What is ModNets?
Modernist Networks (“ModNets”) is a federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies. ModNets has the dual goals of providing a vetting community for digital modernist scholarship and a technological infrastructure to support development of scholarly projects and access to scholarship on modernist literature and culture. ModNets aims to promote affiliated digital projects; to offer peer review based on content, conception, and technical design; to provide editorial and technical support; to evolve standards and “best practices”; and to maintain a system for the aggregation of scholarly resources in the field.
The field of modernist studies has thrived and greatly expanded in recent years, becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, transmedial, and geographically decentered. While the temporal boundaries of the field are a topic of current debate, for the purposes of this consortium we are soliciting projects spanning the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th. Inevitably some projects—on Objectivist poetry or musical Serialism, for example, or on sound technology—will cross boundaries, and in such cases ModNets does not intend to be doctrinaire. By concentrating, however, on a modernism conceived in historical terms as the response in expressive culture to the specific global modernity associated with such phenomena as late imperialism, the two World Wars, first-wave feminism, the emergence of the modern city, and the advent of technologies of mass culture, we intend to maintain a focus on a historically rooted modernism and not to engulf all literatures and cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries.
