Remaking the New: Modernism and Textual Scholarship 13-14 July 2017

The last ten years have seen a textual turn in modernist literary studies. New editions of modernist authors are now in progress, transforming the materials with which critics have worked. Current projects include editions of T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, Dorothy Richardson, Evelyn Waugh, and Wyndham Lewis, Supported by the AHRC Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions Project and building on the AHRC New Modernist Editing network, this conference aims to bring together editors and critics working on modernist texts to discuss the implications for modernist studies of the textual turn. The organisers wish to give particular weight to the contribution of women writers and less canonical writers to modernist literature. The institutionalisation of modernism within the academy after 1945 created an overwhelmingly male canon and editions of women writers have followed slowly after those of figures such as Eliot, Joyce and Beckett. The Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield editions are well under way and the Dorothy Richardsons editions are in process. However, the works of many key figures, such as Jean Rhys and Djuna Barnes, still await attention. The processes by which some authors get chosen and others are left out is complex and deserves scrutiny. New editions contribute to a gradual reconfiguration of the early twentieth-century literary field, transforming our understanding of literary and intellectual history. The result of remaking modernist texts is a new understanding of the past, which will inform how we read early twentieth-century literature in the future. This conference will discuss the key issues in the new modernist editing creating an opportunity for editors to pool and exchange knowledge