Modernist Commons

Welcome to the Modernist Commons, a digital repository of source materials, collection of critical editions and articles, and suite of editing tools. Managed by Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC), this site has been designed to allow users to ingest images, process texts with optical character recognition software, perform markup on transcriptions and images, append critical apparatuses, collate multiple versions, and display editions in a multimedia viewer. The platform integrates a number of open-source digital tools (Islandora, CWRC Writer, Shared Canvas, Calliope, CollateX).

Among the newest features of the Modernist Commons is a collection of articles migrated from The Modernism Lab. Directed by Pericles Lewis at Yale University, the Modernism Lab is a virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism. The original project covers the period 1914-1926, from the outbreak of the First World War to the full-blown emergence of English modernism. This is a collaborative project including over eighty graduate and undergraduate students at Yale and ten other universities. This founding initiative has sought to broaden the canon of works studied in the period by paying attention to minor works by major authors, major works by minor authors, and works that may have been influential in their time but that are no longer much read. With the Lab's integration into the Modernist Commons, these principles of the original project extend to include a more expansive international repertoire of modernist literatures and cultures.

For more information about the Modernist Commons, or to request permission to access the editing tools to produce your own critical editions or articles, please contact us at modernistcommons@gmail.com.

Featured Editions

After Lowry: A Film Essay

After Lowry attempts to complicate in productive ways the experience (ideally conceived as unmediated) of The Malcolm Lowry Walk, a landscape currently occupying a curious space between the natural and the cultivated, the private and the public. The Malcolm Lowry Walk, located in Cates Park in the village of Dollarton in the district of North Vancouver, British Columbia, commemorates the author of the great 20th-century novel Under the Volcano, who with his wife Margerie Bonner lived from 1940 to 1954 in a squatter’s shack on the beach there., This documentary essay is part of an essay collection, Malcolm Lowry and Space, edited by Miguel Mota and Richard Lane, published by the University of Ottawa Press. This film was made possible by a UBC Hampton Fund Research Grant in the Humanities and Social Sciences.