essay about modernism

Modernism in Literature: Definition, Characteristics, Examples, and More

The Industrial Revolution – and the rapid industrialization that followed it – marked the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But new technologies didn't only change the ways of manufacturing. They also made writers reconsider their attitudes toward the established norms of the craft. Out of this cultural shift, one of the most compelling literary movements was born: modernism.

Modernism in literature is the act of rebellion against the norms on the writers' part. They refused to conform to the rules any longer. Instead, they sought new ways to convey ideas and new forms of expressing themselves. In their opinion, the old ways of writing simply couldn't reflect the rapid social change and a new generation born out of it.

Today, let's take a deep dive into modernist work. What is modernism in literature? What are the key characteristics that set it apart from other literary movements? What modernism in literature examples reflect the movement's qualities the best? And who can represent modernism in American literature?

You'll find the answers to all of these questions – and more – below!

What is Modernism in Literature

As any physic helper would advise you to approach a subject, let's start with one crucial question: ‘What is modernism?’

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term 'modernism' as a practice characteristic of modern times and seeking to find original means of expressing oneself. Modernism was a movement not just in literature but also in arts, philosophy, and cinema.

As for the modernism in literature definition, the same dictionary describes it as a conscious break from the past and a search for new ways of expressing oneself. But its spirit is best reflected in a motto coined by Ezra Pound: ‘Make it new.’

The movement's main characteristics are individualism, experimentation, and absurdity. Its other characteristics include symbolism and formalism.

What about the history behind the modernism literary movement? Started by the Industrial Revolution and fueled by urbanization, the movement originated in Europe, with Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Robert Musil as early modernists. It was also heavily influenced by the horrors of World War I: it shattered the preconceived notions about society for many modernists.

The movement first developed in American literature in the early 20th century modernism. Apart from the Industrial Revolution, it was influenced by Prohibition and the Great Depression and fueled by a sense of disillusionment and loss. William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings are among the prominent American modernists.

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5 Key Characteristics of Modernist Literature

Now that we've covered the modernist genre definition let's examine why certain works are considered modernist more closely. In other words, what sets modernist works apart from their counterparts?

The key to unraveling the answer lies in the key characteristics of modernism. We'll define five of them that matter the most:

• individualism;
• experimentation;

Below you'll find a short description of each characteristic, along with examples.

Individualism

Individualism is one of the key elements of modernism. It postulates that an individual's experiences, opinions, and emotions are more fascinating than the events in a society as a whole.

So, modernism is focused on describing the subjective reality of one person rather than societal changes or historical events on an impersonal scale.

A typical protagonist in modernist literature is just trying to survive and adapt to the changing world. Presented with obstacles, the protagonist sometimes perseveres – but not always. You can find compelling examples of individualism in the works of Ernest Hemingway.

The fascination with subjective reality also led to the development of unreliable narrators in fiction. You can find great examples of the Madman type of unreliable narrator in Franz Kafka's works.

Experimentation

Literary modernism rejected many of the established writing norms, paving the way for experimentation with the form. Modernist poets best exemplify it: they revolted against the accepted rules of rhyme and rhythm, thus inventing free verse (vers libre) poetry.

Modernism in literature also led to experiments with prose. Combined with individualism as another core characteristic, writers developed a narrative device called ‘stream of consciousness.’

This device is meant to reflect how the characters think, even though it may be inconsistent, chaotic, or illogical. This new technique allowed writers to craft novels that read like the protagonist's stream of consciousness.

Among authors, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are the best examples of this characteristic in action. As for poetry, T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's bodies of work are a must-read.

During the modernist period, authors watched the world as they knew it crumbled around them. Two World Wars, the rise of capitalism, and fast-paced globalization all undermined authors' beliefs and opinions about humankind.

This led many of them to consider the world absurd and reflect it in their writing. From the setup to the plot development, modernist works based on this characteristic take surrealist or fantastical turns. They can also be described as bizarre or nonsensical.

The rise of absurdism also led to the invention of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pioneered by European playwrights, it revolves around the idea that human existence has no grand purpose or meaning. Absurdist plays don't seek to communicate effectively; instead, they include irrational speech.

There's no better example of absurdity in literary modernism than Franz Kafka's works, especially The Metamorphosis .

While symbolism in literature existed before the late 19th century, it quickly became one of the central characteristics of modernism in literature. Modernist authors and poets also reimagined symbolism. Where their predecessors left little unsaid, modernists preferred to leave plenty of blanks for the reader's imagination to fill.

