Introduction: Modernist Non-fictional Narratives: Rewriting Modernism

This special issue of E-rea focuses on the non-fictional prose writings of the modernist period. It brings to the fore essays, diaries, articles, letters, reviews, manifestos, short books, and other non-fictional prose texts by a variety of authors, many familiar, some less familiar, orbiting at different distances from the centre of this phenomenon called modernism, and whether travelling centripetally, centrifugally, or aslant all responding in different ways to its gravitational pull. That singular term modernism has in scholarly discourse tended to become the plural modernisms (Nicholls, Childs). This issue of E-rea embraces and extends this sense of pluralism by its focus on non-fictional prose writing, sometimes a lesser-observed, relatively forgotten cousin when compared to the dominant genres of writing of the period and the enormous (and necessary) scrutiny they continue to attract. Considering together the non-fictional prose texts of modernism explores the way in which these texts make and remake, draft and redraft, construct and deconstruct a series of conflicting and convergent modernisms; it also intimates how reading them anew might affect the current state of the field. The renewed scholarly emphasis on modernist magazines and other journals of the period makes reexamining such writing all the more prescient. n interest in the history of the book has naturally widened to include all kinds of printed matter and ephemera, and prioritizes a perspective that considers these items as published material, examining in different ways all their signs and bibliographic codes. Fugitive prose items sometimes not reprinted since their original publication are now available to view in a comparative context. These texts demand new appraisal and a concomitant reappraisal of the wider production of their authors as actors in a publishing marketplace. Similarly, new or revisited editions of diaries and letters (see for instance the ongoing projects of edited letters from Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats) help to re-place their authors as part of a vital correspondence network or present them working in new imaginative spaces between the public and the private. Indeed, modernist writers letters or diaries have only rarely been explored as literary writings in their own right, complete with their own conventions and convention-breaking. Looking at them anew provides fresh theoretical openings in their construction of varied and varying modernisms. The issue thus observes plural modernisms in the making, and brings to view some less considered texts.