The joint research seminar which initially inspired this issue (Société d'Études Woolfiennes/Société d'Études Modernistes) was partially disrupted and delayed due to Covid-19. The energies that emerged from the resulting disruptions offered impetus to the organisers to attempt to give new life to the joint sessions in the form of a joint publication. We are grateful to Benoît Tadié for his insightful afterword.

1Modernism as a period of artistic and literary effervescence has been strongly identified with the energies of rebirth and regeneration. In ways many in the 21^st century would no doubt approve of, such energies are seen to drive Modernists high and low, canonical and avant-garde, to embrace experimentation with new forms of art and life and to transgress normative constraints of genre and gender, of literary style as well as life-style(s). Thus Virginia Woolf is celebrated for giving “old” English words a second birth by arranging them in “new orders” (“Craftsmanship” Woolf 1942, 130), criticising writers who resisted new literary forms (“Modern Fiction,” Woolf 2003, 146-154), and embracing possibilities where “perhaps for the first time in literature” “women like women” (“A Room of One’s Own” Woolf 2019, 74). For those writers and artists that emerged on the scene “on or around December 1910” (“Characters in Fiction,” Woolf 1988, 421) as self-identified Modernists, as for scholars of 21^st century New Modernist Studies (Mao and Walkowitz, 2021; Latham and Rogers, 2021; Byron, 2019; Rabaté, 2019), Modernisms’ multiple “renaissances” seem unable to resist the attraction of Ezra Pound’s slogan ‘Make it new.’ 

2If ‘Make It New” “is the most durably useful of all modernist expressions of the value of novelty,” as Michael North reminds us, Pound’s slogan itself was nevertheless a historical recycling of an ancient Chinese proverb, one that might also be translated as “do it again,” or, in Pound’s demotic American, “Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!” (North 2013, 164). T. S. Eliot, for one, thought Pound’s “Make it noo” [sic] (North 2013, 164), proposed as a title for a collection of essays, too new for audiences of the 1930s. Thus, while Modernism is often conflated with the avant-gardes’ dynamic rupture with past traditions, many Modernists were ambivalent about the new, and claimed the literary past as a source of inspiration. In addition to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats sought to revive moribund English aesthetics by turning to Italian, Indian, Gaelic and Japanese traditions, thus allowing for renovations of a non-linear literary heritage. As opposed to the Futurist iconoclastic project to burn all books, their own tabula rasa embraced past forms and modes. Many Modernist writers inscribe the rebirth of literary forms at the heart of each phrase. Other Modernists, such as Wallace Stevens, shunned the typographic experimentation embraced by their contemporaries Gertrude Stein or E. E. Cummings. W. B. Yeats claimed that “ancient salt is best packing” (Yeats 1961, 522); while in her novels Virginia Woolf explored the history of England, setting it against the present time (Orlando, The Years, Between the Acts), as well as prehistory lying at the bottom of a many-layered temporality – a leitmotif in many of her works.

3Just as the temporal and spatial boundaries of Modernism have been the subject of critical conversation for the past two decades or so (Stanford Friedman 2006; Mao and Walkowitz 2006; Perloff 2002), recent scholarly debates have also openly challenged the very notion that literary Modernism is based on an unequivocal enthusiasm for the New, including the New of “New Modernist Studies” (Altieri 2012; Winkiel 2018; Seaber and Shallcross 2019; Goldstone 2021). In the wake of such questionings, this issue aims to further explore the ambivalence of Modernism’s relationship to its literary heritage, as well as the paradoxes of its negotiations with the shock of the new at a moment of historical and aesthetic crisis. To what extent is the ‘Make it New’ of Modernism always bound up in a dialectical embrace of repetition and renewal, embracing also at one and the same time the bipolar moods of ‘neophilia’ and ‘neophobia’? In the age of technological warfare and mechanical reproduction, Modernist rebirth is in ‘dialectical embrace’ with mortality, degeneration, obsolescence and repetition (Edmond 2019, 11). The rise of modern totalitarianism in the 1930s also shadows what Samuel Beckett called James Joyce’s “endless germination, maturation, putrefaction” of language in Finnegans Wake (1939) (Beckett 1983, 29), and the Modernist impasse marked by Beckett’s own “nothing new” in his 1938 Murphy, on the eve of World War II (Beckett 1957, 1). Here, if Joyce’s Aristotelian aesthetics is implicit, we can turn to Agamben’s reminder that Aristotelian poiesis – and the aesthetic ‘making’ of Modernisms’ ‘make it new’ – is not concerned with the construction of novelty for its own sake, or with innovation that reaches its limit at some final teleological end-point (Agamben 1999, 73-75). For Aristotle, as Agamben reminds us, “every art is concerned with giving birth,” and is therefore always also concerned with death and re-birth. Thus Hannah Arendt, who, like Beckett, wrote in the wake of two world wars, reanimates the Greek conception of poiesis as a rebirth or renaissance occasioned whenever “the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it” (Arendt 1998, 169).

