Modern Fiction Studies - Spring 2026



Essays

1___ Gothic Abjection, Intertextuality, and Disloyalty in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover"

Jane Fisher



23__ Cather and Catastrophe: Time and Environmental Realism in the Improbable West

William R. Handley



47__ Contemplating "Queerness" in Anglo-American Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Children's Books: The Case of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden

Meghan Jordan



70__ Narrative Scarring in The Underground Railroad

T. J. Martinson and Aaron Gordon



95__ Philip Roth's Jewish Debility

Marilyn Reizbaum



123_ Technologies of Uplift: Race and Beauty in Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep

Gary Totten



150_ "Letting Oneself Matter": The Dangers of Skepticism in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Kathryn Van Wert



174_ How Day Novels Work: Temporal Economy in A Day Off and Party Going

Aidan Watson-Morris

Essays:

669__ Conceptualizing Peripheral Sexualities in Historical Fiction from Northern Ireland

Andy Carolin



690__ Free Association and Empathy in Ishiguro's The Buried Giant: A Case for Postcritical Psychoanalysis

A. C. Facundo



715__ Olfactory Ecologies: Investigating Oil's Smelly Residues in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep

Anthony Gomez III



742__ Antoinette Cosway's Martyrdom: Catholicism and the "Triumphant" Ending of Wide Sargasso Sea

Naomi Kim-Yu



765__ Metaphorized (Not Real) Lives in Hong Ying's K: The Art of Love

Michael Lackey



788__ Diminishing Returns: Henry James, Alice Munro, and the Foreshortened Future

Allen MacDuffie



813__ Gerald Murnane's Terra Nullius

Jack Quirk



840__ Theorizing Gender, Crime Fiction, and the State: The Case of Dorothy B. Hughes's The Blackbirder

Erin A. Smith

"Secretly Proustian": Les Biches, Mrs. Dalloway, and In Search of Lost Time

Patty Argyrides


A "Usable Past": Teju Cole's Open City and the Fictions of Memory

Thomas Heise


"Gazing at the View": The Prospects of Nature Poetry in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Rachael Isom


Scholars vs. Critics: Henry James, The Aspern Papers, and Professional Vocation

Philipp Loeffler


The Habsburg Myth and the Production of Space in Joseph Roth's Job: The Story of a Simple Man

Ariel Pridan


The Hidden Ending of Julian Barnes's The Sense of and Ending

Brian Richardson


Unwinding Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Ariadne's Quest: Helga Crane's Sacrifice to the Minotaur of Racial Uplift

Bonnie Roos


"In Full Holocaust": Gravity's Rainbow and the Absent Atrocity

Eric Sandberg


Rethinking Modernity: An Essays-Review

Stephen Ross and Kiera Bandy

Summer 2025

Spring 2025

Essays:

563__ "Save America From Itself": Steve Erickson's Speculative History of the Future in Shadowbahn

Greg Deinert



583__ Conservative Modernity: The Self-Making of the Modern Colonial Woman in Cornelia Sorabji's India Calling

Anwesha Kundu



609__ Rape Culture and the Zombie Apocalypse: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend

Gwen Bergner



633__ Between Apparition and Disappearance: Queer Penumbrae in Wu He's Ghost and Fairies

Keyun Tian



652__ "One way looking at it": Positive Thinking and Precarious Labor in Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods

Evan Lower



678__ Staying in Character: Ocean Vuong and the Usefulness of Refugee Beauty

Timothy K. August



700__ "An Unknown Tongue": God, Complexity, and the Limits of Secular Epistemology in Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and Stella Maris

Steven Frye

INTRODUCTION

369__ Women Thinking in Public: An Introduction Debra Rae Cohen and Catherine Keyser



ESSAYS

385__ On Jacob's Room: The Figure and Ground of Protest Sarah Cole, Anne E. Fernald, Paul K. Saint-Amour, and Urmila Seshagiri



409__ The Kinesthetic Turn: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Machinery of Dance Modernism

Zoe L. Henry



433__ Thinking with the Girls with Burning Hinder Parts: Process, Revision, and Uncertainty in Djuna Barnes's Ladies Almanack

Kate Schnur



456__ "I Saw and Felt the Class Lines": Class Divides, Forced Sterilization, and Literary Form in Meridel Le Sueur's The Girl

Jolene Hubbs



477_ "What was failure? What was success?": The Impostor Syndrome's Literary Transformations

Kait Pinder



501__ Cellular Self-Making: Octavia E. Butler, "Childfinder," and the Hypno-Psionic Impulse

Alyssa Collins



518__ Olga Ravn and the Logic of the Lyric Essay

Bridget Vincent



538__ Mistakes Were Made: Overthinking and the Contemporary Woman Writer

Melanie Micir

1__ Fandom and Fictionality after the Social Web: A Computational Study of AO3

Aarthi Vadde and Richard Jean So



30__ Not Quite So Kind: Mrs. Dalloway and the Problem of Kindness

Anne E. Fernland



55__ Edibles into Scribbles: Writing Asia through Food in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Janet Eunjin Cho



78__ Elizabeth Bowen's Grammar of Waning Empire

Wendi Bootes



103__ Alone Together: Connecting through Estrangement in the Black British Novel

Isavella Vouza



130__ Trans*-itional Longings of the "Dark Ghetto": Rosa Guy and a Trans* Black Childhood Studies

Stephen Knadler



156__ Realism and Interface: Reading Ruth Ozeki Apocalyptically

Bren Ram