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.

Eligibility

The JMMLA does not consider for publication book reviews that are submitted by undergraduates.  Contributors to the Journal must be pursuing or hold a graduate degree and are required to hold an active MMLA membership at the time of publication (not of submission).  Lastly, 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.

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 current CV.  

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

Recently published 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.

Recommended Books for Review Published in 2025

  • Alon, Shir. Static Forms: Writing the Present in the Modern Middle East. Columbia University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Anderson Howell, Katherine. Disability and Fandom. University of Iowa Press, March 2025.
  • Behluli, Sofie. Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel. Oxford University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Billington, Josie. Reading Literature and Chronic Pain. Bloomsbury Publishing, June 2025.
  • Bost, Suzanne. Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities. University of Minnesota Press, April 2025.
  • Breton, Justine. Power and Society in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Building Fantasy Civilization. Bloomsbury Publishing, April 2025.
  • Buscatto, Marie, et al., editors. Gender-Based Violence in Arts and Culture: Perspectives on Education and Work. Open Book Publishers, June 2025.
  • Buttes, Stephen. Poverty and Antitheatricality: Form and Formlessness in Latin American Literature, Art, and Theory. Rutgers University Press, June 2025.
  • Craig, Heidi. Theatre Closer and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars. Cambridge University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Detwyler, Anatoly. Seeing Through Abstraction: Literary Encounters with Information in Modern China. Columbia University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Dharwadker, Aparna Bhargava. Cosmo-Modernism and Theatre in India: Writing and Staging Multilingual Modernisms. Columbia University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • D’Souza Radha and Sunera Thobani. Decolonizing Knowledge: Looking Back, Moving Forward. Bloomsbury Publishing, June 2025.
  • Effe, Alexandra. A History of Autofiction: Cognitive and Cultural Work from 18th Century England to Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2025.
  • Ezenwafor-Afuecheta, Chikelu I., Grammar of Etulo: A Niger-Congo (Idomoid) Language. Open Book Publishers, Oct. 2025.
  • Fehskens, Matthew. Poetics of Prophecy and Planetary Hispanic Modernism: The tragic Aesthetic of the Vates Poets. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2025.
  • Feldman, Daniel, et al. Poesis in Extremis: Literature Witnessing the Holocaust. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Gallien, Claire. Reconfiguring and Approaching Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literary Traditions in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Britain: Orientalism and the Recreation of the Islamicate Canon. Oxford University Press, April 2025.
  • Godfrey, Molly. Brave Humanism: Black Women Rewriting the Human in the Age of Jane Crow. The Ohio State University Press, April 2025.
  • Han, John J., et al., editors. Certainty and Ambiguity in Global Mystery Fiction: Essays on the Moral Imagination. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Hammond, Andrew. Modern European Borders in Fiction: The Divided Continent. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2025.
  • Hill, Pamela Smith. Too Good to Be Altogether Lost: Rediscovering Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Books. University of Nebraska Press, July 2025.
  • Hilton, Leon J., Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance. University of Minnesota Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Ioanes, Anna. Painful Forms: Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art,1945-2001. University of North Carolina Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Jenkin-Smith, Daniel. The Rise of Office Literature: Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810-1900. Bloomsbury Publishing, March 2025.
  • Kamper, David. Rezballers and Skate Elders: Joyful Futures in Indian Country. University of Nebraska Press, June 2025.
  • Kortekallio, Kaisa. Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction: Thinking with Embodied Estrangement. Bloomsbury Publishing, June 2025.
  • Kukrechtová, Daniela. Unplanned Cities in Modern American Poetry: Lyrical Challenges to Utopianism. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Lemercier-Goddard, Sophie, et al., editors. Closet Drama in Early Modern England. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Libow, Jess. Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States. University of North Carolina Press, Sept. 2025.
  • Marsh, Wendell H., Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities. Columbia University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • McGuire, Riley. Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability in Nineteenth-Century Literature. The Ohio State University Press, April 2025.
  • McMorran, Will. Sensing Violence: Reading with the Marquis de Sade. Open Book Publishers, Sept. 2025.
  • Medieros, Paulo de, editor. The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal: Fiction Aesthetics and Memory After Postmodernism. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Mehta, Brinda J. The Wounds of War and Conflict in Contemporary Arab Women's Writings from North Africa and the Middle East. Oxford University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Morgan, Alaina M. Atlantic Crescent: Building Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora. University of North Carolina Press, July 2025.
  • Noonan, Patrick. Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan. Columbia University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Parvulescu, Anca. Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism. Cambridge University Press, Aug. 2025.
  • Prabhu, Gayathri. A Genre of Her Own: Life Narratives and Feminist Literary Beginnings in Modern India. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2025.
  • Riahi, Hamida. Study of Intersectionality in Mohja Kahf's "Emails from Scheherazad": The "Odalisque" Gazes Back. Bloomsbury Publishing, Sept. 2025.
  • Roxburgh, Natalie. The Politics of Disinterestedness in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Browning, Eliot, Wilde. Bloomsbury Publishing, May 2025.
  • Rudnytsky, Peter L. Psychoanalysis and the Patriarchal Tradition: Augustine to Milton. Bloomsbury Publishing, Oct. 2025.
  • Scappettone, Jennifer. Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism. Columbia University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Sedgman, Kirsty, et al. Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. University of Iowa Press, May 2025.
  • Shohet, Lauren, et al., editors. Queering Early Modern Death in England: Figuration, Representation, and Matter. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Shollenberger, Jess. Ordinary Queerness in American Modernism. The Ohio State University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • St. Clair, Robert. Counter-Modernities in Nineteenth-Century French Literature: Constellations of Loss in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Flaubert. Oxford University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Stern, Michael. Thinking Nietzsche with Africana Thought: Towards an Alluvial Poetics of Worlding. Bloomsbury Publishing, Sept. 2025.
  • Tait, Adrian. Errant Natures and Wayward Bodies in Late-Victorian Speculative Fiction. Bloomsbury Publishing, Sept. 2025.
  • Thurschwell, Pamela. Teenage Time: Coming of Age Disruptively in Literature, Culture and Film 1945-2024. Bloomsbury Publishing, Aug. 2025.
  • Wainwright, Anna. Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in the Italian Renaissance. University of Delaware Press, May 2025.
  • Watts, Edward. Berserk Violence, Racial Vengeance, and Settler Colonialism in American Writing from Franklin to Melville. Oxford University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Weese, Katherine J. Contemporary Feminist Fiction and a Case for Expanding Rhetorical Narratology. The Ohio State University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Winkiel, Laura. Modernism and the Middle Passage. Columbia University Press, Oct. 2025.
  • Winston, Leslie. Intersex Figures in Modern Japanese Literature and Art. University of Michigan Press, Oct. 2025.