As a companion to our 2025 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 2025. The contents were collected by Rebecca Colesworthy and Laura Hartmann-Villalta.
Enaiê Mairê Azambuja, The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry (Routledge)
. . . the first comprehensive study investigating the cultural affinities and resonances of Zen in early twentieth-century American poetry and its contribution to current definitions of ecopoetics, focusing on four key poets: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings. It develops ‘cosmopoetics’ as a new literary-theoretical concept of the poetic imagination as a contemplative means to achieving a deeper understanding of the human interdependence with the non-human.
Sarah Coogan, Nostalgia and National Identity in the British and Irish Modernist Epic (Cambridge University Press)
This book argues that the modernist epic . . . exhibits a mode of nostalgia that disrupts linear cultural tradition in favor of layering and juxtaposing past and present. Focusing on techniques such as juxtaposition and parallelism not only provides insight into modernist poetics; it also permits a more complex assessment of nostalgia’s cultural implications. The modernist epic seeks neither to abandon nor to reconstruct the past, rather striving to preserve and reimagine it.
María Lugones and Patrick M. Crowley, eds. Decolonial Thinking: Resistant Meanings and Communal Other-Sense (Indiana University Press)
Colonial practices, terms, and ideas have woven themselves into people’s lives. In Decolonial Thinking, contributors examine how coloniality has insidiously attached itself to the very fabric of self-understanding. These pieces compellingly address questions surrounding colonial legacies and offer fresh strategies for creating shared meanings that break with dominant disciplinary and academic categories of knowledge.
Madeline Lane-McKinley, Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy (Haymarket Books)
We live in a world that is profoundly against children.What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future. Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Solidarity with Children examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism. This is a book for anyone who cares about children and the struggle for a better world.
Jess Libow, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press)
Vigorous Reforms focuses on the understudied literary history of how women came to understand physicality and its connection to their everyday lives during [the nineteenth century]. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive, Jess Libow shows the limits of the science of the era, while arguing that women’s writing about health was fundamental to the development of what we now think of as American feminism.
Amanda Shubert, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics in Victorian Culture (Cornell University Press)
Seeing Things tells the story of how Victorians experienced the virtual images created by modern optical technologies—magic lanterns, stereoscopes, phenakistoscopes, museum displays, and illusionistic stage magic. Shubert argues that interactions with these devices gave rise to a new virtual aesthetics—an understanding of visual and perceptual encounters with things that are not really there—to be found in novels, popular science writing, and virtual travelogues.
Eret Talviste, Strange Intimacies – Affect, Embodiment and Materiality in Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys (Edinburgh University Press)
This book explores how the novels by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys maintain an attachment to and love for life amid disenchanting times of war and social change. Drawing from Woolf’s and Rhys’s personal writings and fictions, Talviste demonstrates that Woolf and Rhys locate this attachment to life in the moments and atmospheres of ‘strange intimacy’ – in sensual, affective and oddly intimate moments that function as cracks in dominant patriarchal and imperial ideologies.
Irena Yamboliev, Ornament, the Novel, and the Victorian Real (Oxford University Press)
Yamboliev argues for the many and varied ways in which the novel is indebted to ornament. The book grounds itself historically in Victorian theories and practices of decoration developed in the middle of the nineteenth century, a moment when Victorian designers overhauled the reigning principles of decorative art, and shows the rise of the newly developed theory of ornament to have explanatory power for contemporary novelistic practice too.
Max Ubelaker Andrade, “Literary Visuality and Islam in Borges,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jorge Luis Borges, ed. José Eduardo González (The Modern Language Association of America, 2025), 43-50
Nissa Ren Cannon, “May Birkhead, an American Journalist in Paris,” in The Edinburgh History of the Transnational British Press in Non-Anglophone Countries, 1800-1914, ed. Diana Cooper-Richet, Isabelle Richet, Jennifer Hayward, and Michelle Prain-Brice, (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Whitney Devos, “The Americanity of the ‘American Lyric’: Claudia Rankine in Ibero-American Translation,” differences 36, nos. 2-3 (2025): 187-219.
Adele Guyton, “’A Certain Amount of Scientific Education’: Science, Sensation, and the Everyman Narrator in the Serialised War of the Worlds (1897),” Victorian Periodicals Review 58, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 1-24.
Leanna Lostoski-Ho, “Pointz Hall as Hyperobject: Woolf’s Deep Geological History in Between the Acts,” in Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter, ed. Laci Mattison (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), 266–76.
Eleni Loukopoulou, “James Joyce’s Portrait in London’s Greek Newspaper Hē Hesperia (1916–20),” Journal of European Periodical Studies 9, no 2 (2024): 91-107. [published in 2025]
Garrett Schumann, “Denial, Fantasy, and Erasure in Five Hundred Years of Music Discourse,” Public Humanities 1, e62 (2025).
Aran Ward Sell, “Half-Formed Modernism: Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing,” in Tradition and Experimentation in Irish Literature and Theatre since Modernism, ed. Katarzyna Ojrzyńska and Wit Pietrzak, (Sciendo, 2025), 55-72.
Tianyi Shou, “In the Country House: National Archive, War Ruins, and Modernist Ethnography in Virginia Woolf and Xiao Hong,” Comparative Literature Studies 62, no.4 (2025): 529-560.