The Modernist Review Issue #50: New Work in Modernist Studies

With the promise of the coming spring, we are delighted to share with you our first issue of 2024 after a short hiatus over the winter break. This issue contains a selection of some of the brilliant papers from  New Work in Modernist Studies 2023 (NWiMS), our annual British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) conference for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers. The conference, held in December, was hosted by Liverpool University and organised by Dr. Daniel Abdalla and Dr. Rebecca Bowler. We are excited to bring to you selected contributions from eight speakers at the event, who have reworked their discussions into short papers as a memento of the day! 

The Modernist Review #48

6 September 2023

Between summer schools and symposia, weddings and Difficult Conversations in Modernist Studies, this summer has flown by for all of us at The Modernist Review. We’re very excited to share with you the last of our summer offerings, by way of the hard work of all of our contributors, on the eve of the new academic year. It’s an extensive August issue, ranging from newly discovered short stories, to reviews of the latest and greatest in the world of modernism – let’s jump right in!

The Modernist Review #47

4 July 2023

If we had to pick our favourite thing about editing The Modernist Review, it would probably be the fact that we get to publish, month after month, the work of an increasingly large, international, and diverse community of researchers and writers. Each piece adds to the evolving definition of modernism and modernisms, and contributes to our understanding of a movement which has traditionally been labelled as “difficult”. It is partly because of this that we can hardly wait for what promises to be one of the highlights of the year: Difficult Conversations in Modernist Studies, a series of online talks, discussions and conversations organised by BAMS, the Modernist Studies Association, the Modernist Studies in Asia Network, the Australasian Modernist Studies Network, and la Société d’Études Modernistes.

The Modernist Review Issue #44

30 January 2023

The new year is finally upon us, and with it a new issue of The Modernist Review. As we return to our academic duties and make our resolutions for 2023 as students, researchers, and readers, we carry with us the energy and the joyful moments we shared in the past month. Looking back to the heart-warming and exciting atmosphere of NWiMS (more on this soon!) our own resolution at TMR is to keep bringing  new and inspiring contributions to the BAMS community and to keep highlighting the work of emerging modernist scholars.

Modernist Review #43: Introduction

4 November 2022

Dr Beci Carver, University of Exeter

Take an innocent seeming word like ‘wicked.’ When in 1922, T. S. Eliot used this adjective in The Waste Land to introduce Madam Sosostris’s ‘wicked pack of cards’, he meant, according to Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, ‘Excellent, splendid, remarkable.’^[1] This American and distinctively modern meaning, dated to 1920 by the Oxford English Dictionary,^[2] is in-keeping with our familiar idea of Eliot as an out-of-place American abroad. But if you flip the word on its back, acknowledging the positive primary sense while recognising too that nothing in The Waste Land is quite what it seems, you will see it wriggle with other possibilities. For the word stems from ‘wretch’, meaning, originally, ‘outcast’,^[3] an etymological association that now underlies the dominant meaning of ‘evil’ or ‘mischievous’ like a causal explanation. The word also stands out in the history of the English language in having been confined throughout its early formation to Middle English and Scottish, making no contact with Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Old French, Old German, or any of the usual suspects for linguistic influence. ‘Wicked’ was incubated in the UK for the whole of its life until, in the early 1920s, it was let out to America and promptly positivised. If we read Eliot’s ‘wicked pack of cards’ in English as well as an American way at once, we find ourselves in the company of a highly unpredictable creature.

The Modernist Review #40: Modernist and Avant-Garde Performance

2 June 2022

In Modernism and Performance (2007), Olga Taxidou observed that ‘the concept of performance [has] remained stubbornly connected to the critical legacies of the historical avant-garde and stubbornly ignored in canonical readings of literary Modernism’ (8). Indeed the concept of ‘performance’ still presents significant challenges to the theorization, categorization, and periodization of modernist artworks. Yet this provides us with a fertile opportunity to critically reflect upon the ways in which artists and theorists responded to modernity in the early twentieth century, revising our theoretical understanding of the culture and politics of this period by deploying the concept of ‘performance’. The debate concerning how a performative aesthetics or theory accords with or troubles our understanding of the relations between modernism and the avant-garde is thus a question that still warrants critical scrutiny. This is a provocation that animates the short articles published in this issue, with four writers responding in their own way to this question. 

The Modernist Review #38

28 February 2022

There is an obvious satisfaction in the precision of a four-week month, but the brevity of February is nonetheless surprising; modernist time warps abound. And here we are again to present another issue of The Modernist Review. With a rich offering of content this month, our contributors cycle through circadian rhythms, carve up abstract woodcuts, reflect on archiving archives, ruminate on the mouth of James Joyce’s fictional alter-ego and reconcile the anxieties and embarrassment of ageing modernist writers. Though we’ve racked our brains for a theme, the closest we’ve come is a sense of fragmentation, a churning through literary archaeology in order to break something new loose—as evidenced in our cover image this month, Cézanne’s ‘La Carrière de Bibémus’. This is your cue to settle in with a brew.

The Modernist Review #37

31 January 2022

Happy New Year! And welcome to a very exciting year for modernism. 2022 marks the centenary of what has been termed the ‘height of modernism’. 1922 was a momentous year for publishing with T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room all released into the world; it was also the year that the BBC was founded, Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered and Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature film. As such, here at The Modernist Review, we will keep you updated on all the special events and celebrations which are being planned for this year. 

The Modernist Review #36

6 December 2021

Nothing could be more modernist than the way we’ve experienced time in 2021. How is it possible that 2022 is about to hit us faster than Octave Mirbeau’s car, and yet so many of the days have crept by with the mire of stream of consciousness meticulousness? The festive season is finally upon us, though, and we’re once again trying to sum up a year in the life (Gilmore Girls who?) as BAMS PG Reps here at the Modernist Review. Speaking of festivities, things got busy this summer as we enjoyed all of the wonderful talks, interviews and panels at the Festival of Modernism. This online conviviality came a few months after the Postgraduate Training Day, too, finally back after the 2020 hiatus; we loved connecting online with our fellow postgraduates and learning about all things pedagogy from our illustrious exec and other exciting guests. We’re all about to get together this week, too, for another Zoom version of New Work in Modernist Studies. While we wish we could be raising a glass together in person, we’re delighted that postgrads from around the world are able to join us again this year to share their work.

The Modernist Review #35: the Transnational

8 November 2021

In the last year and a half, we have all been reminded that transnationality is not synonymous with travel. The way people and ideas extend beyond national boundaries is about far more than getting on a train, a ship, or a plane (take note, those who flew by private jet to COP26). Zoom talks, virtual art exhibitions, blogs and vlogs let us see, hear, and read things from across the globe with more ease than ever.