From the Editors

The new cluster on Print Plus, "Modernism and Elegy," published on May 13, seems remarkably timely. "These essays have been written in an extended moment of accumulating political and humanitarian crises, as violence looms as the dominant social grammar in larger public spheres," writes the editor of the cluster, David Sherman. A whole variety of aspects of what contributor Eve Sorum calls "modernism's elegiac attention" are examined in the essays. They cover topics from the economics of...

In the January 2026 issue, two essays explore James Agee and Walker Evans’s notable book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book presents an ironic reversal of the Biblical line, which starts, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Agee’s text and Evan’s photographs instead describe and document poor, unknown sharecroppers, those farthest from being “famous,” who were worthy of praise for their quiet lives of dignity and hard work. Perhaps this mode of questioning...

The new year started wonderfully for Modernism/modernity when the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) announced on 9 January that we had won their annual Best Digital Feature Award for the Print Plus cluster on Hope Mirrlees’s Paris. The CELJ's announcement celebrates the cluster's use of the affordances of the journal’s digital platform to present a multimedia, multiperspectival dossier on the poem and its relation to the city. As Melanie Micir and Anna Preus write in their...

The annual holiday season in India is in October/November when the festival of Diwali is celebrated across the country. In the state of Maharashtra, among the Marathi speaking communities, for over a century now there is a unique tradition of this festival being celebrated with the reading of the “ diwāḷī aṅka” (the Diwali issue) of various periodicals, both high literary and middlebrow. Along with the excitement of new clothes, rich food, gifts, and family gatherings, in this Marathi culture...

I was delighted to join Modernism/modernity as co-editor in July, and have already learned a very great deal in a very short time. One thing I have learned is that you miss out on much excitement if you don’t visit Print Plus every week. I’ve always admired the platform’s innovative format and content, but now, by exploring back through the whole archive, I have realized the full richness of what is published there and the full breadth of opportunities that it offers for debate and collaboration...

Unfortunately, we are never far from wars, and the essays and images in Modernism/modernity have been reflecting on that repeatedly in the past few issues and on Print Plus. The cover of the January issue again features a war image, not obviously from any of the current ones. The abandonment of ethics during such embattled times is at the center of Kipling’s story and perhaps is the dominant story of our times. This issue is out in print a while ago and some readers are already enjoying the...

The M/m editorial team is delighted to announce the publication of issue 31.4. Our slate of print articles… Zakir Paul revisits the representation of love in Proust. Tamlyn Avery examines masculinity, anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s typewriter. Mia Alafaireet elucidates Jean Toomer’s and Nella Larsen’s modernizations of rootwork. Ross Cole argues that Fluxus was an experiment in utopia. Fangdai Chen theorizes Can Xue’s ecosophy of time. Julian Breandán Dean redefines authorship in W. B. Yeats’s...

We have a timely cover for the 31.3 issue. The questions of choice, propaganda, and freedom surround us today, as they did during the Second World War, when the periodical Choix was published (read about its fascinating history in the essay by Guy Woodward and James Smith). Equally timely are questions about reproduction, motherhood, and queerness, all of which appear in the two essays on Radclyffe Hall’s work (by Hannah Roche and Elizabeth Blake). You can acccess one of these online as the...

Leading off this issue, Kristin Rivero revisits the role of mediation in Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and anthropological research. On the related topic of mediation, Elvin Meng considers media affinities between interwar psychical research and Vladimir Nabokov’s idiosyncratic conception of narrative fiction as a spatial (rather than temporal) medium. Allan Antliff explores Ananda Coomaraswamy’s anarchist championing of Walt Whitman’s sexual libertarianism before and during World War I and the...

The first issue of volume thirty one of Modernism/modernity is here and the range and depth of the essays in the new issue is noteworthy. The issue will be in your mailbox soon, and one way to “tame the wild profusion of existing things” in the journal here (to steal Foucault’s phrase) would be to say that you will see two essays on theater, two on the varied analyses of film and its histories, two widely different essays on the Harlem renaissance, one on the materialist politics of the English...

