The Modernist Journals Project
for students and scholars of modernism
The MJP is a multi-faceted project, which is intended to become a major resource for the study of the rise of modernism in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature at the center of this study. As such, its historical scope has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922, and a geographical range that extends to English language periodicals, wherever they were published. With magazines at the center, the MJP also has a generic range that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for the study of these periodicals. At this stage of the MJP's development, however, the chronological range of periodicals extends only from 1904 to 1922.
We end at 1922 for both intellectual and practical reasons: the practical reason is that copyright becomes an issue with publications from 1923 onward; the intellectual reason is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922, a date marked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We are concentrating, then, on the rise of modernism, in which the magazines played a crucial role.
The MJP (http://www.modjourn.org) began in 1995 at Brown University, with funding from the University and small local grants, as a website of digital editions of periodicals connected to the rise of modernism in the English-speaking world. Our first major project began in 1996: a digital edition of The New Age, a British weekly magazine edited by A. R. Orage from 1907 to 1922. In the course of preparing this edition, the MJP generated various supporting materials, including a set of biographical sketches over a thousand artists mentioned in the magazine, with images of their work, along with essays on contributors to the magazine and historical introductions to each six-month volume. Our edition of The New Age was completed, with the aid of a grant from the NEH, in 2004.
The University of Tulsa joined the MJP in 2003. Using copies in Tulsa's McFarlin Library, we were able to add Dana, an Irish magazine of 1904-1905 best known for first publishing James Joyce, to our digital archive in 2005. In that same year, the MJP redesigned its technological infrastructure from scratch, both to accommodate growth and to bring its materials and methods into conformance with the best practices of the digital library community. (The technical details of the new MJP are discussed below.) At the same time, in response to requests from members of the Modernist Studies Association, the MJP has added a digital edition of the well-known Vorticist magazine, Blast, based on copies in the McFarlin Library. The MJP's website was also redesigned from the ground up, producing a data-driven, standards-compliant interface to the MJP's resources.
Our permanent staff includes Robert Scholes and Sean Latham, directors of the MJP at Brown and Tulsa, respectively, and Clifford Wulfman, Technical Director of the MJP and Manager of the Site at Brown. Robert Scholes is a senior scholar of modernism, whose work is widely known. He was President of the Modern Language Association in 2004. Sean Latham, a former Project Manager of the MJP at Brown, is now Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly at Tulsa, an Associate Professor of English there, and the author of books and articles on modernist literature and humanities computing. He hosted the meeting of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) at Tulsa in October, 2006 and will become President of the MSA in 2008. Clifford Wulfman holds a PhD from Yale in modern literature and an MS in computer science from the U. of Pennsylvania. He was a Research Associate at the Perseus Project at Tufts U. before coming to Brown, and has published and lectured extensively on modernist literature and humanities computing. He is currently Webmaster for the MSA. In 2005 he completely redesigned the MJP web pages, generated a new search engine for the site, and integrated our work more closely with both the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown and the Center for Digital Initiatives in the Brown Library. These three faculty members are assisted by graduate and undergraduate students at both schools.
During the current academic year the MJP has added the British little magazine, Rhythm (1911-1913) to our archive - a journal especially important for the quality of visual art that appeared in it under the art editorship of J. D. Fergusson, and for the writing of Katherine Mansfield, which appeared in almost every issue. Along with Rhythm, we have added its successor, The Blue Review, and the successor to Blast, The Tyro. We have also added Ezra Pound's important essay, "Small Magazines," which first appeared in the NCTE's English Journal in 1930.
We have also been granted permission by the University of Illinois Press to publish a digital edition of Theodore Peterson's book on the American periodicals of this period: Magazines in the Twentieth Century, which was originally published in 1956 and is still a major resource for the American periodicals in our field of interest, especially the part of that field which extends beyond the little magazines.
In the future we hope to add important periodicals from New York and Chicago as well as London to our archive, Including The English Review from 1908 to 1910, Scribner's from 1910 to 1922,and Poetry from 1912 to 1922.
Another project is a sample of single issues of magazines published within a year of December 1910, the date on which Virginia Woolf claimed that "human character changed," becoming modern. We expect, ultimately to offer samples of twenty magazines from the years 1910 and 1911.
We are also offering a database of magazines published between 1890 and 1922 that provides information about hundreds of periodicals, ranging from tiny "ephemeral bibelots" to giant mass magazines.
The MJP has a distinguished international Board of Advisors, whose members are consulted about the projects we should undertake and about improvements in our web site:
Since the MJP opened its web site in 2003, its usage has increased steadily. We are currently receiving about 10,000 visits a day and delivering close to 40,000 pages daily. As additional resources are added, we expect the number of people using this site to increase dramatically.
MJP_Project_Manager at brown.edu (replace "at" with @)