As a companion to our 2022 lists of books and articles by contingent historians, here’s a list of books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles published by contingent literary studies scholars in 2022. The contents were collected by Rebecca Colesworthy and Laura Hartmann-Villalta.
James Armstrong, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas: British Tragedy on the Regency Stage (Palgrave Macmillan)
This book reinterprets British dramas of the early-nineteenth century through the lens of the star actors for whom they were written. Unlike most playwrights of previous generations, the writers of British Romantic dramas generally did not work in the theatre themselves. However, they closely followed the careers of star performers. Even when they did not directly know actors, they had what media theorists have dubbed “para-social interactions” with those stars . . .
James J. Berg, ed., Isherwood on Writing: The Complete Lectures in California (University of Minnesota Press)
[Berg] assembles Christopher Isherwood’s free-flowing, wide-ranging public addresses from the 1960s to reveal a distinctly American Isherwood at the top of his form. Given at a critical time in Isherwood’s career, these lectures mark the era when he turned from fiction to memoir . . . he reflects on such topics as why writers write, what makes a novel great, and what influenced his own work . . . He also explores uncharted territory in candid comments on his own work, something not contained in his diaries.
Annie Berke, Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press)
Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers’ contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman’s point of view was essential to television as an art form.
Todd Carmody, Work Requirements: Race, Disability, and the Print Culture of Social Welfare (Duke University Press)
. . . Carmody asks how work, even the most debasing or unproductive labor, came to be seen as inherently meaningful during the late nineteenth century in the US. He explores how the print culture of social welfare—produced by public administrators, by economic planners, by social scientists, and in literature and the arts—tasked people on the social and economic margins, specifically racial minorities, incarcerated people, and people with disabilities, with shoring up the fundamental dignity of work.
Rebecca B. Clark, American Graphic: Disgust and Data in Contemporary Literature (Stanford University Press)
What do we really mean when we call something “graphic”? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the “graphic” as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark’s innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once.
Jeremy Colangelo, ed., Joyce Writing Disability (University of Florida Press)
In this book, the first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors approach the subject both on a figurative level, as a symbol or metaphor in Joyce’s work, and also as a physical reality for many of Joyce’s characters. Contributors examine the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with disabilities.
Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (University of Chicago Press)
Outside Literary Studies investigates how midcentury Black writers built a critical practice tuned to the struggle against racism and colonialism. Hines uncovers a vibrant history of interpretive resistance to university-based New Criticism by Black writers of the American left [who] levied their critique from “outside” venues: behind the closed doors of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in the classroom at a communist labor school under FBI surveillance, and in a host of journals.
Miriam Karpilove, Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe, translated by Jessica Kerzane (Farlag)
Miriam Karpilove was a prolific Yiddish author of novels and short stories. Her debut, an epistolary novel published when she was twenty-three, follows the tumultuous relationship between a small-town Jewish girl uprooted due to antisemitic violence and the dashing revolutionary who routinely disappoints her. Translated from the Yiddish by Jessica Kirzane. One reviewer notes: “Karpilove’s sly, artful narrative is well-served by Jessica Kirzane’s lovely and confident translation.”
Madeline Lane-McKinley, Comedy Against Work (Common Notions)
Comedy Against Work demonstrates how laughing about work can puncture the pretensions of tyrannical bosses while uniting us around a commitment to radically new ways of making the world together. Lane-McKinley exposes a war at the heart of contemporary comedy between those who see comedy as a weapon for punching down and those whose laughter points to social transformation. From stand-up to sitcoms, podcasts to late night, comedy reveals our longing to subvert power, escape the prison of work, and envision the joys of a liberated world.
Clayton Tarr, Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction (SUNY Press)
The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. In readings of texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Dickens, and others, Clayton Tarr shows how sensation fiction at once reflected and challenged medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity, anticipating debates over biometric identification practices in our own time.
Molly G. Yarn, Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text (Cambridge University Press)
A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book . . . challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century [and demonstrates] that taking these women’s work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history.
Joanna Walsh, Girl Online: A User Manual (Verso)
Invited to self-construct as ‘girls online,’ vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil’s bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal ‘experience.’ Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of online styles.
Marshall Needleman Armintor, “The Cultural Paradoxes of Red Velvet Cake,” in The Tacky South, edited by Katharine A. Burnett and Monica Carol Miller (LSU Press, 2022), 189–203.
Melissa Beattie, “‘What’s the Point of the White Australia Policy?’ Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries, Multiculturalism, and Immigration,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 40, no. 2 (Fall 2022): 69–79.
Brianna Beehler, “Charlotte Brontë’s Paper Dolls,” ELH 89, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 115–35.
Annie Berke, “Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment,” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (Spring 2022): 35–60.
Samuel P Catlin, “’No Sin to Limp’: Critique as Error in Geoffrey Hartman’s Essays on Midrash,” Naharaim 16, no. 1 (2022): 53–77.
Lydia Craig, “Drafting Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë at the Circulating Library,” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal 4, no. 1 (2022): 79–94.
Michael Docherty, “Turn West: Finding and Defining the Transnational in California,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 19, no.2–3 (2022): 97–114.
Lloyd Houston, “Parnellites, Playboys, and Pathology: Irish Modernist Drama and the Politics of Sexual Health,” Journal of Medical Humanities, November 9, 2022.
Caroline Hovanec, “‘Animal/Fool/Clown’: Stevie Smith’s Frivolity,” Journal of Modern Literature 45, no. 1 (Fall 2021): 21–39.
Caroline Hovanec and Rachel Murray, “Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction: Introduction,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus 7, no. 2, October 7, 2022.
Jessica Kirzane, “Eyzehu M’koman Shel Zevakhim? [What is the Site of the Ritual Sacrifice?] Yiddish Writers Encounter the Chicago Meatpacking Industry,” Middle West Review 8, no. 2 (2022): 31-44.
Diana Rose Newby, “Race, Vitalism, and the Contingency of Contagion in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” ELH 89, no. 3 (2022): 689–718.
CJ Scruton, “‘Howling and Whistling in off the Sea’: Water, Supernatural Environments, and the Movement of Human and Nonhuman Souls in Conor McPherson’s The Weir,” Gothic Nature III (Spring 2022).
CJ Scruton, “‘A kind of privilege to haunt’: Settler Structures, Land-Based Knowledge, and the Agency of the (Super)Natural in The House of the Seven Gables,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 48, no. 1 (2022): 28–49.
Sean Sidky, “Critique Beyond Judgment: Exploring Testimony and Truth in the Classroom,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 16, no. 2 (2022): 89–108.
Tobias Skiveren, “Postcritique and the Problem of the Lay Reader,” New Literary History 53, no. 1 (2022): 161–80.
Brett Winestock, “‘Brother Jews of the Entire World!’ Bergelson, Hofshteyn, and Soviet-Yiddish in the Worldwide Jewish Family,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (Nov 2022).
Alex Trimble Young, “‘The Vigorous New Vernacular’: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Irony in Roughing It,” The Mark Twain Annual 20 (2022): 158–73.
Magdalena Zapędowska, “James Monroe Whitfield’s ‘The Vision’: Apocalypse and the Black Periodical Press,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 10, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 147–74.