive approaches to power and agency.
Kate Christine Moore Koppy, Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them (Lexington Books)
In the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization . . . By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fairy-tale pastiches, Koppy shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, as much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to.
Rebecca Richardson, Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press)
Stories of hardworking characters who lift themselves from rags to riches abound in the Victorian era . . . Richardson explores this phenomenon in light of the under-studied reception history of Samuel Smiles’s 1859 publication, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. A compilation of vignettes about captains of industry, artists, and inventors who persevered through failure and worked tirelessly to achieve success in their respective fields, Self-Help links individual ambition to the growth of the nation.
Jill Anderson, “‘A Friend, a Nimble Mind, and a Book’: Girls’ Literary Criticism in Seventeen Magazine, 1958–1969,” Journal of American Studies 55 (Oct. 2021): 815–840.
Neval Avci, “‘The Sons of New-England’: Barbary Captivity and the Transatlantic Production of Anglo-American Identities,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 21 (Winter 2021): 56–93.
Rebecca W. Boylan, “Feminine Law and Ableness Endangered in the Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Emily Bronte, and Rachel Whiteread,” in Romantic Dialogues and Afterlives, edited by Monika Coghen and Anna Paluchowska-Messing (Columbia University Press, 2021)
Rebecca W. Boylan, “Class Subjectivities in Hardy, Wilde, and Woolf,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class, edited by Gloria McMillan (Routledge, 2021)
Rebecca W. Boylan, “Saving Face: Respecting Nature’s Inversions in A Pair of Blue Eyes,” in From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria: Readings in 18th and 19th Century British Literature and Culture, vol. 7 (University of Warsaw Press, 2021)
Nissa Ren Cannon,“‘Essentially an American Institution Planted on Foreign Soil’: The American Library in Paris, the Paris Herald, the Paris Tribune and Ex Libris,” Cultural History 10, no. 2 (Oct. 2021): 207-225.
Nissa Ren Cannon, “’No Man’s Ocean Ever Did Get the Best of Me’: The Oceanic Journeys and Maritime Modernism of Romance in Marseille,” English Language Notes 59, no. 1 (April 2021): 133–45.
Scott Challener, “Introduction: ‘Not Only a Metaphor,'” Contemporaries at Post45
Scott Challener, “Rehearing ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ in an Era of Global Decolonization: ASK YOUR MAMA’s Jazz Poetics,” Langston Hughes Review 27, no. 1 (2021): 47–69.
Jeremy Colangelo, “Tactics of Dwelling: Alterity and the Room in Tender Buttons,” Textual Practice (March 2021)
Jeremy Colangelo, “Waking from History: The Nation’s Past and Future in Finnegans Wake,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Irish Modernism, edited by Maud Ellmann et al.,(Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 67–81.
AW Corey, “The Reverberating Flesh: Refiguring Blackness and Sex in Ralph Ellison’s Musical Basements,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 77, no. 1(2021): 1-32.
Michael Docherty, “Raymond Chandler’s Spatial Interrogations: Relocating the Detective-Frontiersman,” Crime Fiction Studies 2 (March 2021): 79–95.
Michael Docherty, “‘You don’t even know how you know’: Double Indemnity as Anti-Office Discourse,” European Journal of American Culture 40, no. 1 (March 2021): 27–43.
Michael Docherty, “Felskian Phenomenopolitics: Decolonial Reading through Postcritical Singularities,” Textual Practice (2021)
G. Cory Duclos, “Well-Behaved Panzas Rarely Make History: Teresa Panza and the Metafiction of Don Quijote,” in Cosmic Wit: Essays in Honor of Edward H. Friedman, edited by Vicente Pérez de Léon et al. (Linguatext, 2021)
Emma M. Duncan, “Defamiliarizing Faith: Emily Dickinson’s Use of Hymns, Scripture, and Prayer,” Women’s Studies 50, no. 2 (2021): 157–74.
Timothy M. Foster, “Miguel Manipulated: Metatheater and Social Critique in Two Quixotic Puppet Operas,” in Cosmic Wit: Essays in Honor of Edward H. Friedman, edited by Vicente Pérez de Léon et al. (Linguatext, 2021)
Jennifer Golightly, “Gender Performance and the Spectacle of Female Suffering in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Emma Corbett,” in Transatlantic Women Travelers, 1688–1843, edited by Misty Krueger (Bucknell University Press, 2021)
Gerard Holmes, “‘The Bird / Who Sings the Same, Unheard, / As Unto Crowd —’: Dickinson, Birdsong, and the Business of Improvisation,” Women’s Studies 50, no.2 (2021): 175–94.
Peter Labuza, “When a Handshake Meant Something: The Rise of Entertainment Law in Post-Paramount Hollywood,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60, no. 4 (2021): 61–84.
Eleni Loukopolou, “James Joyce and the Modern Scots,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 12, no.1 (2021): 87–124.
Sara Schotland, “Let Them Go! Compassionate Release for Disabled Prisoners with Chronic Health Conditions During the COVID-19 Public Health Pandemic,” Disability Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2021)
Matthew Scully, “Democratic Aesthetics: Scenes of Political Violence and Anxiety in Nari Ward and Ocean Vuong,” American Literature 93, no. 4 (December 2021): 685-712.
Matthew Scully, “Resistance and Revolution: Fanon, Himes, and ‘a literature of combat,’” African American Review 54 (Fall 2021): 199–217.
Erin Spampinato, “Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon: Adjudicative Criticism and the Capacious Conception of Rape,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 32 (Fall 2021): 122-160.
Wendy Tronrud, “’The Fossil Bird-Tracks’: Emily Dickinson Performing Archaeologically,” Women’s Studies 50, no. 2 (2021): 123–39.
Abigail Weil, “The Bugulma Tales: Authorship and Authority in Jaroslav Hašek’s Stories from Russia,” Slavic and East European Journal 65 (Spring 2021):145–62.
Steven B. Wenz, “The Importance of Humor in Recent Translations of Don Quijote,” in Cosmic Wit: Essays in Honor of Edward H. Friedman, edited by Vicente Pérez de Léon et al. (Linguatext, 2021)
Dennis Wise, “Globalization, Depth, and the Domestic Hero: The Postmodern Transformation of Tolkien’s Bard in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy,” Tolkien Studies 18 (2021): 211–33.
Dennis Wise, “Just like Henry James (Except with Cannibalism): The International Weird in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Rats in the Walls,’” Gothic Studies 23, no. 1 (2021): 96–110.
Dennis Wise, “Antiquarianism Underground: The 20th-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry,” Studies in the Fantastic 11 (Summer 2021): 22–54.
Dennis Wise, “Poul Anderson and the American Alliterative Revival,” Extrapolation 62 (Summer 2021): 157–80.
Dennis Wise, “Just Reading Piers Anthony’s A Spell for Chameleon: An Appreciation, with Caveats, and an Elegy,” Mythlore 40 (Fall/Winter 2021): 85–102.
Dennis Wise, “Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss, and The Dispossessed” in The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics, edited by Christopher L. Robinson et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 47–63.
Kit Yee Wong, “Degenerate Bodies: Max Nordau’s Degeneration and Émile Zola’s La Débâcle,” Essays in French Literature and Culture 58 (2021): 15–31.