Agata Szczeszak-Brewer is Professor of English and John P. Collett Chair in Rhetoric at Wabash College, USA where she teaches 20th-century World Literatures, Gender Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published two scholarly books—Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce (2010) and Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad (2015)—and co-edited a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on Irish and South African literary and cultural intersections. Her 2023 memoir in essays The Hunger Book won the Gournay Prize.

This book’s sophisticated literary study of the complex intersection(s) of sex and nation within global geopolitics advances inclusive narratives of belonging – it is an informative, innovative and important read.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: “Writers Respond To Nationalisms’ Gender Panic”Chapter 1: “James Joyce’s Womanly Men”Chapter 2: “Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Nation, Proportion”Chapter 3: “Cross-Dressing Putos In Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk”Chapter 4: “Queering The South: Nation, Race, And Sex In Jean Toomer’s Cane”Chapter 5: “States Of Emergency: Regulating Sex And Nation In Richard Rive’s Fiction”Chapter 6: “South African Nationhood, Incest, And Miscegenation In Jm Coetzee’s In The Heart Of The Country”Chapter 7: “Intimate Violence And Tribalism In Patrick Mccabe’s Breakfast On Pluto”Chapter 8:White Allyship And Narrative Dissonance In Andrea Levy’s Small IslandChapter 9: Queering The Trenches In David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is BlackConclusion: Looking Into The Future