Archival excavation and detailed contextualization is becoming increasingly central to scholarship on literary modernism. In recent years, the increased accessibility and dissemination of previously unpublished or little-known documents and texts has led to paradigm-shifting scholarly interventions on a range of canonical authors (Beckett, Eliot, Joyce, Pound and Woolf, among others), neglected topics (the occult, ‘primitivism’, fascism, eugenics, book history, the writing process), and critical methodologies (genetic criticism, intertextuality and historical contexts). This trend will surely only increase as large-scale digitization of archival materials gathers pace and existing copyright restrictions gradually lapse. Modernist Archives is a book series that aims to channel, extend and interrogate these shifts by publishing hitherto unavailable or neglected primary materials for a wider readership. Each volume also provides supporting, contextualizing work by scholars, alongside a critical apparatus of notes and references.
The impetus for Modernist Archives emerges from the editors’ well-established series, Historicizing Modernism. While Historicizing Modernism’s focus is analytical, Modernist Archives will make accessible edited and annotated versions of little-known sources and avant-texts. The monographs and edited collections in Historicizing Modernism have revealed the extent to which contemporary scholars are increasingly turning toward archival and/or unpublished material in order to reconfigure understandings of modernism, in its broader historical rootedness as well as in its compositional methodologies. The present series extends this empirical and genetic focus.
Understanding and defining such primary sources as a broad category extending to letters, diaries, notes, drafts and marginalia, the Modernist Archives series produces volumes that not only unearth significant unpublished material and provide original scholarship on this material, but which also develop cutting-edge editorial presentation techniques that preserve as much information as possible in an economical and accessible way. Also of note is the potential for the series to explore collections pertaining to the relations between literary modernism and other media (radio, television), or important cultural moments. The series thus aims to be an enabling force within modernist scholarship.
It is becoming ever-more difficult to read this extraordinary period of literary experimentation in isolation from contextualizing archival material, sometimes dubbed the ‘grey canon’ of Modernist writing. The difficulty, we suggest, is something like a loss of innocence: once obviously relevant materials are actually accessible, they cannot be ignored. They may challenge received ideas about the limits or definition of modernism; they may upend theoretical frameworks, or encourage fresh theoretical reflection; they may require new methodologies, or revise the very notion of ‘authorship’; likewise, they may require types of knowledge that we never knew we needed – but there they are.
However, while we are champions of historical, archival research, Modernist Archives in no way seeks to influence the results or approaches that scholars in this area will utilize in the exciting times ahead. By commissioning a wide range of innovative and challenging editions, this series aims to once more ‘make strange’ and ‘make new’ our fundamental ideas about modernism.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning