As a companion to our 2023 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 2023. The contents were collected by Rebecca Colesworthy and Laura Hartmann-Villalta.
Wayne Bradshaw, The Ego Made Manifest: Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Wayne Bradshaw reinserts Stirner into the history of manifestos that not only rebelled against tradition but sought to take ownership of history, culture, and people’s minds. This study documents the trajectory of Stirner’s reception from mid-19th-century Germany to his rediscovery by German and American readers almost 50 years later, and from his popularity among manifesto writers in fin de siècle Paris to the birth of Italian Futurism.
Daniel Shank Cruz, Ethics for Apocalyptic Times: Theapoetics, Autotheory, and Mennonite Literature (Penn State Press)
Ethics for Apocalyptic Times is about the role literature can play in helping readers cope with our present-day crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the shift toward fascism in global politics . . . Cruz investigates the age-old question of what literature’s role in society should be, and argues that when we read literature theapoetically, we can glean a relational ethic that teaches us how to act in our difficult times.
Alexandra Edwards, Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (Louisiana State University Press)
Before Fanfiction investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s. By reexamining the work of popular American women writers and their fans, Alexandra Edwards [draws] previously ignored fangirls into the spotlight.
Paul Gagliardi, All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project (Temple University Press)
Many of the FTP plays Paul Gagliardi analyzes in All Play and No Work feature complex portrayals of labor and work relief at a time when access to work was difficult. [What] does it mean that many plays produced by the FTP celebrated forms of labor like speculation and swindling? Gagliardi shows how comedies of the Great Depression engaged questions of labor, labor history, and labor ethics.
Alexandra J. Gold, The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art (University of Iowa Press)
[Gold] offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Taking several of these books out of special collections libraries and . . . making them available to a broad readership, Gold brings to light a whole genre that has been largely forgotten or neglected.
Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston, Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (Oxford University Press)
[This book] explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Analyzing the work of canonical authors . . . and less often discussed figures . . . in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, the book charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland.
Michael O’Connell, Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction (Fordham University Press)
Startling Figures is about Catholic fiction in a secular age and the rhetorical strategies Catholic writers employ to reach a skeptical, indifferent, or even hostile audience. Although characters in contemporary Catholic fiction frequently struggle with doubt and fear, O’Connell argues that works by Flannery O’Connor [and others] also retain a belief in the possibility for transcendent meaning and value beyond the limits of the purely secular.
Tim Personn, Fictions of Proximity: Skepticism, Romanticism, and the Wallace Nexus (Rowman Littlefield)
Fictions of Proximity tells the story of a nexus of contemporary novelists around David Foster Wallace who took up the legacy of logical positivism and reworked it between the 1980s and the 2000s in a way that has affinities with romanticism. The book shows how the writers of this ‘Wallace nexus’ use fiction’s complexities to challenge the idea that, in human interactions, only complete fusion and transparency may count as instances of knowing.
Deborah Lindsay Williams, The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction: The Literary Agenda (Oxford University Press)
The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction argues that YA fiction helps us to think about some of most pressing problems of the twenty-first century by offering imaginative reconceptualizations about identity, nation, family, and the human relationship to the planet. Williams shows that the cultural work of YA fiction shapes readers perceptions, making them receptive to–and invested in–the possibility of positive social change.
Michelle Anya Anjirbag-Reeve, “No Country for Old Women: Age, Power, and Beauty in Neil Gaiman’s Fantasies,” Marvels & Tales 37, no. 1 (2023): 3-20.
Michelle Anya Anjirbag-Reeve, “Wicked Old Schoolmarm or Stern Old Crone? Age and Gender in Magical School Stories,” The Lion and the Unicorn 47 (2023): 101–122.
Leila Belkora, “The Historical Context of Robert Frost’s Enthusiasm for Astronomy,” The Robert Frost Review no. 32 (Fall 2022): 25-38. Published in 2023.
Leila Belkora, “Astronomical, Meteorological, and Optical Effects in ‘Iris by Night,’” The Robert Frost Review no. 32 (Fall 2022): 39-52. Published in 2023.
Max L. Chapnick, “George Eliot, Edward Said, and Romantic Zionism,” Studies in Romanticism 62, no. 2 (2023): 297-310.
Max L. Chapnick, “New Louisa May Alcott Pieces: Radical Sensation in a Culture of Ambiguous Attribution,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 11, no. 1 (2023): 171-185.
Shannon Finck, “The Fraught ‘New’ Frontiers of Climate Fiction’s Third Coast,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2023).
Polly Hember, “H. D.’s Hotel Visions” in Hotel Modernisms, eds. Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi (Routledge).
Alex Moscowitz, “The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56, no. 1 (2023): 1-20.
Alex Moscowitz, “Martin Delany: Labor, Ecology, and Black Freedom,” The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, special issue on “African American Nature Writing,” 30 (2022): 59-75. Published in 2023.
Alex Moscowitz, “Apathy, Political Emotion, and the Politics of Space in Thoreau’s Antislavery Writing,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 64, no. 2 (2022): 139-160. Published in 2023.
Hannah Lauren Murray, “Get In and Get Out: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination,” Humanities 12, no. 6 (2023): 129.
Hannah Lauren Murray, “Confusion” in The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Study, eds. Christopher Lloyd and Hillary Emmett (Routledge).
Jeannette Schollaert (with Margaret Ronda and Jenna DiMaggio), “Introduction: Abortion Now, Abortion Forever,” Contemporaries at Post45 (2023).
Jeannette Schollaert, “Grow Abortion Power: Herbal Abortifacients and Abortion Storytelling,” Contemporaries at Post45 (2023).
Courtney Naum Scuro, “Timesoup, Missing Relevance, and Making a Pandemic History” in Scholars in Covid Times, eds. Melissa Castillo Planas and Debra A. Castillo (Cornell University Press).
Harriet M. Thompson, “The Whale and the Wire: Moby-Dick and the 1858 Atlantic Telegraph Cable,” The Cambridge Quarterly 52, no. 1 (March 2023): 60-80.
Caroline Wilkinson, “Beyond Isabel Archer’s Door: The Underground Railroad and the Condemned Plot for Freedom,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 56, no. 2 (2023): 208–227.