Modernism Lab
Overview
The Modernism Lab is a virtual space dedicated to collaborative research on the roots of literary modernism. We hope, by a process of shared investigation, to describe the emergence of modernism out of a background of social, political, and existential ferment. The project covers the period 1914-1926, from the outbreak of the first world war to the full-blown emergence of English modernism. The Lab has supported undergraduate classes on Modern Poetry, the Modern British Novel, Modernist London, and Joyce’s Ulysses, and a graduate course in English and Comparative Literature, as well as a class on modern German literature at the University of Notre Dame. Students in the classes have contributed materials to the website and used it as the platform for their research. The main components of the website are an innovative research tool, YNote, containing information on the activities of 24 leading modernist writers during this crucial period and a wiki consisting of brief interpretive essays on literary works and movements of the period.
The project as a whole aims to reconstitute the social and intellectual webs that linked these writers—correspondence, personal acquaintance, reading habits—and their influence on the major works of the period. We are interested, too, in broadening the canon of works studied in the period by paying attention to minor works by major authors, major works by minor authors, and works that may have been influential in their time but that are often no longer read.
Questions of particular importance for our research involve the modernists’ engagement with their literary, intellectual, and historical context. We are particularly interested in Anglo-European literary relations. A typical question of this sort would be, “How did the translations of Dostoevsky by Constance Garnett influence English writing in the period?” Another major concern is the tracing of intellectual trends: “How and when did psychoanalysis make its impact felt in modernist writing?” We pay particular attention to the literary manifestations of a broader historical context, including the modernists’ involvement with political movements such as socialism, feminism, liberalism, nationalism, and imperialism. Another major theme is the attitudes of these writers to formal religion and to alternatives such as atheism, neo-paganism, spiritualism, and the occult. The database traces the empirical information—such as references to Dostoevsky or Freud or Tagore in writers’ correspondence—while the wiki offers interpretive accounts of how these influences played out in the modernists’ formal and thematic concerns.
The Kan'ichi Asakawa Epistolary Network Project
Kani’chi Asakawa (1873-1948) was the first professor of Japanese history and the head of the East Asia Library at Yale. Asakawa was an influential scholar in the field of...
Learn More »ATHENA
Automatic Text Height ExtractioN for the Analysis of old handwritten manuscripts (ATHENA) has developed a layout analysis method to perform automatic text height estimation, even in the case of...
Learn More »Babylonian Collection Digital Imaging
This project extends research methods and supports didactic objectives associated with the Yale Babylonian Collection, which contains the largest assemblage of cuneiform tablets, seals, and other inscribed artifacts documenting...
Learn More »