Modernist Archives – serie

In 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries to live as Lili Ilse Elvenes (more commonly known as Lili Elbe). Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man to Woman), published in Copenhagen in 1931, is the first popular full-length (auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung). In Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer present the full text of the 1933 American edition of Elbe’s work with comprehensive notes on textual and paratextual variants across the four published editions in three languages. This edition also includes a substantial scholarly introduction which situates the historical and intellectual context of Elbe’s work, as well as new essays on the work by leading scholars in transgender studies and modernist literature, and critical coverage of the 2015 biopic, The Danish Girl. This print edition has a digital companion: the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). Launched on July 6, 2019, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) where Lili Elbe was initially examined, the Lili Elbe Digital Archive hosts the German typescript and all four editions of this narrative published in Danish, German, and English between 1931 and 1933, with English translations of the Danish edition and the typescript. Many letters from archives and contemporaneous articles noted in this print edition may be found in the digital archive.

Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones’s The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as ‘one of the most important poems of our times’ – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones’s literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.

Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s 1924 novel The Call is widely regarded as one of the most important suffrage novels of the early 20th century. Including authoritative notes and commentary throughout, this is the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the novel.The Call tells the story of a young chemist, Ursula Winfield, who comes of age in the years before the start of the First World War. Confronted by the gross injustices faced by women and the working class in early 20th-century Britain, she is drawn inexorably and with increasing militancy into the suffragette movement. The story charts the conflict between her political commitments and her personal life as the Great War approaches.Alongside the definitive text of the novel, this edition also includes contextual historical documents – from contemporary reviews of the novel to newspaper coverage of the suffragette movement – and critical chapters by leading scholars exploring the world of the novel.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield’s creative process.With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. The stories included are: ‘Je ne parle pas francais’; ‘Sun and Moon’; ‘Revelations’; ‘The Stranger’; ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’; ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’; ‘Marriage à la Mode’; ‘The Voyage’; ‘Six Years After’; ‘The Fly’.

Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas’s most challenging poems, ‘I, in my intricate image’ and ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics – many with substantial reworkings and variant passages – this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.

James Joyce spent the last decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe was being engulfed by the rising tide of fascism. Bringing together new archival discoveries and personal accounts, this book explores one of the central relationships of his final years: that with his friend, confidant and adviser Paul L. Léon.Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce’s Paris circle – which included Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov – the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Léon) Noel’s personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published as James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant rescue of Joyce’s Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for the first time Leon’s clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941, chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France’s main Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiègne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Léon was murdered by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia.Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.

The figures of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear throughout the writing of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, featuring in his poems, short fictions, dialogues and as authorities in notes to his work. Bringing together into one volume published and unpublished writings featuring these two enigmatic figures, W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings traces their history and the development of Yeats’s mystical thought that culminated (twice) in the publication of his visionary work A Vision (1925, 1937).Including reproductions of manuscript and notebook pages as well as transcriptions and extracts from a wide range of Yeats’s mystical writings and substantial commentary and annotation throughout, this book is an essential resource for scholars of Yeats’s thought, his stylistic evolution and the esoteric influences on modernist writing in the early 20th century.

In the summer of 1936, Ezra Pound agreed to take on the role of European Correspondent for a newly launched travel journal entitled Globe: The International Magazine. Ezra Pound and 'Globe' Magazine: The Complete Correspondence collects for the first time Pound’s writings for the journal and his extensive correspondence with one of its editors, James Taylor Dunn, and the leading writers who Pound himself attempted to recruit for the magazine. Numbering almost forty letters and twenty published and unpublished articles, these writings represent a darkly significant time in Pound’s thought as his infatuation with the rise of fascism took root. Annotated throughout and supported by substantial explorations of the historical and cultural contexts of the writings, the book also includes a substantial bibliography of related writings and a biographical glossary of the major figures discussed in the correspondence and writing. Together, these texts represent an important resource for anyone interested in an important phase of 20th-Century literary modernism.