That, however, doesn't mean there was no attention to details. On the contrary, modernist authors infused every layer of their work of fiction with symbolic details. The difference is that their way of using symbolism in writing allowed for several interpretations, all simultaneously possible and valid.

As a characteristic, symbolism in the modernism literary movement is most prominent in the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.

As mentioned above, 20th-century modernism was defined by the search for radically new forms of expression. Creativity fueled this search, paving the way for the emergence of original forms.

In modern period literature, the writing process was no longer perceived as a laborious craft. Modernists treated it as a creative process instead. In some cases, the originality of the form was deemed more important than the substance.

Take the works of E. E. Cummings as an example here. Instead of conventionally putting the poetry on the page, he spread out separate words and phrases on the page as if it were a canvas and his poem – the paint.

Other examples of formalism include the use of invented or foreign words and phrases and unconventional structure – or its absence.

4 Recurring Themes in Modernist Literature

As an act of rebellion against conventional norms of the craft, literature of the modernist period touched on various themes that could best convey the author's opinion on the world around them.

Due to their variety, listing all of them here would be impossible. However, some of the modernist themes are more prominent than others. Below you can find four of them, along with examples.

These themes also represent a great starting point for essay writing. Whether you want to do it yourself or turn to a write my essay service, you can choose one of them as your topic for exploration.

Transformation

Modernism is practically inseparable from the theme of transformation. Be it the transformation of form, expression, or norm; the movement is based on the idea of radical change. If you want to see this theme in action, start with Ezra Pound's manifesto, Make It New .

As a theme, transformation also means a change in beliefs, opinions, and identities, a symbolic rebirth. Fueled by loss, destruction, and the war experiences of the authors caused fragmentation, this aspect of the theme.

You can find examples of transformation as a theme in Franz Kafka's absurdist The Metamorphosis . As for modernism in American literature, you can identify this theme in the works of Ernest Hemingway ( The Sun Also Rises ) and William Faulkner ( Barn Burning ).

Mythological Tales

Unlike their predecessors, modernist artists and authors didn't just refer to the Greek-Latin and other myths. Instead, they reimagined those tales in a new, modern world setting. Used as symbols or characters central to the plot, mythological tales and figures define modernism in literature.

As for examples of myths in the works of the modernist period, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is one of the best. In this poem, T. S. Eliot reimagines the myths of the Fisher King and uses Tarot cards and the Holy Grail as symbols. T. S. Eliot also used Greek and Latin phrases to enhance the poem's meaning.

Other examples of myths in modernist works include James Joyce's Ulysses, which alludes to Homer's Odysseus, and Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which reimagines the Greek myth of Electra.

Loss, Separation, and Destruction

The cruel experiences of war are the major reason this theme became prevalent in modern-period literature. These experiences were infused with loss, separation, and destruction, and many authors lived through them. So, these experiences were reflected in the works of the post-war times.

Loss, destruction, and separation were also universal experiences that many went through simultaneously and shared their consequences. That's why the modernist works were also well-accepted by the readers.

You can find more than one instance of this theme in the works of Virginia Woolf, a British author and a pioneer of modernism in English literature. In American literature, the best examples of these themes are present in the works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and T. S. Eliot.

Love and Sensuality

As one of the characteristics of modernism, individualism drove the theme of love and sensualism in the literature of this period. However, these themes didn't escape the disillusionment and demystification: they were reimagined somewhat cynically (or, some might say, realistically).

In modernist works, love isn't described as a magical feeling that can move mountains. Instead, the tone of love stories becomes grimmer and more fatalistic, and it serves as more proof of the social fabric corroding away.

In addition to love and sensuality, modernist works were marked by discussions of and reflections on sexuality, gender roles, and feminism. Some prominent authors in this regard are Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence.

For love and sensuality modernism examples in literature, read and analyze F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls . D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is also a great example here as it examines the theme from the perspective of emancipation and gender equality.

10 Notable Modernist Writers in the Literary Movement

Need to write a literature review about one instance of modern-period literature? Start your search for the subject by checking out the works of the following ten authors and poets!

These creators are among the most prominent modernists that defined the movement, developed its qualities, and experimented with its main characteristics. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and more age-defining creators are among the notable modernist writers and poets below.

Virginia Woolf

A pioneer in modernism in English literature, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) and her body of work defined the movement. For one, she was one of the first authors to start using the stream-of-consciousness narrative device to display the complex inner world of her characters.

