Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat (review)

Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams’s 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti’s distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the prospects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modernism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book.

The prospect of a modernist “choose your own adventure” scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader’s agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela—again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on “Sentimental, Sentimentality” points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to “Form, Formalism” and “Woman, New Woman” but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro” and the High Modernists via E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associative method, or what Henry Miller would have called “spiral form” (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often over-looked H. D. in “Reality, Realism”; John Cowper Powys in “Queer, Gay” and “Shock, Shell Shock”; and Mulk Raj Anand in “Personality, Impersonality.” More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, I. A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists.

Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for developing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing “Research on such a grand scale depends on massive resources” (xv) such as online digital repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through Internet Archive), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (jstor to the Modernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti’s distant reading in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable connections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti’s project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. Nevertheless, the curated nature of the volume, reflecting the care and attention of expert readers in the field, means that readers are invited to connect entries in unexpected ways drawn as much from word frequencies as from the interpretive expertise of the project authors. While the entry on...