Book Reviews

 

Members of the MMLA are encouraged to submit book reviews which, if accepted, will be published in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association (JMMLA).  Strong book reviews help scholars keep abreast of the state of scholarship in their own and other fields, and they guide researchers in choosing books relevant to their scholarship.                                                                                                                                                     
If you would like to review a book that would be of interest to our members, please inform us by email at [email protected], and attach a copy of your CV.  Please keep in mind that only one book review from a single scholar may be under consideration at a time.  Scholars who have published a book review with the JMMLA previously are invited to submit another at a later date if they are interested in doing so.

Guidelines and Models

To assist members in composing strong book reviews, we offer the following guidelines and models:

I.  Guidelines

An effective book review should:

  • Distill the essence of the book’s argument, identifying the critical debates in which it intervenes, the analytical problems it addresses, the key assertions or claims it makes, and the methods and materials it uses to support those claims. 
  • Describe how the book’s parts support its key claims, and evaluate whether that support is convincing.   
  • Identify the scholarly audiences who would benefit from reading this book, and situate the book's argument in relation to other works in that field of scholarship. 
  • Specify how researchers will benefit from this book, referencing the book’s own account of that benefit, and supplementing or challenging that account as appropriate.
  • Accomplish the above in not more than 1200 words.

II.  Models

Those seeking models to emulate when composing a book review are invited to consult the following:

Selecting a Book to Review

Recent books that you are reading for exam preparation, dissertation research, or other scholarly projects are all excellent candidates to review.  Please Note: To keep our reviews timely, we only publish reviews of books published within the last year-and-a-half. The MMLA maintains a list of books available for review (see below), but members need not limit themselves to these titles. If you wish to review a book that is not listed below, we can request that the book's publisher supply you with a review copy.

Books Published in 2024

  • Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. Millenial Style: The Politics of Experiment in Contemporary African Diasporic Culture. Duke UP, Feb. 2024. 
  • Bacon, Eugen, editor. Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction. Bloomsbury Publishing, Nov. 2024.
  • Behrooz, Anahit. Mapping Middle-Earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien's Cartographies. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Bergstein, Mary. Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna: Science, Eros, and the Psychoanalytic Imagination. Bloomsbury Publishing, Mar. 2024.
  • Brintlinger, Angela. Why We Need Russian Literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Others. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Caison, Gina. Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance. Duke UP, Nov. 2024. 
  • Calhoun, Doyle D. The Suicide Archive: Reading Resistance in the Wake of French Empire. Duke UP, Oct. 2024.  
  • Cavitch, Max and Brian Connolly, editors. Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American Studies. Duke UP, Apr. 2024.
  • Cowan, Leah. Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? Verso Books, June 2024.
  • Curthoys, Ned. The Bildungsroman in a Genocidal Age. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Daiker, Donald. Hemingway's Earliest Heroes Nick Adams and Jake Barnes. Kendall Hunt Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Davis, Lennard J. Poor Things: How Those with Money Depict Those without It. Duke UP, Nov. 2024.
  • Djohar, Hasnul Insani. Rewriting Islam: Decolonialism, Justice, and Contemporary Muslimah Literature. Ohio State UP, Aug. 2024.
  • Gabler, Hans Walter. Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce. Open Book Publishers, Feb. 2024.
  • George, Sheldon and Jean Wyatt, editors. Experimental Subjectivities in Global Black Women's Writing: Race and Narrative Innovation. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2024.  
  • Gordon, Colby. Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature. The U of Chicago P, Sept. 2024.
  • Harrison, Jaime. Digital Culture in Contemporary Fiction. Liverpool UP, Apr. 2024.  
  • Helms, Nicholas and Steve Mentz. Water and Cognition in Early Modern English Literature. Amsterdam UP, Mar. 2024.
  • Henry, Patrick Thomas. The Work of the Living: Modernism, the Artist-Critic, and the Public Craft of Criticism. Liverpool UP, Apr. 2024.  
  • Holmes, Chris. Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2024.
  • Hooley, Matt. Against Extraction: Indigenous Modernism in the Twin Cities. Duke UP, Apr. 2024. 
  • Hume, Robert D. Paratext Printed with New English Plays, 1660-1700. Cambridge UP, Feb. 2024.
  • Jenkins, Jerry Rafiki. Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction. The Ohio State UP, Apr. 2024.
  • Jordan, Spencer. Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2024.  
  • Fiege, Mark, Liesl Carr Childers, and Michael J Lansing, editors. Wallace Stegner's Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West. U of Nebraska P, Feb. 2024.
  • Kilbane, Matthew. The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media. Johns Hopkins UP, Feb. 2024.
  • Lawson, Ashley. On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett. The Ohio State UP, Sep. 2024.  
  • Loira, Javier Patiño. The Age of Subtlety: Nature and Rhetorical Conceits in Early Modern Europe. Rutgers UP, June 2024.
  • Maurer, Anais. The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists. Duke UP, Apr. 2024. 
  • Medeiros, Paulo de, and Ana Paula Arnaut. The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal: Fictional Aesthetics and Memory after Postmodernism. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Millet, Kitty. Kabbalah and Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Östbjerg, Kell. The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy. Verso Books, Apr. 2024.
  • Robinson, Douglas. Translating the Nonhuman: What Science Fiction Can Teach Us About Translating. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2024. 
  • Rudrum, David. Trolling Before the Internet: An Offline History of Insult, Provocation, and Public Humiliation in the Literary Classics. Bloomsbury Publishing, Nov. 2024.
  • Russell, Legacy. Black Meme. Verso Books, May 2024.
  • Schrock, Chad. Chaucer and the Invention of Biblical Narrative. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2024. 
  • Sonboldel, Farshad. The Rebellion Forms in Modern Persian Poetry: Politics of Poetic Experimentation. Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 2024.
  • Stead, Evanghelia. Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley. Open Book Publishers, Oct. 2024.