Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. CL published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo; we also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J. M. Coetzee to American readers. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, CL features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.

current issue

summer contemporary literature journal cover

Jerry A. Varsava
An Interview with Ha Jin
Robin Truth Goodman
In a State without State: Jean Said Makdisi's Beirut Fragments as a Thought Experiment in Public Sphere Disintegration
Magdalena Maczynska
This Monstrous City: Urban Visionary Satire in the Fiction of Martin Amis, Will Self, China Miéville, and Maggie Gee
Jim Hannan
"A Champion of Mixtures": Difference and Global Literature in Pauline Melville's Shape-Shifter
Heather M. Houser
"A Presence Almost Everywhere": Responsibility at Risk in Don DeLillo's The Names
George Hart
"Enough Defined": Disability, Ecopoetics, and Larry Eigner
Reviews
V. Nicholas LoLordo
Returning to Lyric
David James
Executive Designs: Rereading Sovereign Power through Novelistic Style
Krista Kauffmann
Modernity and Its Discontents
Richard Begam
Cerebrating and Celebrating Beckett

news

In anticipation of the journal’s fiftieth anniversary in Winter 2010, CL is pleased to announce a new Web site, a new editorial collective, and a renewed commitment to publishing the best scholarship on contemporary literary studies.

Contemporary Literature is also hosting a reception in honor of this anniversary at MLA this December. Please check your email for further information.

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