Woolf also infused her works with feminist themes. She was one of the three female authors of the period to explore ‘the given,’ according to Simone de Beauvoir. However, other themes of the time – the war, destruction, and the role of social class – are also central to her work.

Virginia Woolf's most prominent works are Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). You may also enjoy reading The Waves (1931) and The Years (1936).

Further reading on Virginia Woolf's life and body of work includes J. Goldman's The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press) and V. Curtis's Virginia Woolf's Women (University of Wisconsin Press).

James Joyce

An Irish poet and novelist, James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known for his Ulysses novel (1922). He belonged to the group of creators who explored new styles and forms of expression. His approach to writing was detail-oriented, infused with internal monologues, and overturning traditional plot and character devices.

James Joyce focused on modernist themes such as destruction, social class, enlightenment, and identity. However, his works mostly focused on slice-of-life tales told in new, creative ways.

Apart from Ulysses , James Joyce's major works include a collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Finnegans Wake (1939). The latter pushed the use of stream of consciousness to its extreme.

As for poetry, James Joyce is best known for his three collections of poems, with Chamber Music (1907) being the most acclaimed one.

Gertrude Stein

Often referred to as the mother of modernism, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is one of the most important American modernist writers. Like the two previous authors on this list, Stein experimented with stream of consciousness and other narrative devices. Her writing style, in turn, can be described as distinctive and playful.

Stein's first novel, Q.E.D. Q.E.D. (1903), was one of the first to explore a coming-out story. A lesbian herself, Stein focused on sexuality in some of her works (case in point: Fernhurst (1904)) – an unprecedented choice for the time.

As a poet, Stein is best known for Tender Buttons (1914), a collection of poems that capture the routine of mundane life. In the publication, Stein experiments with sounds and fragmented words to convey an image to the reader.

Stein's most prominent prose works of fiction include The Making of Americans (1902–1911) and Three Lives (1905–1906).

William Faulkner

Look no further if you're looking for modernism examples in literature that explore symbolism and multiple perspectives. William Faulkner (1897-1962), an American novel and short story writer, belongs to the group of celebrated modernist authors who focused on these themes.

A Nobel prize laureate and a Mississippi native, Faulkner is famous for his Southern Gothic stories taking place in the made-up Yoknapatawpha County. Besides symbolism and multiple-perspective storytelling, Faulkner also explored the unreliable narrator and nonlinear storytelling devices.

Faulkner's most prominent novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), The Wild Palms (1939), and Light in August (1932). He was also working as a Hollywood screenwriter between 1932 and 1954. During that time, he crafted screenplays for films like Flesh (1932), To Have and Have Not (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946).

An expatriate American poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is one of the most prominent figures of 20th-century modernism. He was unrivaled in using free-verse poetry and allusions in his body of work.

Pound also excelled in using imagism in his works – and he was one of the first poets to do so. This makes his poems vivid and powerful for the reader's imagination.

You've already seen several references to Ezra Pound's Make It New (1934), a manifesto for the modernist movement. However, that's not the cornerstone of Pound's literary legacy. To delve into it, read The Cantos (c. 1917–1962), an epic 800-page poem, In a Station of the Metro (1913), or The Return (1917).

Franz Kafka

An Austrian-Hungarian author, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of the most prominent modernist writers in the German-speaking world. Kafka explored the themes of transformation, existentialism, and alienation in his works.

Kafka focused his craft on absurdist, surrealistic, and fantastical plots, as best exemplified by The Metamorphosis (1915). In this short story, a salesman has turned into a large insect (commonly interpreted as a cockroach).

Kafka's body of work led to the birth of a new term – Kafkaesque. This term is the easiest way to describe the author's style: it's marked by absurdist, disorienting complexity and a surreal distortion of reality.

The Metamorphosis isn't the only work of Kafka worth reading. His best novels include The Castle (1926) and The Trial (1925).

E. Cummings

E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) was one of the most productive American poets and authors of modern-period literature. Over his lifetime, he crafted around 2,900 poems, four plays, and two autobiographical novels over his lifetime.

Cummings' poetry style is best defined as idiosyncratic. The poet disregarded not just the established norms of rhyme and rhythm. He went further and refused to abide by the syntax, punctuation, and spelling rules. His poems often employ lowercase spelling as a form of expression.

If you want to get acquainted with the best works of E. E. Cummings, we suggest you start with may I feel said he (1935) and [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] (1952). His books of poetry – 1 × 1 (1944) and No Thanks (1935) – are also a worthy read and a great introduction to the poet's unique style.

