ENGL2035:
Modernism

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General resources

Reference

The Oxford Online Reference Collection has searchable online versions of almost 130 reference works, including the Oxford Companions to Music, English Literature, American Literature, and Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, and the Oxford Dictionary of Art...

Xrefer has searchable online versions of (among others) The Oxford Guide to English Literature, The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature, the Penguin and Concise Grove Dictionaries of Music, The Bloomsbury Guide to Art, The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists, The Oxford Dictionary of Art, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and The Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought. This site used to be free, but now it's access by subscription. Trial subscriptions are free. I've put in a recommendation that the University Library subscribe: watch this site for developments. In the meantime, you can take out a trial subscription of your own: all you do is sign up, and you'll immediately be emailed back with a user name and password, valid for a month.
 

Modernism in general

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, edited by Michael Levenson (PN56.M54 C36) has, among other things, essays on poetry, the novel, film, drama, gender, the politics of culture, and the visual arts.   Christopher Butler's Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916 (NX543.B88) is also an important introduction.

• Susan Stanford Friedman's "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism" (from Modernism/modernity 8:3 (2001), 493-513) is about the instability of the terms themselves, and what that implies.
• Andreas Huyssens's "High/Low in an Expanded Field" (from Modernism/modernity 9:3 (2002), 363-374) suggests that the famed split between "high" and "low" cultures which is historically such an important part of modernist criticism should be read as a horizontal rather a vertical distinction. That is, it doesn't describe the opposition of a dominant culture and a popular culture at war with each other, so much as a distinction between "mass" and "niche" marketing which operates across and within all cultural productions.

See also Eric Rothstein's "Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity", Modern Language Quarterly 51:2 (2000), 359-94, for another version of the heterogeneity and complexity of the modern. For a sense of some of the ways in which the concept of modernism has been and is used, see Astradur Eysteinsson's The Concept of Modernism (PN56.M54 E97 1990)

Two collections of writings which have been highly influential in the past are Modernism, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (PN56.M54 M6), and The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson (PN49.E5). They date from the 1960s and 1970s, and view modernism as primarily a European and aesthetic phenomenon. Two other influential shorter pieces from this time are Harry Levin's "What Was Modernism?", in his Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature (PN871.L4), and Maurice Beebe's later response, "What Modernism Was" (Journal of Modern Literature 3 (July 1974), 1065-84.  Raymond Williams's 1989 "When Was Modernism?", from his The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (NX456.5.M64 W5) refers to both of these.

On women and modernism, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's classic three-volume series, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (PR116.G5 1988-), Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (PS151.B46 1986), Marianne DeKoven's Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (PR888.M63D45 1991), and Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity (HQ1190 .F417 1995). 

For all that this course focuses on that moment of European-North American modernism between roughly 1900 and 1930, it would be simply incorrect to see modernism and modernity as essentially European.  Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (HM101.A644 1996) is on non-Western modernities rather than literary modernisms; see also Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (CB235.G55 1993).  Houston A. Baker Jr's Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (PS153.N5B25 1987) and James De Jongh's Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination (PS153.N5 D4 1990) examine the extraordinary boom in African-American writing, music and art which was focused on New York's Harlem in the 1920s and 1930. 
 

Literature

• your copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature is not only a source of poetry by Yeats, Eliot and Auden. It has a wealth of information about other writers on this course, and introductory material on the twentieth century (including a survey and timeline of the main historical events you'll find reflected in the texts we're looking at).
• the Anthology comes with an audio CD which has examples of Yeats and Auden, among others, reading from their own work.
• it also comes with a website, at www.wwnorton.com/nael/, which includes a range of resources on a number of topics (Imperialism to postcolonialism, Technology and warfare, The meaning of the millenium, and Twentieth-century Irish writers), and an Archive of supplementary texts.

Some recommendations, among many:

• Randall Stevenson's collection, Modernist Fiction, has essays on modernism and modernity, space and time, and the graphic arts (PR888.M63 S74)
• Michael H Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism: a study of English literary doctrine, 1908-1922 (PR478.M6 L4)
• Ricardo J. Quinones's Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (PN56.M54 Q56) and Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones and Albert Wachtel's collection, Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives (NX454.5.M63M6 1986)
• Peter Faulkner's study, Modernism (PN701.F36) and his collection of key documents from the time, A Modernist Reader: Modernism in England, 1910-1930 (PR478.M6 M636).
• Steve Giles's collection Theorizing Modernism: Essays in Critical Theory (PN56.M54 T44)
• Peter Ackroyd's Notes for a New Culture: An Essay on Modernism (PN56.M54 A3)
• Terry Eagleton's Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (PR474.E2 1970) looks at the relationship of modernism to cultural displacement. Why is it that so many of the great figures of English modernism have a complex and displaced relationship to the dominant English culture? Shaw, Yeats and Joyce were Irish, and spent most of their lives out of Ireland; Conrad was Polish, and wrote in an English which was a fourth language learnt as an adult; Eliot was an American who became more English than the English; Auden went the other way, and became an American citizen; Stein and Pound lived most of their lives outside the US...

