The schedule for print issues of Modernism/modernity—like so many institutional features of the university—seems to be designed for a different time, a different model of the academic life. September, November, January, April—you can imagine the issues arriving to mark the new semesters, waiting in a plumply full mailbox for the scholar’s return from the summer’s solitary composition or self-care, from the Ransom Center, MacDowell, the Hamptons, or perhaps a gîte in the Dordogne. If few of us live that way these days, so too have our habits of readerly consumption changed—which of us hasn’t brought a year’s stack of untouched journals (other journals) to the beach, or abandoned them in hotel rooms to make room for return-trip luggage?
We designed the cycles of Print Plus to allow for the release of articles, clusters, blogs and commentary throughout the year, and, indeed, especially during the summer, when some of us, at least (with apologies to our comrades in Australia) may have a few moments to breathe and read. Cycle 2, it seems, goes on forever—from April through August—and so it’s just possible that some of what we’ve posted this summer will still be new to you.
Over the last few months, we’ve offered a veritable treasury of new material—articles from Jeremy Braddock on Nancy Cunard and Claude McKay, from Lisa Hollenbach on “Howl” and public radio, from Andrew Berish on the gendered lexicon of popular song and the baritone Vaughn Monroe, and—just this week—from David Nowell Smith on the link between poetry and painting in the works of W. S. Graham.
We’ve run, too, a new cluster forum, edited by Shawna Ross (and featuring a host of terrific contributors—Gabriel Hankins, Jeffrey Drouin, Sean Latham, Claire Battershill, Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Jana Millar Usiskin, Caroline Winter, Christine Walde, Nikolaus Wasmoen, and Adam Hammond) on the future of modernist DH. And we’ve inaugurated a new section of “What Are You Reading?”—“Modernist Baedekers”—with an essay/review by Matthew Levay. Plus we’ve had blog posts on everything from Samuel Delaney to Rio de Janeiro, on methodologies computational and collagist, on the rhythms of process and the realities of precarity.
Next cycle, coming up very soon, will feature a new cluster on translation edited by Joshua L. Miller and Gayle Rogers, Paul Saint-Amour’s introduction to the special print issue on Weak Theory, articles on ballet, Russian photography, and poètes maudits, new mechanisms for discussion and comment, and much more. But for now, enjoy what you may have missed. It’s still summer—at least until tomorrow.