H. Lawrence

Another prominent English novelist and poet, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), didn't earn himself a worthy place in the modernism literary movement during his lifetime. Only after his death did his works earn him the recognition he deserved.

His works dealt with themes of sexuality, industrialization, modernity, and spontaneity. Exploring sexuality – especially from the standpoint of female characters – earned D. H. Lawrence many enemies. As a result of public persecution and censorship trials, D. H. Lawrence spent years in voluntary exile.

D. H. Lawrence's most prominent novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920), The Rainbow (1915), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). However, the latter was deemed too scandalous to be published in Great Britain until 1960, after D. H. Lawrence's death.

Ernest Hemingway

An American novelist and short-story writer, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) isn't just considered one of the most influential creators of the modernist period but American literature as a whole. He is famous for his unique style of prose. It's economical, straightforward, and matter-of-fact, with few descriptive adjectives in the text.

Having spent years as a journalist on the battlefield, Hemingway experienced the horrors of war first-hand. This influenced the themes he explored in his writing: his novels reflected war, love, destruction, loss, and disillusionment.

Hemingway's bibliography consists of seven novels and six collections of short stories. His most prominent works include For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), based on his experiences of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is one of the iconic feminist modernist writers who specialized in crafting short stories. A New Zealand native, Mansfield reflected on anxiety, identity, existentialism, and sexuality in her works.

Mansfield's style draws inspiration from visual arts and psychoanalysis. This made for vivid descriptions in her prose and complex characters. Her short stories often have a twist in the form of a revelation or an epiphany about the protagonist.

If you want to get acquainted with Mansfield's literary style, we recommend you start with short stories like The Garden Party (1922) and Daughters of the Late Colonel (1920). Other great but lesser-known examples of her short stories include Something Childish But Very Natural (1914), Bliss (1918), and Sun and Moon (1920).

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Modernism Lab

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The Modernism Lab

The Modernism Lab, a virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism, was compiled from 2005 to 2012. Through this project, we hoped, by a process of shared investigation, to describe the emergence of modernism out of a background of social, political, and existential ferment. The project covered the period 1914-1926, from the outbreak of the first world war to the full-blown emergence of English modernism. The Lab has supported undergraduate classes on Modern Poetry, the Modern British Novel, Modernist London, and Joyce’s Ulysses , and a graduate course in English and Comparative Literature, “Moderns, 1914-1926,” as well as a class on modern German literature at the University of Notre Dame. Students in the classes have contributed materials to the website and used it as the platform for their research. The main components of the original website were an innovative research tool, YNote, containing information on the activities of 24 leading modernist writers during this crucial period and a wiki consisting of brief interpretive essays on literary works and movements of the period.

The project as a whole aimed to reconstitute the social and intellectual webs that linked these writers—correspondence, personal acquaintance, reading habits—and their influence on the major works of the period. We were interested, too, in broadening the canon of works studied in the period by paying attention to minor works by major authors, major works by minor authors, and works that may have been influential in their time but that are no longer much read.

Questions of particular importance for our research involved the modernists’ engagement with their literary, intellectual, and historical context. We were particularly interested in Anglo-European literary relations. A typical question of this sort would be, “How did the translations of Dostoevsky by Constance Garnett influence English writing in the period?” Another major concern was the tracing of intellectual trends: “How and when did psychoanalysis make its impact felt in modernist writing?” We paid particular attention to the literary manifestations of a broader historical context, including the modernists’ involvement with political movements such as socialism, feminism, liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism. Another major theme was the attitudes of these writers to formal religion and to alternatives such as atheism, neo-paganism, spiritualism, and the occult. The database traced the empirical information—such as references to Dostoevsky or Freud or Tagore in writers’ correspondence—while the wiki offered interpretive accounts of how these influences played out in the modernists’ formal and thematic concerns.

Lab vs. Archive vs. Reference Work

Our orientation towards ongoing research differentiated this project from other major websites devoted to humanistic research. One very successful model has been the electronic archive—a collection of primary documents made available on the web (e.g. the Modernist Journals Project or The Valley of the Shadow). In the case of our period, however, the potential archive of primary documents is massive. Questions of copyright also limit the applicability of this model. In our original website, we therefore included a set of links to existing web-based archives, including the collections of the Beinecke Library, Project Gutenberg, and Google Book Search.

