Global Modernists on Modernism
An Anthology

Literary modernism has historically been understood as describing a period of aesthetic foment and renewal in the early twentieth century, centred in Europe and the US. In recent years, many scholars of modernism have sought to expand these boundaries, arguing that modernism was in fact a global phenomenon, and that practitioners of literary modernism can be found on every continent, and in most countries. This expansion has dramatically reconfigured the boundaries of the field, and has had significant effects on its scholarly emphasis and direction. It has allowed for a new engagement between modernist studies and work in postcolonial and decolonial literature, and has revealed previously unacknowledged founts of exciting modernist writing around the world. But research in this field has been hampered by the fact that primary documents are not widely available to scholars, either because they are not available in English or because they are divided between an overwhelming number of different literary traditions. Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology seeks to respond to this situation, by bringing together seventy-six primary sources for global modernism, organised into 15 national, regional, linguistic or ethnic traditions. The product of a large-scale collaboration run by my co-editor Stephen Ross and I, the published book runs to around 210,000 words and contains 76 original documents from 19 languages. Many of these texts appear in this volume for the first time in English; others were unavailable, out of print, or hard to access prior to its publication.

In assembling the volume, we adopt what we call an “inductive” approach to the problem of definition, relying on accounts of modernism developed by scholars, critics, and authors who write from or with deep knowledge of the national, regional or linguistic traditions we treat. The volume includes key manifestos, essays and other statements by global modernist artists and writers. Manifestos and essays by practitioners have been crucial to advancing the study of Euro-American modernism, and we hoped that this volume might have a similarly galvanising effect on the study of global modernism. By assembling these texts about modernism by modernists from around the world, it seeks to provide scholars with an entry point into the diversity of modernisms across the globe and facilitates comparative work by scholars in all areas of modernist studies.

Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology was published by Bloomsbury in 2020, and won the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Prize for an Anthology, Collective or Edition.