色情导航

Modernism/modernity Print Plus Cluster Proposal

2020 marked the 100^th anniversary of 鈥渕odernism鈥檚 lost masterpiece,鈥� Hope Mirrlees鈥檚 Paris: A Poem. Published by Hogarth Press in the spring of 1920, and typeset by Virginia Woolf, this ground-breaking long poem maps the range of continental avant-garde aesthetics of the 1910s even as it both engages and anticipates the mythical methods and epic conventions of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

This proposed Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster hopes to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees鈥檚 poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism and early twentieth-century poetics. While scholars such as Julia Briggs, who produced the first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), and Sandeep Parmar, who edited the first critical edition of Mirrlees鈥檚 Collected Poems (2011), have done the important archival and recovery work that restored Paris to critical attention, Peter Howarth solidified Paris鈥檚 position within the modernist 鈥渃anon鈥� with his chapter, 鈥淲hy Write Like This?,鈥� in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), which introduces readers to the disorienting pleasures of modernism鈥檚 most famous poems through an extended analysis of Mirrlees鈥檚 鈥渄ifficult鈥� work (16). Building on these approaches, this cluster aims to initiate a new wave of Paris scholarship that complicates and extends the poem鈥檚 aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political import on the occasion of its centenary.

This Print+ cluster will demonstrate how engagement with Paris speaks not only to Mirrlees鈥檚 text but also to broader interests within modernist studies. We therefore seek a selection of articles that both pay tribute to the exceptionality of the poem and insist on the 鈥渃omplex intersections鈥� that resist canonical trends of exceptionalizing marginalized writers like Mirrlees. While some interventions may consider detailed aspects of the poem, its influences, and its legacies, others may focus on Mirrlees鈥檚 work more generally and in relation to her contemporaries. Additionally, given M/m鈥檚 long history of engagement with Eliot and the The Waste Land, especially their recent Print+ cluster on 鈥淩eading 鈥楾he Waste Land鈥� with the #MeToo Generation,鈥� we seek contributions that help us to respond to the urgent questions: why Paris and why now? As an alternative to revisiting TWL鈥檚 position within the High-Modernist canon, can we, to quote the editor of the Eliot cluster, examine the ways in which Paris 鈥渁cts as a kind of test case of how the #MeToo generation can change the way we read鈥�? How might this poem spark new conversations about the relation among gender, sexuality, and power in modernist studies?

Our hope is that a Print+ cluster, which will be widely accessible and allow for an unprecedented engagement with the poem through the platform鈥檚 ability to include digital material (archives, visual culture), together with the recent publication of a new, smaller, and more affordable edition of the poem (Faber & Faber 2020), will facilitate the inclusion of Paris on more syllabi, igniting future waves of scholarship centered on this long under-appreciated poem and its networks.

Topics may include:

Teaching Paris

Hogarth Press

The history of the circulation of Mirrlees鈥檚 poem

The poem in relation to its (anti)colonial and Imperial interventions

Paris in dialogue with non-Western Modernisms

Mirrlees and translation

Mirrlees鈥檚 materialism

Cinema and visual culture

The city poem

Psychoanalysis and poetic form

Politics of poetics/aesthetics

Gender and sexuality in Paris

Queer(ing) Paris

*Abstracts (~250 words) due: October 1 2021. Please send to editors Nell Wasserstrom and Rio Matchett at wassersn@bc.edu and r.a.matchett@liverpool.ac.uk with the subject line 鈥淗ope Mirrlees Print+ Submission.鈥� The editors also welcome queries.

*Selected abstracts will be followed by short articles (~3000 words) due March 1 2022. The cluster will then be submitted in its entirety to M/m for peer review.