Another model, typified by the Victorian Web, offers authoritative essays on the period. We recognize the value of such an approach, but ours was, by design, more experimental. As a Laboratory, we posed research questions and worked together to answer them. In a prototype of Modernism Lab, for example, Pericles Lewis and his graduate students created an archive of information from the letters, biographies, and published statements of 12 major modernist writers during the four months immediately following Britain’s declaration of war on August 4, 1914. This information served as the basis of Lewis’s article, “Inventing Literary Modernism During the Great War,” which argues that these authors’ contemporary reaction to the war continued to shape modernism for years to come.

While we have expanded the chronological field of inquiry, we used a comparative method to address some of the following major research questions:

• What was the influence of figures associated with the modernist movement and techniques, like Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair, who are less often read today than they once were?
• What role did Edwardian writers like Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett, and Ford play in the development of literary modernism, before and after Woolf’s critical essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”?
• What Russian literature were the modernists reading and how did this affect their sense of their own literary endeavors?
• How much did the modernists know about the development of psychoanalysis and at what level did they engage with this emergent discipline in their own work?
• How did formal techniques like free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, and genres like the Bildungsroman and the travelogue, develop and change in this period?

A collaborative project, the Modernism Lab  drew on the efforts of over eighty graduate and undergraduate students at Yale and ten other universities.

History of the Modernism Lab

The Modernism Lab has its roots in Pericles Lewis’s courses on Modern British literature. In 2005, Professor Lewis received a grant from the ELI/Davis foundation to develop a website for the study of the Modern British Novel. That website became the nucleus for the Modernism Lab. Lewis’s book  The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism , based partly on his undergraduate teaching, became the basis for some of the first wiki entries posted on the Modernism Lab. His research has been supported by Hilles and Griswold fund grants at Yale.

The Yale Modernism lab was created as a space where students and established scholars could share insights on the work of modernist authors and collaborate in analysis, while reflecting the modernists’ spirit of collaboration, shared readership and reflection, and the exchange of ideas.

Other projects like  the Victorian Web  and  the Walt Whitman Archive , both of which pre-date the Yale Modernism Lab, work to accomplish similar goals, although more weight is placed in creating a database of primary resources or curated essays, in contrast with the Modernism Lab, which focuses on contributions generated by students and scholars.

Professor Lewis explained, “In the first few years of this century, the Web 1.0 model of publishing was being replaced by the Web 2.0 model that emphasized user-generated, dynamic content. We were aiming to bring that approach to scholarly work. If we were doing it today, we would probably be interested in what is now called Web 3.0, that is the semantic web and using machine learning to approach literary and biographical sources.”

As Anthony Domestico, a former managing editor of the Modernism Lab who is now an Assistant Professor of Literature at SUNY Purchase, explained, ““we’re always hearing about the crisis in the humanities, how we need to justify our existence — and I am resistant to trying to justify the existence of the humanities in a certain way because when you get into an instrumental argument by saying that humanities, that we should continue to fund the humanities because we make good workers, or we should fund the humanities because, you know, they train you for the kinds of critical thinking that can be useful in…consulting or something like that. I get very weary of that. I think that we should support the humanities because they are good in and of themselves, not because they serve this greater instrumental purpose. But — I think one way, if not to justify the humanities, in a way, make the inherent value of the humanities more obvious, is by writing for a broader audience, is by sharing your work with people outside the narrow coterie that is modernism.”

Since its original conception, the Modernism Lab has been widely used as a public resource for modernist research. Its editors continue to receive emails inquiring about the Modernism Lab wiki essays, from both professors who use the site as a pedagogical tool and students (like myself, as I referenced the wikis in writing my undergraduate thesis on James Joyce) who have used the wikis as a resource for analyzing modernist textsm(and, as you can see in Sam Alexander’s reflections, his student even plagiarized a Modernism Lab in his class!). Contributor Kirsty Dootson informed me her piece on Wyndham Lewis’s  Time and Western Man  had been cited in a scholarly book about James Joyce.

For technical reasons, we have migrated the site to a new address and to WordPress. This version of the site, designed, assembled, and developed during the summer of 2017, provides an archive of the original essays and collected media of the original site, which were primarily compiled between 2005 and 2012. We were unable to migrate the YNote database, which is discussed in Sam Alexander’s account of the site’s founding. As Professor Domestico noted, even the wikis did not achieve quite the level of interactivity we had hoped for: “Because, really, what they ended up being were short, more informal essays that were written and shared with the word, but weren’t — we didn’t leave them open to editing by other people — sometimes, you know, I’d look at Sam’s and offer suggestions, he’d look at mine and offer suggestions. Pericles would look at both of ours and offer suggestions. But it wasn’t a true Wiki, in kind of the broadest sense. And maybe a true Wiki isn’t quite what we were going for, I just wish that somehow, I think the Wikis were successful, but they weren’t as collaborative and provisional, as, at least in our initial conception we wanted them to be.”

