Call For Chapter Proposals – The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Modernisms

Editors: Ruth Clemens, John Greaney, Maebh Long, Barry Sheils

For more than thirty years, the term ‘modernism’ has served to designate a historical period of cultural experiment and evaluate innovation in contemporary literary and cultural practice. Examples abound in scholarship: from Peter Bürger’s The Decline of Modernism (1992), to Marjorie Perloff’s 21st-Century Modernism (2002), Rebecca Walkowitz’s Cosmopolitan Style (2006), David James’s Modernist Futures (2011), and Michaela Bronstein’s Out of Context (2018), prominent critics have deployed modernism to recall an era of trailblazing cultural production and to identify aesthetic advances in the present. Discourses of modernism also permeate contemporary literary essays and reviews. Zadie Smith’s famous 2008 essay ‘Two Paths for the Novel’ argues that an ‘avant-garde’ move away from lyrical realism, one which embraces and furthers the pursuits of Freud, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett and Nabokov, might well spur an ‘alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward’. In 2010, Tom McCarthy wrote that the ‘task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism … to navigate the wreckage of that project’. In 2012, 2015, 2018 and 2021 respectively, Will Self, Julian Barnes, Olga Tokarczuk and Teju Cole each cite modernism as a key precursor to their literary initiatives. In 2022, The New York Times described Australian writer Gerald Murnane as fostering ‘a brand of late modernism’. Also in 2022, The New Statesman categorised Ali Smith as ‘a modernist for our times’, and, in 2024, dubbed Han Kang as writing ‘modernist prose’. In 2025, The Guardian termed Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face as ‘classic European modernism’ remade with contemporary concerns.

A turn to modernism is also evident beyond the academy and literary circles. Modernist verse is a regular reference for journalists and politicians, with statistics from Factiva showing that W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) was quoted more often online in 2016 – the centenary of the 1916 Rising in Ireland as well as the year of Brexit and Donald Trump’s first presidential election – than in preceding years. In 2022, the BBC commemorated the modernist annus mirabilis with a series titled ‘1922: The Birth of Now’, thus implying that the present has foundations in the modernist past. In 2024, viral images of saluting members of the Italian neofascist movement, CasaPound, which takes modernist poet Ezra Pound as its figurehead, caused Italian Democratic Party leader Elly Schlein to write: ‘Rome, 7 January 2024. It seems like 1924’. 

The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Modernisms seeks to analyse the contemporaneity of modernism. It invites critical scrutiny of the term’s historical and institutional reference points while evaluating its discursive prevalence today. Does modernism remain an apposite framework for thinking through the experiments and anxieties of the contemporary moment? Or does a nostalgia for modernist formulations of the new obscure the novelties of contemporary cultural practice? 

There is little doubt that the continued institutionalisation of modernism, especially within the North American university system, forms a key disciplinary coordinate for transnational literary studies. Does this mean the social and political imperatives of a historical moment have been remediated as questions of technique? Did the Pound Era morph into the Program Era and thereafter inform our contemporary, globalising media? And if ‘modernism’ now comprises an archival accumulation of a variety of aesthetic, critical and philosophical innovations, what can we say of its ‘sub-groups’ and related avant-garde movements – aestheticism, dada, decadence, futurism, psychoanalysis, surrealism, amongst others? With what alertness to historical difference should we continue to read these movements as establishing the foundations for forms, styles and susceptibilities that endure in contemporary aesthetic practice? 

We also ask: what counts as contemporary? How is a contemporary modernism differentiated from conceptions of late modernism and postmodernism? Can these terms and their implied periodisations converge? How do understandings of an ongoing and geographically dispersed modernism relate to the logics of change, rupture and ‘the new’ found in theorisations of meta modernism, neo modernism, post-postmodernism and remodernism?

Relatedly, we ask: what spatio-temporal scales shape our understandings of modernism’s contemporaneity? How is modernism contemporary in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow or New York? How does the appearance of national modernist canons, a phenomenon particularly observable in Europe, relate to earlier accounts of modernism as an expatriate and supranational movement? Do such questions presuppose Lagos, Suva and Manilla to be out of time, both in relation to modernism and the contemporary? Is modernism inseparable from the temporal considerations of geography and development? Given the stronger presence of the postmodern in the Americas, how does a contemporary American modernism relate to its postmodern past? 

