Future Pasts

Robert Spoo

Contributors

Thomas Mann, “Bilse and I” (1906): A Critical Introduction

Tobias Boes

In October of 1905, a defamation trial that would have a lasting impact on the development of literary modernism took place in the sleepy German harbor town of Lübeck. A lawyer with the slightly preposterous name “Ritter aus Tondern” was suing...

Thomas Mann, “Bilse and I” (1906)

Tobias Boes

Translated by Tobias Boes.
Read his critical introduction here.

The other day I was much abused in Lübeck, my hometown. My novel Buddenbrooks became the subject of a long and heated debate in a trial concerning...

From Mentor to Supplicant: The Correspondence of Jessie Redmon Fauset and Langston Hughes

Anne E. Fernald

On January 6, 1925, Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote a letter to Langston Hughes from Paris. It's a long letter—over a thousand words—and it balances advice with appeal in ways that capture the intimacy and strength of their friendship. Her first novel...

Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication: A Dialogue

Melissa J. Homestead, Emily J. Rau

Melissa Homestead and Emily Rau have spent the past decade collaborating with Andrew Jewell and a team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to create the Complete Letters of Willa Cather . With 2,800 letters published at the time of...

“The Freud Game”; or, Connecting the Mary Butts Letters in the Modernist Classroom

Joel Hawkes

By Joel Hawkes; Madison Robinson; Vanessa Funk; Katie Croudy-Hollott; Ella McQueen-Denz; Samantha Burt; Maya Smith; Marcus Tisot; Sam Oosterman; Alistair Corp; Devan Gillard; Emily Coldwell; Sean Godwin; Noah Brandon; Thomas Nienhuis

In...

James Joyce, “according to the pictures postcard”

William S. Brockman

James Joyce was an avid postcard writer at a time when the western world’s fascination with postcards was at its peak. We know of nearly a thousand postcards that he sent, dating from a Christmas card to Frances Sheehy Skeffington in 1898 to a...

“Broken Continuity”: Cubist Interpretation from Mary Butts’s Letters in the Archive

Scott Matthews

The past year’s global pandemic may be remembered as a time of boundaries: six foot or two-meter personal bubbles, restricted entry to and movement within public spaces, and the once-steady stream of international travellers reduced to a trickle...

Copyright and the Modernist Archive: James Joyce’s Correspondence at Antwerp

Robert Spoo

This blog post is about an institution of modernism that is quite different from the ones that Lawrence Rainey examined in his groundbreaking book, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture . His subjects were...

Joint Property, Divided Correspondents: The T. S. Eliot-Emily Hale Letters

Frances Dickey, John Whittier-Ferguson

Almost as soon as they began corresponding in 1930, T. S. Eliot told Emily Hale that he treasured her letters—not just the words, but the paper itself: “I cannot bear to be separated from your letters at present, not so much for need to refer to...

Beyond Recovery: Towards a New Feminist Methodology of the Archive

Lauren M. Rosenblum

In Towards a Feminist Life , Sara Ahmed writes of feminism as “a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility.” [1] From this tenuous archive, I seek an affirming...

Oppositions in the Modernist Archive

Margaret Konkol

In the opening days of 2020 modernists may have rejoiced over two significant events. On January 1, works published in 1924 entered the public domain. On January 2, Princeton University opened to the public the recently uncrated 1,131 letters...

The “eBay Archive”: Recovering Early Women Type Designers

Lauren Elle DeGaine

Southern Vancouver Island’s 100-kilometer-long BC-14 Highway slides predominantly east to west along British Columbia coastline through traditional Coast Salish territory. Beneath the old-growth trees that are the marrow of this lush ecosystem is...

In and Out of the Archive with the Letters of Mary Butts

Joel Hawkes

Located in Special Collections at the University of Victoria is a little studied folder that contains fifty-one letters written by the British modernist author Mary Butts (1890-1937) to friend and fellow British modernist Douglas Goldring (1887-...

Cancelled in Purple: Alice Walker’s Virginia Woolf Calendar

Amanda Golden

Alice Walker began 1982 with Virginia Woolf. Walker would spend the year recording events, plans, and phone numbers in spiral-bound pages of a calendar she had acquired filled with photographs of Woolf and her contemporaries. As Walker crossed...

Finding the Modernist Archive: Why UX Matters

Amy Hildreth Chen

Using the modernist archive requires finding it first. The modernist archive does not live in one collection at one repository, such as a single university special collections department or one pivotal private library. Rather, the modernist...

What Is a Modernist Archive?

J. Matthew Huculak

The past twenty years, along with the promises and perils of the digital turn, have seen a robust engagement with the modernist archive. One can map nearly point for point the rise of the New Modernist Studies and the Modernist Studies...

Future Pasts

Mar 11, 2018 By: Robert Spoo

Volume 3, Cycle 1

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