One reason for this result was a concern with quality control—only about a hundred people had editing rights on the site—but another was probably the tendency of humanities scholarship towards sole authorship.

After 2012, Professor Lewis, the director of the project, largely stopped work on the Modernism Lab, in order to fulfill his new role as President of Yale-NUS College and aid in designing its curriculum. Here, he developed with his team a core curriculum which similarly strove for this spirit of collaboration and conversation in its approach to learning.

The course pages for Professor Lewis’s The Modern British Novel class and his seminar on  Ulysses  have also been preserved under the Modernism Lab’s Undergraduate Gateway. On these pages, you can find course materials, readings, and other resources used in the teaching of these courses, which serve as useful guides for approaching these subjects, in addition to their use as a pedagogical record.

Anthony Domestico, who was a PhD student at Yale and worked with Professor Lewis building and editing the Modernism Lab, explained that part of the intent originally was to profile non-canonical works, by canonical Modernist authors. This branched out into what the Modernism Lab is today, with essays on over 40 different modernist authors and artists, connected along the lines of time, correspondence, and collaboration.

In an interview with Domestico, he emphasized the liberating volume of content that was needed to create the Modernism Lab, explaining that it encouraged students and scholars alike to share more provisional content, and to open themselves up to feedback at an early, more vulnerable stage of composition. Generally, he explains, and particularly with graduate students, people can become isolated during the writing process, and unwilling to share their works-in-progress for fear of revealing flaws oropening themselves up to criticism prematurely. Domestico argues this stems the flow of ideas which conversation and collaboration can facilitate, which is crucial to creating not only the most thorough end-product, but also a more enjoyable, community-based way of working.

As Domestico said, ““a grad student has a very solitary existence — we don’t have to share our work if we don’t want to, and I think it’s good to share your work. Because it forces you to do work, it forces you to be in conversation with other people, other ideas.”

The “laboratory aspect” of the Modernism Lab, then, was sharing provisional work and getting feedback from peers, as opposed to what he described as the typical grad student way of “cordoning yourself off for 8 or 9 months, and then presenting something to the world.” This outlook of accessibility and outward-facing scholarship for graduate education extends to what Domestico sees as an opportunity for humanities academia. Of his hopes for the Modernism Lab’s effect on wider humanities scholarship, Domestico explained, “my hope would be that humanities scholars are less insular. More outward looking in their writing, meaning both that they write more for a popular audience, I mean I think that that’s one good thing about the writing — they were generally understandable by non-specialists.”

Interestingly, this mode of creativity and collaboration replicates the way this period of literature was produced:

“One of the trends within modernist studies is the networks of modernism — and the Modernism Lab ideally was a network of scholars looking at the networks of modernism. I mean, that was part of the purpose of the database itself, was to have an entry for, you know, a bit of Virginia Woolf’s diary, in which she talks about T.S. Eliot with Leonard, or something like that…talking to another modernist about another modernist. So network theory is important to modernist studies right now, and modernists themselves were a very networked movement.”

In fact, in a section of his forthcoming book, Domestico engages with periodical culture in modernist literature (poetry specifically), which was formative in the era’s literary culture. Publications like  The Little Review  and  The Egoist  cultivated networks in literary circles, their contents both growing out of and forging relationships. The structure and collaborative nature of the Modernism Lab, though perhaps imperfectly realized, draws on this value for connectivity and conversation in writing and engaging with literature. It can be described in much the same way that these modernist circles can be described: a group of enthusiastic people talking to each other, printing each other, and connecting each other to friends who could help them.

The web-presence of the Modernism Lab enables a new kind of connectivity in scholarship, and particularly in humanities scholarship. One of the founding goals of this project was to tap into this spirit of collaboration and community and create a more outward-looking kind of humanities scholarship, as Domestico described. In our conversation, he explains, “what we were hoping, for the Modernism Lab, was that it would, both at Yale and ideally rippling out from Yale, serve as a kind of testing space for the kinds of collaborative provisional projects that digital technology seems to enable.”