We invite chapter proposals for contributions to The Edinburgh Companion to Cotemporary Modernisms, a comprehensive volume that will explore the contemporary relevance of modernism to twenty-first century arts and culture. We are interested in arguments that lay out the uses of modernism’s value for describing the literary and cultural forms of today, as well as those that contest its contemporary relevance. In light of early-twentieth-century modernism’s engagements with new media, technologies and visual languages, we are open to proposals that consider inter- or transmedial examples of contemporary modernisms. For consideration, please submit a 250-word abstract with a short biographical note to 

eupcontemporarymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 of January 2026. 

Topics may include but are not limited to: 

• What is a contemporary modernism? Where, how and for whom is it located? To what ends has modernism been re-purposed in the twenty-first century? What are the different ways in which modernism is contemporary today? 
• Has modernism, as Jean-Michel Rabaté suggests, become a ‘new classicism’? Do fiction’s most innovative advances today occur under the banner of modernism? Are there forms of experimentation in contemporary cultural production for which modernism, or the idea of a modernist legacy, is not an apt descriptor? Does the term ‘modernism’ now serve as a form of brand capital, bestowing onto an array of differently mediated cultural productions the status of high or serious art?
• Under what theoretical rubrics can we articulate a contemporary modernism (historicist, feminist, formalist, queer, global, neo-Marxist, post/decolonial, spatial, Wallersteinian)? What is the relation of postmodernism and late modernism to ideas of contemporary modernism? Did postmodernism mark, as David James suggests, ‘merely an interruption, a temporary delay in all that modernist aesthetics had still to achieve’? Or was postmodernism only ever a marker of a particular stage of late capitalism, one that had few real resonances outside pockets of the global north? 
• In what ways is modernism contemporary in regions whose ‘high’ modernist moment is over a century past? How has modernism become a mode of national memory? How do modernisms mediated by colonial legacies and the networks of global capital emerge today in relation to different national and regional cultures?
• Where are the contemporary avant-gardes? What constitutes an avant-garde today? Who is conducting assaults on taste and confronting the institutions of art in the twenty-first century? 
• In what ways has modernism been institutionalised? What are the different cultural and geopolitical uses, or appropriations, of the term? What new meanings of the term ‘modernism’ have been produced as a result of its different institutionalisations?
• How can modernism be understood in the light of contemporary technological advancements? In what ways does modernism relate to the internet? Is AI the new modernism, or does it diverge significantly from a modernist sense of ‘the new’?

References:

Armitstead, Claire. ‘Interview Olga Tokarczuk’. The Guardian, 20 April 2018.

Barnes, Julian. ‘Art doesn’t just capture the thrill of life ... sometimes it is that thrill’. The Guardian, 2 May 2015.

Michaela, Bronstein. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Bürger Peter, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Cole, Teju. ‘Teju Cole on the Wonder of Epiphanic Writing, Or: How Authors “Evoke the Overspilling World”’. Literary Hub, 26 October 2021.

Greaney, John. ‘Modernist memories: mnemotechnics, transmissions, temporalities’. Textual Practice 38(1) (2024): 1-9.

Hughes-Hallett, Lucy. ‘The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride review’. The Guardian, 30 January 2025.

Illingworth, Dustin. ‘After a Five-Decade Run, a Master Hangs Up His Reins’. The New York Times, 3 May 2022.

James, David. Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Marr, Andrew. ‘Ali Smith, our thoroughly modern modernist’. The New Statesman, 20 April 2022.

Peirson-Hagger, Ellen. ‘Why Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature’. The New Statesman, 11 October 2024.

Perloff, Marjorie. 21st Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.

Purdon, James. ‘Tom McCarthy: To Ignore the Avant Garde Is Akin to Ignoring Darwin’. Observer, 31 July 2010.

Self, Will. ‘Modernism and Me’. The Guardian, 3 August 2012.

Smith, Zadie. ‘Two Paths for the Novel’. The New York Review of Books, November 20 2008. 

Walkowitz, Rebecca. Cosmopolitan Style. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Acknowledgements: 

This work is supported by the Research Ireland project, CONTMODS, led by John Greaney.

This work is supported by the Leiden University Fund / Stichting Elise Mathilde Fonds.