Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays

This collection of essays provides a thorough and probing account of an author who is quickly becoming one of the most read, studied and taught contemporary writers, but whose work remains underrepresented in scholarship. It is broad and ambitious in scope, mirroring the richness of Ward's oeuvre, and it brings together a diverse and dynamic range of approaches that reflect the scholarly conversations in which Ward is embedded.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Introduction: The Restless Social Vision of Jesmyn Ward Sheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble and Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo 1. Bois Sauvage as Biotope in the Novels of Jesmyn Ward Wendy McMahon 2. Wayward Kinship and Malleable Intimacies Jay N. Shelat 3. Determination in the Wake of Dispossession: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Depiction of Black Resistance to Outmigration Donald Brown 4. Local and Global Scales of Racial Neoliberalism in Where the Line Bleeds Martyn Bone 5. Mapping the ‘Ungeographic’ in Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds Beth Beatrice Smith 6. Salvaging Vulnerabilities: Climate Crisis and Marginalised Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Leah Van Dyk 7. ‘We are left to seed another year’: Nature and Neglect in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Devon Anderson 8. The Weather and the Wake: Maternal Embodiment and Peril in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka 9. ‘Something to save’: Rewriting Black Teenage Motherhood in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Chiara Margiotta 10. Being Touched by Cloth: Imprints on Community, Body and Self Melanie Petch 11. ‘Life had promised me something when I was younger’: Biopolitics and the Rags to Riches Narrative in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo 12. Releasing the Heavy Repercussions of Black Death in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Candice N. Hale 13. A Prophetic Tension: Bearing Witness Against Black Nihilism in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Mary McCampbell 14. ‘Something like praying’: Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Lucy Arnold 15. Ghosts in Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Christopher Lloyd 16. Experiencing the Environment from the Car: Human and More-than-Human Road Trippers in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Michelle Stork 17. Reclaiming the Ghosts of Trauma’s Past: Witnessing and Testimony as Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Apryl Lewis 18. Carceral Ecologies: Incarceration and Hydrological Haunting in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Cydney Phillip 19. Pilgrimages to the Past in Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison Lara Narcisi 20. ‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied, Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption Marco Petrelli Afterword. ‘The most beautiful song’: Jesmyn Ward and Diasporic Recognition Sheri-Marie Harrison Index

About the Author :
Sheri-Marie Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she researches and teaches Contemporary literature and mass culture of the African Diaspora and directs the Individualized Degrees program. She is the author of Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature (2014). Among her ongoing projects is an author study of Marlon James, a monograph on genre in Contemporary Black fiction. She is also a co-editor for the Routledge Companion to the Novel (forthcoming 2024). Arin Keeble is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. His research interests include the literary and cultural representation of terrorism, crisis, neoliberalism and systemic violence. He is co-editor of Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (2023) and is the author of Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context (2019), and his writing appears in journals such as Critique, Journal of American Studies, Post45, Parallax, Punk and Post-Punk, and TLS. Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo is a trade union organiser based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She received her PhD from Edinburgh University in 2021. Her dissertation focused on contemporary American women’s autobiographies and posthumanism

Review :
This brilliant and timely collection covers a startling range of approaches to Jesmyn Ward’s work – from ecocriticism to abolitionism to Afropessimism, and beyond. Harrison, Keeble and Torres-Quevedo’s constellation of essays deftly guides us through and bears witness to Ward’s powerful portraits of Black life and death, Black pasts and futures, and Black despair and hope. Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays greatly expands the field of literary crit-icism as well as the existing scholarship on Ward’s works, both fictional and non-fictional. The essays are meticulously researched, thoughtfully written, and pro-vide readers with a deeper understanding of Ward’s work, offering unique insights into the complexity of Ward’s writing and exploring both the already uncovered and for thefirst time unearthed meanings that emerge from it.