Our new essay series Modernist Moments celebrates the moments that made modernism – meetings, epiphanies, compositions, censorships, concerts, disasters, days, exhibitions, and publications familiar and unfamiliar – finding new meanings and contexts in moments giving rise to all kinds of cultural events.
Below are the essays published to date. Click here to view the ongoing Call for Submissions.
Hostile Environments, Parties, and Observation in Woolf’s “The Years”
Scarlet Clark, Southampton University In the latest essay in the #ModernistMoments series, Scarlet Clark examines the role of auto-ethnography in countering hostile nationalist politics and encouraging collective self-scrutiny. Clark discusses Virginia Woolf’s employment of Mass Observationist theories in The Years (1937) as a literary example of such an invocation. Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937) spans…
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Philip Johnson: Architecture’s “International Style” and Fascist Nationalism
Bill Freind, Rowan University The designs of modernist architect Philip Johnson are prominent landmarks in many city skylines. However, Johnson was a Nazi sympathiser, and the development of his architectural style is inseparable from his fascist politics. In the latest of the #ModernistMoments series, Bill Freind examines this political-aesthetic instability in Johnson’s career. On February…
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“People like that don’t expect sacrifices from us”: Katherine Mansfield’s echoes in the Covid-19 era
Emma Marns, University of Essex In the latest in the #ModernistMoments series, Emma Marns examines the significance of Katherine Mansfield’s work for the present day and the role wealth plays in how we celebrate and grieve. Katherine Mansfield came from an educated and socially prominent family in New Zealand; her father was knighted in 1923.…
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PART 2: “Taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops”: Yeats meets Joyce in poetry and prose
Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway In the second of MSI’s Modernist Moments Essay series, Adrian Paterson unpicks the artistic consequences of James Joyce’s famous first meeting with W.B. Yeats. This is the second of two parts in this essay: the first can be read here. Despite his determination to “damn Russell, damn Yeats, damn Skeffington […]…
Keep readingPART 1: “Taking pleasure in the mere handling of the stops”: Yeats meets Joyce in poetry and prose
Adrian Paterson, NUI Galway In the first of MSI’s Modernist Moments Essay series, Adrian Paterson unpicks the artistic consequences of James Joyce’s famous first meeting with W.B. Yeats. The first part of this 2-part essay marks Yeats’s birthday. (Read Part Two here). James Joyce’s first meeting with William Butler Yeats on the streets of Dublin…
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