Loyola University Chicago

Midwest Modern Language Association

Book Review Guidelines

Members of the MMLA are encouraged to submit book reviews. An adequate book review will provide a summary, or a good sense, of material treated and arguments made; a good book review will also offer an informed assessment of the book’s contribution to its field.  Book reviews help scholars keep abreast of their own and other fields, and choose what to read; they are also important for the discussion of the state of scholarship. 
 
The MMLA maintains a list of books available for review, but members need not limit themselves to the texts listed below. We can request review copies of books we don’t currently have in our office if you choose to review another title. If you would like to review a book that would be of interest to our members, please inform us by email at mmla@luc.edu, and attach a copy of your CV.  We only publish reviews on books published within the last year-and-a-half. In general, book reviews should not be more than 1200 words.

2022

Please note that many of the 2022 book titles are forthcoming and pending publication!
  • Lunning, Frenchy. Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
  • Parlett, Jack. The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
  • Schleck, Julia. Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
  • Song, Min Hyoung. Climate Lyricism. Duke University Press, 2022.
  • Tahmahkera, Dustin. Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
  • Williams, Roland Leander. Smooth Operating and Other Social Acts. SUNY Press, 2022.
  • Zaytoun, Kelli D. Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte. University of Illinois Press, 2022.
  • Elze, Jens. Realism: Aesthetics, Experiments, Politics. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
  • Hodapp, James. Graphic Novels and Comics as World Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
  • Schaberg, Christopher. Pedagogy of the Depressed. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
  • Stewart, Garrett. The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors: Reflexive Action in Fiction and Film. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
  • Coffman, Chris. Queer Traversals: Psychoanalytic Queer and Trans Theories. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
  • Kavadlo, Jesse. Don DeLillo in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
  • Tangedal, Ross K. The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.
  • Murison, Justine S. American Literature in Transition, 1820-1860. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
  • Walsh, Richard, et al., editors. Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited. The Ohio State University Press, 2022.

2021

  • Chandna, Mohit. Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film. Leuven University Press, 2021.
  • Darlington, Joseph. The Experimentalists: The Life and Times of the British Experimental Writers of the 1960s. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Dauda, Bola and Toyin Falola. Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Dini, Rachele. "All-Electric" Narratives: Time-Saving Appliances And Domesticity in American Literature, 1945-2020. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Docherty, Thomas. The Politics of Realism. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Esteve, Mary. Incremental Realism. Stanford University Press, 2021.
  • Fagan, Paul, et al., editors. Irish Modernism: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Forster, Chris. Modernism and Its Media. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Hefner, Brooks E. Black Pulp. Minnesota University Press, 2021. 
  • Hemley, Robin and Xu Xi. The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Hessel, Nikki. Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry. SUNY Press, 2021.
  • Johansen, Emily. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Neoliberal Contemporary Life. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Lazzari, Laura and Ségeral, Nathalie. Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Palgrave, December 2021.
  • Lennartz, Norbert. Tears, Liquids and Porous Bodies in Literature Across the Ages: Niobe's Siblings. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Leonard Hoeg, Mette, editor. Literary Theories of Uncertainty. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Little, James. The Making of Samuel Beckett's Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Luckhurst, Roger. Gothic: An Illustrated History. Princeton University Press, 2021. 
  • McHenry, Elizabeth. To Make Negro Literature. Duke University Press, 2021.
  • Miquel, Angel. Ponchos y sarapes. El cine mexicano en Buenos Aires (1934-1943). Peter Lang Inc., 2021.
  • Moraru, Christian, et al., editors. Theory in the "Post" Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Morton, Timothy. Spacecraft. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Murray, Mitch R. and Mathias Nilges, editors. William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture. University of Iowa Press, 2021. 
  • Nelson, Steve. Teaching the Way: Using the Principles of 'The Art of War' to Teach Composition. Ten16 Press, October 2021. 
  • Paulin, Roger. From Goethe to Gundolf: Essays on German Literature and Culture. Open Book Publishers, 2021. 
  • Rando, David P. Hope, Form, and Future in the Works of James Joyce. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Ross, Stephen, editor. Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading: A Critical Conversation. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Ruth Rutter, Emily. Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists. University of Delaware Press, 2021.
  • Sanchez Prado, Ignacio M., editor. Mexican Literature as World Literature. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Stokes, Claudia. Old Style: Unoriginality and Its Uses in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature. Penn Press, 2021. 
  • Suvin, Darko. Disputing the Deluge: Collected 21st-Century Writings on Utopia, Narration, and Survival. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. 
  • Tremblay, Jean-Thomas and Andrew Strombeck, editors. Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s. SUNY Press, 2021.
  • Ungureanu, Delia. Time Regained: World Literature and Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.
  • Walezak, Emilie. Rethinking Contemporary British Women's Writing: Realism, Feminism, Materialism. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.