Happy New Year! COVID time being what it is, we get to celebrate the beginning of a new school year (the September 2022 issue, 29.3) and the beginning of a new calendar year (2023) simultaneously. We editors are crawling ourselves out of our pandemic delays, determined to gradually bring the issue date and the calendar back into sync.
2022 was a major centenary for modernism. One of the most exciting offerings in this last cycle is Andrew Frayn’s cluster, “Modernist Centenaries, Anniversaries, and Commemorations.” This rich and surprising cluster will give you fresh eyes through which to see 1922. That is by design. As you might imagine, we were inundated with proposals for centenary celebrations—surely, scholars would note in their proposals, we would be interested in this or that article, cluster, blog post, or review marking this anniversary. For most of the year, I found myself in sync with Harris Feinsod, whose “#DownWithCentennialism” became a guiding principle for me. For Modernism/modernity to thrive into the next century, we cannot become a journal mainly about commemoration. So how to mark the time without falling prey to marking time? That was the challenge that Frayn and his contributors gladly took up, and as you read it, we are confident that you’ll find a rich and varied set of reflections and interventions.
In addition to this cluster, this cycle has brought you more of the usual potpourri of fascinating work in the field: two full-length articles, peer-reviewed, and exclusive to Print+--Peter Kirkpatrick’s “Corrosive Littoral: On the Beach with Kenneth Slessor” and Irina Markina’s “For the Record: Voice and Orality in Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Lettre-Océan’.” You won’t find these in your print issues—read them here, but they are indexed and they are open access and available to all. As we continue to seek readers across the globe, offering some portion of your work to those whose libraries do not have the journal remains a service we are proud to offer to the profession. We also published a second cluster on the urgent topic of the sixth extinction, edited by Cari Hovanec and Rachel Murray, six blog posts—on editing Amy Lowell only to read of her death again and again and again, Black becoming, Djuna Barnes’s dog, and more, a book review, and our first podcast (yippee!), from Tommy Davis’ Energy and the Environment blog: Tobias Wilson-Bates in conversation with Elizabeth Carolyn Miller and Devin Griffiths on Joseph Conrad and time.
With this new cycle, we bridge the digital/print divide, as always, with a teaser article, Joel Duncan’s fascinating, richly textured account of William Carlos Williams’ relationship to the automobile, and a review, too: Len Gutkin (whose name you may recognize from those daily emails from The Chronicle of Higher Education!) reviews Dora Zhang’s Strange Likeness.
The issue itself arrived in most of your mailboxes over the holiday break, so you already know that it is wide-ranging and provocative. We are sharing the table of contents with you here as an inducement to dive in (again). You will find familiar names and new, poetry and sculpture, cultural history, close reading, and theoretical musings. Enjoy!
—Anne E. Fernald