He continues, “I know for myself I’ve gotten lots of emails from people who read the Wikis. And so I think that, in that sense, it was a success, in that I think it was…a lot more people read our Wiki writing than will ever read any of the scholarly essays we’ve written (laughs).” Sam Alexander expressed a similar kind of amusement that a student in one of his classes had plagiarized a Modernism Lab article from his time as an editor. Both agree that the accessibility of the Modernism Lab online has generated a much wider and more informal audience, facilitating access to the material and breaking down the often insular nature of humanities academia.

In our conversation, Domestico stressed the importance of provisional work, and the accessibility of that provisional work to feedback, in addition to its being more accessible in terms of being useful and understandable to a broader audience of non-specialists.

One of the most successful projects, in Domestico’s view, was the  Mapping Ulysses project , perhaps because of its visual quality and how present and accessible it made the material. Students were enthusiastic, and it was readily understandable what this project was meant to accomplish. Domestico explains, “one tool that grew out of the Modernism Lab work we did was using arcGIS to map Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, and I think that had a clear pedagogical purpose — the students got really excited to be able to see how characters were moving through the narrative, moving through a city.”

Aside from fulfilling Joyce’s dream (the author painstakingly constructed  Ulysses  street by street and shop by shop, from the Dublin that he knew), these projects thoroughly engaged the students, who were excited to see the plots and characters of these novels mapped out in physical space. This project provided a visual and interactive use of literature, working toward the pedagogical goal of the digital humanities: increased engagement in art and literature by way of technology.

In the interest of cleaning up and facilitating the use of the modernism lab as this testing space, we have used the summer of 2017 to do some renovations. In this next edition of the Modernism Lab, we have decided to do away with the YNote feature, as well as the Digital Archive. However, we will be preserving the Undergraduate Gateway as a record of courses taught by Professor Pericles Lewis, and which utilize the Modernism Lab as a pedagogical tool. In our renovations, we hoped to make the Modernism Lab easier to navigate and more user-friendly, creating a more streamlined look and intuitive interface.

The Modernism Lab’s strength is its enthusiastic pedagogy, providing a space for people curious about this period of literature and wanting to explore it, whether for the first time or the thousandth. Our hope is that its content will continue to be used as a valuable tool in modernism research for many years to come.

—Ally Findley

Sam Alexander, a former Managing Editor of the project, provided his thoughts and reflections on the Modernism Lab — they can be read  here .

Contributors

Project director.

• Pericles Lewis

Managing Editor

• Anthony Domestico (2011-2012)

Associate Editors

• Sam Alexander, Managing Editor (2007-2011)
• Michaela Bronstein
• Colin Gillis
• Elyse Graham
• Tobias Boes, Editor for German Literature and Culture

Instructional Technology Group

• Ken Panko – Project Management, Instructional Design
• Yianni Yessios – Project Management, Technical Design
• Jacob Albert
• Annie Atura
• Anne Aufhauser
• Emily Cersonsky
• Michael Chan
• Patrick Clardy
• Olivia Coates
• Codi Coslet
• Samuel Cross
• Jay Dockendorf
• Merrick Doll
• Kirsty Dootson
• Nathan Ernst
• Colleen Fleshman
• Elizabeth Freund
• Julia Galeota
• Joshua Gang
• Edgar Eduardo Garcia
• Andrew Gates
• Alex Gatlin
• Matthew Gerken
• Stephen Gilb
• Ruth Gilligan
• Charles Ginner
• Kevin Godshall
• Paul Goerhke
• Monika Grzesiak
• Michael Hathaway
• James Heffernan
• Robert Higney
• Kira Hillman
• Steven Hobbs
• Lauren Holmes
• Qingyuan Jiang
• Daniel Jordan
• Andrew Karas
• Eike Kronshage
• Erik Larsen
• Elizabeth Legris
• Marcus Liddell
• Kenneth Ligda
• James Ross Macdonald
• Laura B. Marcus
• Katherine McComic
• Anne-Marie McManus
• Alexandria Miller
• Hayley Mohr
• Mariel Osetinksy
• Emily Petermann
• Annie Pfeifer
• Natalie Prizel
• Elizabeth Pugh
• Heather Rhoda
• Meaghan Rubsam
• Glyn Salton-Cox
• Jesse Schotter
• Michael Shapiro
• Carolyn Sinsky
• Jack Skeffington
• Aaron Steiner
• Aleksandar Stevic
• William Stewart
• William Stone
• Jessica Svendsen
• Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
• Jessica Technow
• Samantha Terkeltaub
• Olena Tsykynovska
• Noah Warren
• Christina Walter
• Robert Wiene
• Andrew Williamson
• Matthew Wilsey
• Ben Zweifach