Written during the Italian winter of 1930, The Blue Spill is an unfinished detective novel written by Ezra Pound – the leading figure of modernist poetry in the 20th century – and his long-time companion Olga Rudge. Published for the first time in this authoritative critical edition, the novel reflects both Rudge’s and Pound’s voracious reading of popular fiction as it echoes and parodies such writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and P.G. Wodehouse.Based on the original manuscripts of the novel, this critical edition includes annotation and textual commentary throughout. The book also includes critical essays exploring the contexts of the work, from the dynamics of artistic collaboration to the growing popularity of detective fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. Taken together, this unique publication sheds new light on the relationship between the literary avant-garde and popular culture in the modernist period.

David Jones – author of In Parenthesis, the great poem of World War I – is increasingly recognized as a major voice in the first generation of British modernist writers. Acclaimed by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden, his writing was deeply informed by his Catholic faith and Welsh blood.This book makes available for the first time a number of previously unpublished statements by Jones that open new perspectives on his own work and the religious, political, and cultural engagements of British modernism more broadly. Annotated throughout, with detailed commentaries exploring the historical context of each document, the volume presents the restored text of Jones’s essay on Hitler and includes a letter to Neville Chamberlain, an unfinished essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the transcript of an interview with Jones a year before his death. These reveal an unknown side of Jones and give fresh insight into the influences and assumptions of 20th-century British literary culture.

Drawing on new archival discoveries, this book presents an authoritative reconstruction of David Jones’s The Grail Mass, the unfinished and unpublished project from which came both his masterpiece The Anathemata – a work described by W.H. Auden as ‘one of the most important poems of our times’ – and The Sleeping Lord and other fragments, his final collection. With detailed commentary on the development and reconstruction of the text, this edition provides a full picture of Jones’s literary endeavours over the second half of his life and further establishes his status as a major figure in the first wave of British modernist writers alongside T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.In addition to the text of The Grail Mass, this edition includes a number of unpublished fragments by Jones that emerged from this larger project, complete with textual commentaries.

James Joyce spent the last decade of his life in Paris, struggling to finish his great final work Finnegans Wake amidst personal and financial hardship and just as Europe was being engulfed by the rising tide of fascism. Bringing together new archival discoveries and personal accounts, this book explores one of the central relationships of his final years: that with his friend, confidant and adviser Paul L. Léon.Providing first-hand accounts of Joyce’s Paris circle – which included Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov – the book makes available again the text of Lucie (Léon) Noel’s personal memoir of the relationship between her husband and the Irish writer (published as James Joyce and Paul L. Léon: The Story of Friendship in 1950), including his valiant rescue of Joyce’s Paris archives from occupying Nazi forces. The book also collects for the first time Leon’s clandestine letters to his wife from August to December 1941, chronicling his desperate state of body and mind while interned in Drancy, France’s main Nazi transit camp, and then in Compiègne, just before he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Joyce died suddenly on 13 January 1941 in Zurich and Léon was murdered by the Nazis on 4 April 1942 in Silesia.Annotated throughout with contextual commentary by Luca Crispi and Mary Gallagher, this is an essential resource for scholars of James Joyce and of the literary culture of Paris in the 1930s and first years of World War II in France.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield’s creative process.With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. The stories included are: ‘Je ne parle pas francais’; ‘Sun and Moon’; ‘Revelations’; ‘The Stranger’; ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’; ‘Mr and Mrs Dove’; ‘Marriage à la Mode’; ‘The Voyage’; ‘Six Years After’; ‘The Fly’.

Collecting in full for the first time the correspondence between Ezra Pound and members of Leo Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt across a 30 year period, this book sheds new light on an important but previously unexplored influence on Pound's controversial intellectual development in the Fascist era. Ezra Pound's long-term interest in anthropology and ethnography exerted a profound influence on early 20th century literary Modernism. These letters reveal the extent of the influence of Frobenius' concept of 'Paideuma' on Pound's poetic and political writings during this period and his growing engagement with the culture of Nazi Germany. Annotated throughout, the letters are supported by contextualising essays by leading Modernist scholars as well as relevant contemporary published articles by Pound himself and his leading correspondent at the Institute, the American Douglas C. Fox.

