The Modernist Journals Project

April 28, 2008 9:50 AM

The Modernist Journals Project collects literary arts journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including both issues of Wyndham Lewis' Vorticist manifesto Blast, the first ten years of Poetry magazine (with Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and foreign correspondent Ezra Pound), topical essays, the Virginia Woolf-inspired December 1910 Project, the amazing proto-dada zine Le Petit Journal des Réfusées and a searchable biographical database of famous and not so famous artists and writers.
posted by mediareport (10 comments total)

Wow! My BA thesis will be surrounding this subject so this is a treasure trove for me. Thanks!
posted by auralcoral at 9:54 AM on April 28, 2008

that's quite a find - thanks
posted by pyramid termite at 10:08 AM on April 28, 2008

This is so swell it's keen. Wonderful resource, thanks.
posted by FelliniBlank at 10:26 AM on April 28, 2008

Holy crap, this is amazing. For years I've kicked myself for not buying the reproduction of Blast that was on sale in the '80s just because it cost a bunch, and now I have access for free. And all those issues of Poetry, and... and... w00t! Thanks, mediareport!
posted by languagehat at 11:28 AM on April 28, 2008

This is a great find, mediareport. If only for this bit of doggerel by T. S. Eliot:

I shall not want Honour in Heaven,
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sydney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of his kidney.

- From A Cooking Egg (second half).

That said, most of it's pretty darn fine stuff.
posted by Kattullus at 11:52 AM on April 28, 2008

Great post, thanks!
posted by ersatz at 3:07 PM on April 28, 2008

I love this from the Journal des Réfusées:

E is for editor; what does it mean?
Everyone now runs his own magazine

Plus ça change...
posted by mediareport at 3:19 PM on April 28, 2008

Neato. Makes me want to look through Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism again. Thanks.
posted by bardic at 4:28 PM on April 28, 2008

Wow, this fucking rocks. The British Library had an exhibition on modernist print stuff recently and I learned from one of the texts on the wall that Wyndham Lewis wrote to the War Office in 1914 requesting an army job, pointing out that he had masterminded 'the Cubist invasion of England without the loss of a single Cube'.
posted by Mocata at 2:40 AM on April 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

Readers of Ulysses might take an interest in Dana; its contributors included AE, John Eglinton, George Moore, and James Joyce. Though I never liked his poetry much myself.
posted by cobra libre at 7:08 AM on April 30, 2008