Modernist Peripheries: Fringes and Frontiers

Famously beginning ‘on or about December 1910’ and ending with mid-century postmodernism, the temporal parameters of modernism have long been set. Modernism’s geography, whilst shaped by border crossings and transatlantic exchanges, is similarly easy to define: Woolf’s Bloomsbury, Joyce’s Dublin, and the lively artistic spaces of 1920s Paris all provide key focal points on the modernist map. But what of those writers, artists, and thinkers who fall outside of the established boundaries? In terms not only of temporal and spatial topography but also of identity and aesthetics, is the category of modernism more exclusionary than it is expansive? What might be gained by a new critical approach that enlarges our conception of modernism by focussing on its peripheries and cross-disciplinary pollinations?

Through a series of seminars and workshops delivered by leading and emerging scholars working across the Arts and Humanities, this Research Strand casts a much-needed light on modernism’s margins. By drawing attention to texts, artworks, and technologies that have evaded close analysis as ‘modernist’, and by dismantling long-established frameworks that have threatened to limit understandings of the avant-garde, our aim is to explore the gains to be made in probing the fringes and pushing the temporal, spatial, and disciplinary frontiers of modernism.