Irish literary modernism is of enormous and obvious importance. The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (PR8706.O88 1996), edited by Robert Welch with Bruce Stewart and Vivien Mercer's Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders (PR8753.M47 1994) have material on Shaw, Yeats and Joyce, as well as on the Irish Revival. W. R. Rodgers's Irish Literary Portraits (PR8727.R6 1973) is a series of transcripts of radio programs the author made about, among others, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, AE (George Russell, whom we meet in the library chapter of Ulysses), George Moore (whose lyrics are frequently mentioned in Ulysses), Synge, Shaw, Oliver St. John Gogarty (the original of Ulysses's Buck Mulligan). Hugh Kenner's A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers (PR8750.K46 1983), with chapters on Yeats and Joyce, is not to be missed.

And while we're on Kenner, one of the great stylists of late twentieth century criticism, see also his A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (PR478.M6K4 1988) and A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (PS221.K4 1975).

The BUBL Information Service at Strathclyde University in Glasgow has a large and invaluable set of annotated links in all areas of the humanities. In particular, check out their page on Language, Literature and Culture, and within that, the page on English Literature from 1871, which has a number of links of interest to us in this course. A really thorough and well-organised site.

LiteraryHistory.com is a similar annotated site. See in particular its Web Guide to Twentieth-Century Authors.

The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 is a society for "the study of literature and culture between the wars which provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussion and research of overlooked texts, understudied authors and new approaches to traditionally canonical texts. We also encourage fresh examination of art, society and culture illuminating the interwar period." It has a rich website, with an annotated list of links.

Paula Di Tallo's Literary Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900-1940 includes features and listings on Bloomsbury.

The Modernist Journals Project at Brown University aims to provide "fully-searchable online editions of the English-language journals and magazines that were important in shaping those modes of literature and art that came to be called modernist." So far, it has been focusing on The New Age: "Edited by A.R. Orage and published in London between 1907 and 1922, The New Age was a weekly review of politics, arts, and letters. It played a key role in the dissemination and contestation of the radical social and aesthetic changes we now describe as modernist. Among its most famous contributors are numbered Ezra Pound, Katherine Mansfield, G.B. Shaw, and G.K. Chesterton. When completed the archive will span all 30 volumes which contain over 13,500 folio-sized pages."

Other courses in literary Modernism with resources and notes on the Web include:

• Steven Connor's course in English Literary Modernism, Birkbeck, University of London (in the heart of Bloomsbury, no less).
• John Lye's Modern Fiction course pages at Brock University in Canada, including pages on Some attributes of modernist literature and Some cultural forces driving literary modernism.

Jack Lynch, at Rutgers University, has a set of links to online literary resources, including Twentieth-century British and Irish.

The graphic arts

Mark Harden's Artchive at the University of Texas has a large number of fine art images of the period, as well as a wealth of critical and introductory material.

Chris Witcombe's Art and Artists (Department of Art History, Sweet Briar College, Virginia) is part of an online exhibition "exploring the perception of art and the identity of the artist through history and in contemporary society," and includes a long hyperlinked essay on various aspects of modernism in the fine arts (The Roots of Modernism, Modernism and Art for Art's Sake, Modernism and Politics, Modernism and Postmodernism, Modernism and the End of Art).

For art images and commentary, see also the modernism sites at Boston College Honours Program: Art History and Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Music

There is a good chronology juxtaposing landmarks of twentieth-century music with the other arts and other events from world history on the Music Department site at Emory University.

The Internet Public Library has a number of pages on twentieth-century music history, with links and a number of audio files. Similar information and audio files are available from the Composers Online site (Norton-Sony Classical Essentials of Music), with material on figures such as Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartok, Ives, Prokofiev, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and Debussy. There is a fairly large collection of links to twentieth-century art music sites on the Charles K. Moss Piano Studio site, many with audio files.

And a miscellany of pages: those extraordinary modernists Charles Ives, Edgar Varese, Webern, and an essay on Stravinsky by Philip Glass ... 

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