A fully contextualised catalogue of one of the most significant archival Joyce acquisitions of recent times. When Stephen James Joyce died on 23 January 2020, he and his wife Solange bequeathed an archival collection and library to the University of Reading, comprising a wealth of documents, photographs, and rare books relating to James Joyce and his literary work. Some of this material has not been read by anyone outside the family, or was only shown to select scholars in the 1950s and 1960s and thereafter was kept private. This book contains a detailed catalogue of the Solange and Stephen James Joyce Collection, in order to organise the collection’s contents in an accessible fashion for public readers and academic researchers, as well as introductory material and headnotes that draw on the rich history of Joyce scholarship and contextual essays from four well-known Joyce scholars. Together, this material shows how this groundbreaking new collection has the potential to revise and reinvigorate understandings of Joyce and modernist literature for decades to come.

Collecting in full for the first time the correspondence between Ezra Pound and members of Leo Frobenius' Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie in Frankfurt across a 30 year period, this book sheds new light on an important but previously unexplored influence on Pound's controversial intellectual development in the Fascist era. Ezra Pound's long-term interest in anthropology and ethnography exerted a profound influence on early 20th century literary Modernism. These letters reveal the extent of the influence of Frobenius' concept of 'Paideuma' on Pound's poetic and political writings during this period and his growing engagement with the culture of Nazi Germany. Annotated throughout, the letters are supported by contextualising essays by leading Modernist scholars as well as relevant contemporary published articles by Pound himself and his leading correspondent at the Institute, the American Douglas C. Fox.

In the summer of 1936, Ezra Pound agreed to take on the role of European Correspondent for a newly launched travel journal entitled Globe: The International Magazine. Ezra Pound and 'Globe' Magazine: The Complete Correspondence collects for the first time Pound’s writings for the journal and his extensive correspondence with one of its editors, James Taylor Dunn, and the leading writers who Pound himself attempted to recruit for the magazine. Numbering almost forty letters and twenty published and unpublished articles, these writings represent a darkly significant time in Pound’s thought as his infatuation with the rise of fascism took root. Annotated throughout and supported by substantial explorations of the historical and cultural contexts of the writings, the book also includes a substantial bibliography of related writings and a biographical glossary of the major figures discussed in the correspondence and writing. Together, these texts represent an important resource for anyone interested in an important phase of 20th-Century literary modernism.

The figures of Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear throughout the writing of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats, featuring in his poems, short fictions, dialogues and as authorities in notes to his work. Bringing together into one volume published and unpublished writings featuring these two enigmatic figures, W.B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings traces their history and the development of Yeats’s mystical thought that culminated (twice) in the publication of his visionary work A Vision (1925, 1937).Including reproductions of manuscript and notebook pages as well as transcriptions and extracts from a wide range of Yeats’s mystical writings and substantial commentary and annotation throughout, this book is an essential resource for scholars of Yeats’s thought, his stylistic evolution and the esoteric influences on modernist writing in the early 20th century.

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Edited Volume PrizeBringing together works by writers from sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, central Europe, the Muslim world, Asia, South America and Australia – many translated into English for the first time – this is the first collection of statements on modernism by writers, artists and practitioners from across the world.Annotated throughout, the texts are supported by critical essays from leading modernist scholars exploring major issues in the contemporary study of global modernism. Global Modernists on Modernism is an essential resource for students and scholars of modernism and world literature and one that opens up a dazzling new array of perspectives on the field.

David Jones – author of In Parenthesis, the great poem of World War I – is increasingly recognized as a major voice in the first generation of British modernist writers. Acclaimed by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and W.H. Auden, his writing was deeply informed by his Catholic faith and Welsh blood.This book makes available for the first time a number of previously unpublished statements by Jones that open new perspectives on his own work and the religious, political, and cultural engagements of British modernism more broadly. Annotated throughout, with detailed commentaries exploring the historical context of each document, the volume presents the restored text of Jones’s essay on Hitler and includes a letter to Neville Chamberlain, an unfinished essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the transcript of an interview with Jones a year before his death. These reveal an unknown side of Jones and give fresh insight into the influences and assumptions of 20th-century British literary culture.