In the coming weeks, we will be delighted to promote Modernism/modernity 30.4—which arrived in mailboxes a little while ago—on Print Plus. Stay tuned for our teaser materials: next week, Michal Peles-Almagor’s review of Alison Schachter’s Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939; the week after, Kaitlin Staudt’s “‘ Move Forward and Ascend!’: Temporality and the Politics of Form in Turkish Modernist Literature.” —Stephen Ross

Happy new year from the Rutgers Desk of Modernism/modernity! As the new co-editor of Modernism/modernity, it is a privilege to introduce the 30.3 September issue, despite a delay of a few months. There have been changes at the journal. After successfully shepherding the journal through the tumultuous years of Covid, Anne Fernald stepped down as senior co-editor of the journal but she continues to be a trusted sounding board. I also want to thank Alys Moody for her inspiring work as co-editor for...

The M/m editorial team is delighted to announce, after significant delay, the publication of issue 30.2! Stephanie Lebas Huber leads off the issue by making the case for the “filmic modernism” of Dutch Neorealist painting (and a painting by Carel Willink, featured in the article, adorns our cover). We then turn to Hilary Whitham Sánchez’s analysis of blackface and the dubious mobilization of alterity at the Soirée Dada in Paris on June 10, 1921. Drawing on recent work in disability media studies...

This editor’s note brings with it the belated January 2023 issue to your mailbox, library shelves, and databases. With it, I write my last note to you as co-editor of this journal. The January 2023 issue is an exciting one. Our gorgeous cover offers a hint of the pleasures of Jack Quin’s article inside. Beyond Quin’s piece on Edward McKnight Kaufer’s work illustrating T. S. Eliot—the second recent cover on modernist illustration—this volume is full of poetry. In addition to Eliot, we have Sylvia...

The last issue of volume twenty-nine of Modernism/modernity is ready and wending its way to your inboxes as I write. As always, we are sharing with you on this site, a teaser article—Jon Najarian’s fascinating and richly illustrated consideration of Rockwell Kent’s art and illustrations—and a review as well, Pardis Dabashi’s assessment of Sarah Keller’s Anxious Cinephila. We hope that these temptations tide you over as you watch your mailbox for the print issue. And, if your subscription (and...

Happy New Year! COVID time being what it is, we get to celebrate the beginning of a new school year (the September 2022 issue, 29.3) and the beginning of a new calendar year (2023) simultaneously. We editors are crawling ourselves out of our pandemic delays, determined to gradually bring the issue date and the calendar back into sync. 2022 was a major centenary for modernism. One of the most exciting offerings in this last cycle is Andrew Frayn’s cluster, “Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries...

Greetings! This editor’s note marks the publication of a new print issue of Modernism/modernity and thus a new cycle here on Print+. Issue 29.2 is—or soon will be—in your mailboxes and it’s another exciting collection of the best of modernist studies today. With every issue we share one article and one review from the print journal online, so you’ve already had the chance to read Shaj Mathew’s examination of the distinct practices of Persian flânerie of two figures, the fokoli and the...

In More Tales of the City (1980), Armistead Maupin introduced us to Mona’s law: “you can have a hot job, a hot lover and a hot apartment, but you can't have all three at the same time.” In this long, brutal covid spring, I have been living a sad version of Mona’s law. Putting together a journal is not about hotness, but it does help to have three things: timeliness, editorial precision, and good relationships with the editorial team. This winter, as the wheels fell off the bus, we (I) chose...

A Tik-Toker I like posts short videos of himself walking and talking. They’re silly and soothing in that strange way of the form. He lives in Minnesota, and recently he posted to say that he does not play any winter sports, but that what he likes to do in winter is just to trudge. That word arrested me. Trudge. That’s what this long, deep winter has been: a trudge. So here we are, welcoming the November issue into the world in February. It’s a terrific issue, but it has been a trudge. I can feel...

Greetings from the Fordham office of Modernism/modernity! This is my first editor’s note to you in my new role as Print+ editor. After five years of heroic service, Christopher Bush has stepped down as co-editor of the journal. As you look at Print+ and read the print issue itself and marvel at the range and diversity of articles we now publish, you can thank Chris for his extraordinary gifts. He brought expertise in and commitment to global modernisms as well as commitment to being a generous...