Description: This is the first book specifically devoted to the new modernist studies. Bringing together a range of perspectives on the past, present, and future of this vibrant, complicated scholarly enterprise, the collection reconsiders its achievements and challenges as both a mode of inquiry and an institutional formation. In its first section, the volume offers a fresh history of the new modernist studies' origins amid the intellectual configurations of the end of the twentieth century and changing views of the value, influence, and scope of modernism. In the second section a dozen leading scholars examine recent trends in modernist scholarship to suggest possible new paths of research, showing how the field continues to engage with other areas of study and how it makes a case for the ongoing meaning of modernist literature and art in the contemporary world.
Brief description: Douglas Mao is Russ Family Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton, 1998) and Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development, and Literature 1860-1960 (Princeton, 2008) as well as the co-editor, with Rebecca Walkowitz, of Bad Modernisms (Duke, 2006). A past president of the Modernist Studies Association, he has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and currently serves as Series Editor of Hopkins Studies in Modernism and Senior Editor of ELH.
Review Quotes: '... essential reading for all in this amorphous, contested field.' Abbie Garrington, Modern Language Review