Editorial Board

• Tobias Boes , University of Notre Dame
• Christopher Bush, Northwestern University
• Susan Chambers, Yale University
• Sarah Cole, Columbia University
• Kevin Dettmar, Pomona College
• Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania
• Laura Frost, The New School
• Joseph Gordon, Yale University
• Langdon Hammer, Yale University
• Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University
• Pericles Lewis, Yale University
• Doug Mao, Johns Hopkins University
• Jesse Matz , Kenyon College
• Barry McCrea, Yale University
• Liesl Olson, University of Chicago Society of Fellows
• Siobhan Phillips, Harvard Society of Fellows
• Jessica Pressman, Yale University
• Martin Puchner, Columbia University
• Megan Quigley, Villanova University
• Ravit Reichman, Brown University
• Victoria Rosner, Texas A&M University
• Paul Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
• Sam See, Yale University
• Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University
• Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University
• Alex Woloch, Stanford University

Initial funding was provided by a John and Yvonne McCredie Fellowship in Instructional Technology. Funding was also contributed by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Paul Moore Memorial Fund for Instructional Innovation in Yale College, and the Provost’s Office of Yale University. Technical support was provided by the Instructional Technology Group.

“The Lotus Eaters”

by Ally Findley Plot The “Lotus Eaters” episode is the fifth episode in Ulysses, and one of the shortest chapters in the novel. In this episode, Bloom begins wandering through Dublin, on his way to Paddy Dignam’s funeral. It is a hot summer day, and the humidity perpetuates a mood of sluggishness. Bloom, in his… Continue Reading “The Lotus Eaters”

Reflections on the Modernism Lab

8/12/17 By Sam Alexander, in response to Ally Findley A recent book on modernist DH projects includes a description of Modernism Lab in an appendix titled “Field Guide to Digital Projects”: Focusing on the networks of people, places, ideas, and works of the early modernist period (1914-1926), the Modernism Lab grew out of Pericles Lewis’s… Continue Reading Reflections on the Modernism Lab

Sam Alexander

Sam Alexander, Associate Professor of English at Endicott College, was managing editor of the Modernism Lab from 2007-2013. He has written on the problem of population in Joyce’s Ulysses for Novel and on democratic form in modernist fiction for Gregory Castle’s recent History of the Modernist Novel. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled “Demographic Modernism” and helping to… Continue Reading Sam Alexander

Anthony Domestico

Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNY and the books columnist for Commonweal. His book, Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period​​, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can view his Purchase College faculty page here, and his website containing his book reviews and essays here.    

A Room of One’s Own

by Pericles Lewis A Room of One’s Own (1929) is Virginia Woolf‘s most famous work of feminist literary criticism. If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, in this work Woolf prefigures two concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a… Continue Reading A Room of One’s Own

Adolphe Appia

by Pericles Lewis The Swiss theorist Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), like the English actor and set designer Gordon Craig, created methods for implementing Richard Wagner’s vision of the “total work of art” in the theater. Appia, in The Staging of Wagnerian Music Drama (1895) and Music and the Art of Theatre (1899), proposed to banish painted… Continue Reading Adolphe Appia

by Elyse Graham Clive Bell’s theories of art shaped themselves under two major influences. One was the ethical philosopher G.E. Moore‘s defense of his field: for a set of things to shelter under one class, they must have a common property—in the case of ethics, goodness—which must really exist. 1 Bell, who like all art… Continue Reading Art

Reflections Upon War and Death

by Jessica Technow The declaration of World War I in 1914 marked the beginning of an era which to this day has had lasting effects on humanity. New technologies changed the face of warfare and, for the first time, trenches were the main method utilized in military strategy. On the home front, civilians became engrossed… Continue Reading Reflections Upon War and Death

The Professor’s House

by Jack Skeffington In the introduction to Not Under Forty, Willa Cather’s 1936 collection of essays, she (in)famously writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” an opinion that, if nothing else, has fairly successfully separated her from the ranks of artists and authors we have come to call modernists.[1] The judgment,… Continue Reading The Professor’s House

Roger Fry: A Biography

by Michael Shapiro In Roger Fry—the last book she saw to publication—Virginia Woolf experiments with the structure and style of biography. She exercises editorial control to burnish the occasionally imperfect life of her subject and, by implication, to smooth over public critiques of the Bloomsbury group. Fry (1866–1934) was an English artist and art scholar,… Continue Reading Roger Fry: A Biography