Modernism and Close Reading

Modernist studies is evolving at an unprecedented rate: expanding its archives, proliferating its objects of knowledge, lengthening its history, and reforming some of its most established methods. But at a time when scholars in a variety of other fields (Victorian studies, Romanticism, and Early Modern Studies) are reassessing the place of formalism and aesthetics in their work, modernist studies has arguably yet to reimagine its own relationship to the very practice it helped to institutionalize across the twentieth-century–namely, close reading. Modernism and Close Reading responds to this lacuna, bringing together world-renowned scholars of modernist studies to consider the history and future of critical reading at a moment in the field’s extraordinary transformation.