Research project
Neomodernisms: Networking Modernist Memory between contemporary scholarship and literature
How do contemporary authorship and scholarship work together to shape the way that early twentieth century literary and cultural movements are remembered today?
- Duration
- 2025 - 2026
- Contact
- Ruth Clemens
- Funding
-
Leiden University Fund
- Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds
This project aims to analyse the dynamic relationship between the contemporary literary field and the contemporary scholarly field in reimagining the modernist period. By investigating the entangled relations between contemporary literary and scholarly actors to understand what emerging engagements with the cultural memory of modernism tell us, this project reveals how contemporary authorship and scholarship together actively rewrite modernist cultural memory to reflect contemporary socio-political contexts.
The cultural memory of the modernist period (c. 1914-1939) is mediated by its literature: figures and movements like Kafka, Woolf, Dada, and Futurism evoke modernism in the cultural imaginary today. A century on, there is a trend in contemporary literature explicitly revisiting these modernist histories (e.g. Nobel prizewinning author Olga Tokarczuk’s 2022 novel Empuzjon. Horror przyrodoleczniczy rewrites Thomas Mann’s 1924 modernist work Der Zauberberg). Concurrently, a major way the early twentieth century is revisited nowadays is through scholarship itself. This project is a scholarly intervention in the present moment in history, an era of modernist centenaries, urging scholars and writers to think about the legacy of modernism. Present-day commemorations of modernism are shaped by present-day culture, scholarship, and politics. This reflects wider existential questions in the field, where the historical exclusion of marginalised writers from the modernist canon prompts a re-evaluation of the very category of modernism. This focus on the hidden histories and contested heritage of modernism coincides with a contemporary phenomenon in global literature to explicitly revisit and question the modernist canon.
This mode of revisiting, rewriting, and re-visioning modernism through its literary texts is called neomodernism: a new trend in engagements with modernism in contemporary contexts. However, there is not yet a scholarly framework for the emerging trend of neomodernism in literature as there is for neovictorianism or neomedievalism. This project addresses this gap.
Neomodernisms was made possible in part by the donors of the Leiden University Fund and the Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds, www.luf.nl.
The project team is Dr. Ruth Alison Clemens, postdoctoral researcher, and Clarice Carvalho Alphen, student assistant.
Currently in preparation is the Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Modernisms, a comprehensive volume that will explore the contemporary relevance of modernism to twenty-first century arts and culture. This collection is edited in collaboration with colleagues from University College Dublin, Durham University, and the University of Otago.
Additional project outputs are listed below:
Clemens, R. A. 2026. ‘Re-visioning Modernism: Intermedial Reckoning in the Anglophone World.’ Paper presented at IMBXL 2026 Conference on The Politics of Intermedial Connectivity, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 27-29 May.
Clemens, R.A. 2025. ‘Fake monographs and empty archives: modernist countermemory in LOTE and The Most Secret Memory of Men.’ Paper presented at Relational Forms X – 1925, 2025: Which Twenties? Empathy and Estrangement Across Time in Literature and the Arts, Department of Anglo-American Studies (Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto) and CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, 4-6 December.
The project involves three online sandbox-style ‘salons’ in the spirit of modernist experimentation and one in-person workshop and panel discussion, taking place in the first half of 2026. The salons are organised in collaboration with Dr. John Greaney and his Research Ireland project CONTMODS at University College Dublin. For more information or to attend, please contact Ruth Clemens.
Salon 1: Unfinished Projects of Modernism
Thursday 19 February 2026 on Zoom, 10-11:30am EST / 3-4:30pm GMT / 4-5:30pm CET.
With Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Salon 2: Curating Modernism Today
Tuesday 7 April 2026 on Zoom, 10-11:30am EST / 3-4:30pm BST / 4-5:30pm CEST.
With Katia Denysova, University of Tübingen, Meindert Peters, Oxford University, and political craft collective Decorating Dissidence (Jade French and Lottie Whalen).
Salon 3: Nationalist, Populist, and Authoritarian Reappropriations of Modernism
Tuesday 7 May 2026 on Zoom, 10-11:30am EST / 3-4:30pm BST / 4-5:30pm CEST.
With Joseph Owen, University of Southampton, Katerina Pavlidi, University College Dublin, and Philip McGowan, Queen’s University Belfast.
Collage workshop and panel discussion: Modernist Pasts, Neomodernist Futures
July 2026, more information to follow shortly.
With Jade French, University of Loughborough, Thalia Ostendorf, University of Amsterdam, Anneloek Scholten, Utrecht University, and Chris Flinterman, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
This project undertakes one primary case study: Neomodernist Woolf.
Developing an approach from the sociology of literature, specifically literary network analysis, allows for the study of the wider context of the dynamic relationships between authorship and scholarship in both directions via visualisation of the quantity and qualitative properties of nodes and edges within networks, with the innovate step of incorporating scholarship itself into this textual sociology.
Data will be gathered from across literary, cultural, and scholarly institutions, including but not limited to literary and non-fiction texts, paratexts, essays, publishing data, translation data, and scholarly publications, events, and associations. In the context of the project size, the primary case study focuses on engagements since 2020 with one significant modernist figure: Virginia Woolf. Woolf is an apt primary case as engagements with her are wide-ranging across diverse perspectives, media, scholarly networks, and texts which explicitly incorporate scholarly historiographies, themes, and conventions. Analysing Woolf enables the identification of broader trends in emerging re-engagements with the early twentieth century, while the limitation of one author makes the project feasible. The open-source software Gephi will be used to visualise and analyse these networks, with the possibility to compare across geographical location, language, and other variables.