Future Pasts

In October of 1905, a defamation trial that would have a lasting impact on the development of literary modernism took place in the sleepy German harbor town of Lübeck. A lawyer with the slightly preposterous name “Ritter aus Tondern” was suing his cousin, the regionalist writer Johannes Valentin Dose, claiming that Dose had maliciously portrayed him as an alcoholic and an adulterer in the 1904 novel The Milksop ( Der Muttersohn)

Translated by Tobias Boes. Read his critical introduction here. The other day I was much abused in Lübeck, my hometown. My novel Buddenbrooks became the subject of a long and heated debate in a trial concerning the freedom of the press that was reminiscent of the Bilse affair. [1] It was a noisy matter, the particulars of which need not concern us very much. My novel has become an integral part of every public outrage about art, because its characters are partially based on living people, and...

On January 6, 1925, Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote a letter to Langston Hughes from Paris. It's a long letter—over a thousand words—and it balances advice with appeal in ways that capture the intimacy and strength of their friendship. Her first novel, There is Confusion, had been published in 1924 and Fauset was on leave from her position as the literary editor of The Crisis, studying and writing in Paris. She had planned the trip as a celebration: finally, at forty-two, she had published a novel...

Melissa Homestead and Emily Rau have spent the past decade collaborating with Andrew Jewell and a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create the Complete Letters of Willa Cather. With 2,800 letters published at the time of this writing, the Complete Letters is an ongoing digital scholarly edition of all known letters written by American author Willa Cather. The edition features full transcriptions of the letters, detailed annotations, high-quality scans, and sophisticated searching and...

By Joel Hawkes; Madison Robinson; Vanessa Funk; Katie Croudy-Hollott; Ella McQueen-Denz; Samantha Burt; Maya Smith; Marcus Tisot; Sam Oosterman; Alistair Corp; Devan Gillard; Emily Coldwell; Sean Godwin; Noah Brandon; Thomas Nienhuis In the fall of 2019, the Mary Butts Letters Project began seeking collaborators to help track, transcribe, digitize, and critique the letters of lesser-known British modernist author, Mary Butts (1890–1937). Scholars, librarians, undergraduate and graduate students...

James Joyce was an avid postcard writer at a time when the western world’s fascination with postcards was at its peak. We know of nearly a thousand postcards that he sent, dating from a Christmas card to Frances Sheehy Skeffington in 1898 to a card to his brother Stanislaus in early January 1941 announcing his arrival in Zurich only a week before his death. Postal correspondence is a fundamental point of reference in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, their texts replete with various postal media...

The past year’s global pandemic may be remembered as a time of boundaries: six foot or two-meter personal bubbles, restricted entry to and movement within public spaces, and the once-steady stream of international travellers reduced to a trickle. In many ways, this new reality further emphasized the concentrically fortified position occupied by the Special Collections archives housed in the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library. How does a department located in the basement of a locked...

This blog post is about an institution of modernism that is quite different from the ones that Lawrence Rainey examined in his groundbreaking book, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. His subjects were patronage, collecting, speculation, investment, little magazines, and deluxe editions—institutions that marked modernism’s “tactical retreat” into a “counter-space securing a momentary respite from a public realm increasingly degraded [by mass media and market values]...

Almost as soon as they began corresponding in 1930, T. S. Eliot told Emily Hale that he treasured her letters—not just the words, but the paper itself: “I cannot bear to be separated from your letters at present, not so much for need to refer to the contents, some of which I repeat to myself often during the day and night, but for the touch of the paper and sight of the writing.”

In Towards a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes of feminism as “a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility.” [1] From this tenuous archive, I seek an affirming inclusion in modernist studies: Urmila Seshagiri explains in a recent Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster that “the process of canon-formation––and deformation, and reformation––constitutes the simplest and yet the most complex act in feminist scholarship...

In the opening days of 2020 modernists may have rejoiced over two significant events. On January 1, works published in 1924 entered the public domain. On January 2, Princeton University opened to the public the recently uncrated 1,131 letters from T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale. In these two opposing examples of the modernist archive 2020 stages a central tension between diffusion and enclosure, between the dream of a universal library—which paradoxically and simultaneously enacts a “library without...

Southern Vancouver Island’s 100-kilometer-long BC-14 Highway slides predominantly east to west along British Columbia coastline through traditional Coast Salish territory. Beneath the old-growth trees that are the marrow of this lush ecosystem is the small, unincorporated community of Shirley, and the Cook Kettle Press (fig.1). Though small, the press is a regional hotbed of letterpress activity. As a print shop, it provides opportunities for artists to use its space and equipment. It also acts...

Located in Special Collections at the University of Victoria is a little studied folder that contains fifty-one letters written by the British modernist author Mary Butts (1890-1937) to friend and fellow British modernist Douglas Goldring (1887-1960), with some few to Goldring’s second wife, Malin.

Alice Walker began 1982 with Virginia Woolf. Walker would spend the year recording events, plans, and phone numbers in spiral-bound pages of a calendar she had acquired filled with photographs of Woolf and her contemporaries. As Walker crossed out days, her purple ink seeped through one page, partly obscuring Woolf’s photograph on the verso. [1] The lines meet Woolf’s likeness, a purple X just passing her eye. The range of inks that Walker used throughout her calendar suggest that this was chance, but the ink also recalls Walker’s novel published the same year, The Color Purple; likely unbeknownst to Walker, it was also a color in which Woolf preferred to write. [2] It is the materiality of circumstance that makes this artifact a vestige of mass culture, everyday life, and artistic creation.

Using the modernist archive requires finding it first. The modernist archive does not live in one collection at one repository, such as a single university special collections department or one pivotal private library. Rather, the modernist archive is a term used to conceptualize a networked set of collections across many repositories in the United States or abroad. [1] The fact that the modernist archive is dispersed rather than centralized is critical because each institution’s holdings are more or less discoverable based on local application of user experience (UX) principles. Weave, a Journal of Library User Experience defines UX as employing a variety of methodologies to inform improvements to physical and digital space so that the user can easily access collections and services. Th US Department of Health and Human Services provides an overview of UX basics that, adapted for libraries and archives, would require repositories to identify their users, what they want, what skills they have, and which they don’t. According to Coral Sheldon-Hess, when UX is properly implemented, users of all levels of expertise can more easily access what they need. When UX is ignored or poorly applied, users are more likely to perpetuate pre-existing archival silences as well as less likely to have successful searches.

The past twenty years, along with the promises and perils of the digital turn, have seen a robust engagement with the modernist archive. One can map nearly point for point the rise of the New Modernist Studies and the Modernist Studies Association with the rise of digital resources that have reenergized the field: the Modernist Journals Project (1997), the Modernist Magazines Project (2006), the Blue Mountain Project (2012), the Modernist Versions Project (2012), ModNets (2013), and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (2013), among others, have all contributed to the “ expansive” forces enlarging the universe of material modernity.