archives

The World of Shakespeare and Company

What’s left to learn about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris? The story of Shakespeare and Company has been told and retold—by Beach herself in Shakespeare and Company (1959) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010), by Noël Riley Fitch in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1984), and by Laure Murat in Passage de l’Odéon (2003). Ernest Hemingway mythologized the bookshop and lending library in A Moveable Feast (1964), and Woody Allen satirized that mythology in Midnight in Paris (2011). Countless writers have described Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): Richard Ellmann in James Joyce (1959), Kevin Birmingham in The Most Dangerous Book (2014), Keri Maher in The Paris Bookseller (2022)—to name just three. In the aftermath of the Ulysses centennial, we might assume we know all there is to know about Beach’s “famous bookshop and lending library on the Le

Sylvia Beach’s Final Book

Booksellers speak through the books they sell, lend, or promote. After World War II, Sylvia Beach officially retired from the profession of bookselling. Having closed the doors of Shakespeare and Company in 1941 under duress during the German Occupation, she never reopened her bookshop. Entering her sixties in the post-war years, she returned to live in the apartment above where her bookshop had been. Surrounded by her enormous archive, she continued to lend, give away, translate, and promote books and authors. Although she was no longer officially a bookseller, she continued to speak through bo

Virginia Woolf’s Common Readers in Paris

On July 27, 1927, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf, describing an unexpected encounter: "Today as I was driving down Oxford Street I saw a woman on a refuge, carrying [To the] Lighthouse. She was an unknown woman – up from the country, I should think, and just been to Mudie’s or the Times, – and as the policeman held me up with his white glove I saw your name staring at me, Virginia Woolf, against the moving red buses, in Vanessa’s paraph of lettering. Then as I stayed (with my foot pressing down the clutch"

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

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. In many ways, this new reality further emphasized the concentrically fortified position occupied by the Special Collections archives housed in the University of Victoria’s McPherson Library.

Miss Lowell Regrets

Amy Lowell is tired. “This is a work, this poetry,” she writes Harriet Monroe in March of 1922, finalizing the poems she’ll have included in the 1922 version of Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson’s The New Poetry anthology. Lowell had published her eighth and ninth books the previous year, and would publish her tenth in ten years later that fall. She has pulled back on the rigorous lecturing schedule which has kept her away from her home in Brookline, Massachusetts and has had her crisscrossing the country the past several years.

“Adjusting the Ash Heaps”: Extinction and the Modernist Archive

One of the saddest features of civilisation is the disappearance of so many beautiful and curious creatures from this world of ours. From all parts of the earth the same story comes; and we now seem to be within measurable distance of a time when wrecks and remnants of once compact and indigenous assemblages of organisms will be all that remain to us, and such a thing as a complete fauna will be unknown.

—Charles Dixon, Lost and Vanishing Birds, 1898

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

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.

Race in the Modernism/modernity Archives: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond

We are pleased to be able to share here a selection of articles on race and modernism from past print issues of Modernism/modernity. Reflecting the history of the journal, many of these focus on the Harlem Renaissance, but we’ve also included articles on the Caribbean and Brazil as well as a more broadly comparative treatment of race...

On Seeing Ghosts

When I first saw this image on the National Gallery of Australia’s website, I wasn’t quite sure who, or what, I was seeing (fig. 1). What is the shadowy form lurking in the bottom-left-hand-corner of the image? Is it a person emerging out of the basement, a playful photographic superimposition, or something more banal: just another painting propped in the corner?