Edward Jackson holds a PhD in English from the University of Birmingham. He is the author of David Foster Wallace’s Toxic Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

Book Review: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola is a comprehensive overview of where the field currently stands. If the first wave of Coppola scholarship has been concerned with explicating her genius, then the critiques included in Handbook to Sofia Coppola help to widen the scope of the field. So, too, do readings that place her creative practice in broader cultural contexts Continue reading

Book Review: Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro.

Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature is a challenging collection of essays that should reverberate throughout the field. Readers will find a range of insights here into how recent American fiction, in editors Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro’s words, ‘models and interrogates the neoliberal present’ (1). Continue reading

Book Review: The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age by Alison Phipps

Two anecdotes in the opening pages of Alison Phipps’s The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age set the scene for what is a thorough, if at times frustrating, investigation into the ‘difficulties of positioning for contemporary feminist theory and activism’ (2). Continue reading