Resilient Modernisms

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 mourning to the politics of memorialization, as well as formal strategies from vocal performance to the crossing out of words. I highly recommend turning to this cluster to discover, in Sherman's words, "elegy as a reparative force for our struggles, an imaginative resource for resilience in precarity and for binding generations across time".

The April 2026 print issue of Modernism/modernity comes hot on the heels of the January issue, as we catch up with the calendar. Very many thanks and congratulations to all those at the journal and at JHUP who have worked so hard to make this possible, and especial thanks to our extremely committed and talented Managing Editors.

The April issue has a particular focus on questions of mediation: three of the essays center on print culture, the marketplace, and the literary field, while a fourth considers the literary mediation of modern music. Look out for our print teasers, which will appear in open-access form on Print Plus over the coming fortnight. These are Brian Hurley's article "Conservatism as Modernism: The Aesthetics of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s In Praise of Shadows in Global Context" and a review of an important new book on poetry in the American university.

—Faye Hammill