4In this respect, the Modernists’ frequent references to the Early Modern Renaissance, be it in their literary works or in the names of their artistic and literary movements (the Irish Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance, Southern Renaissance), are symptomatic of this dual mood that celebrates the potentialities of rebirth while reaching for a distant past. Or, as Quinones argues, “[t]he confrontation with the Renaissance is an essential one for Modernism” (Quinones 1985, 6). From Walter Pater’s famous conclusion to The Renaissance (1873) and his celebration of “courting new impressions” and “moments of intensity” (Pater 1900, 197) through Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” (Woolf 2002), and her attention to Elizabethan literary themes and forms, the Early Modern Renaissance has provided critical impetus in defining the Modernists’ exploration of new spatio-temporal and aesthetic forms. The Early Modern Renaissance might provide distance from a perhaps distressing present time and near future, just as the transnational migrations of both eras fuelled the expanded periodization and scale of New Modernist Studies: transatlantic, global, planetary Modernisms (Halliwell 2005; Doyle and Winkel 2005; Mao and Walkowitz 2008; Stanford Friedman 2015). The question then arises of how these 20th century Modernists of our past history, just as scholars of 21st century Modernist studies, might be said to follow Walter Benjamin’s dictum that, “[i]n every era the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it” (Benjamin 1969, 255).

5This issue proposes to further explore this double movement that at once embraces and resists the ‘new’ of modernity. Here, the bipolarities of neophilia and neophobia should not be read as positive or negative valuations. Rather, neophilia and neophobia are treated as poles in an active negotiating strategy at a moment of crisis that constantly oscillates between the two modes. Rather than add to the proliferation of new categories of ‘New’ Modernist studies, in this issue we attend to nuances of mood and energy bound up in the dialectical embrace of ‘neophilia’ and ‘neophobia’.

6The tension between “neophilia” and “neophobia” can be correlated with what Bryony Randall, in her essay “Woolf and Modernist Studies,” calls the “endless but compelling tension between the need to formulate ever new Modernisms [...] and the apparent need for us to retain a single term, ‘Modernism,’ that has at least some critical purchase” (Randall 2012, 37). If Virginia Woolf figures prominently in the essays that make up this collection, this is due not only to the contingencies of this project’s genesis, but also to the productive role Woolf plays in “challenging the very definition [of Modernism] she continually contributes to constructing” (ibid.). Here, the productive tension between challenging and constructing Modernism is produced not only by Woolf’s “attachment to the marginal, the peripheral and the non-institutionalised,” as Randall suggests (ibid.), but also to her own dialectical embrace of ‘neo-philia’ and ‘neo-phobia,’ as the articles in this collection more than aptly demonstrate. Following Woolf’s own attachment to the marginal, peripheral and non-institutionalised, we acknowledge, but choose not to focus on, those Modernists most directly associated with canonically recognised Modernist Renaissances: the terrible trio of the Irish Renaissance, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. Instead, our collection gathers a constellation of Modernists, and analyses of them, whose dispositions share Woolf’s dialectical embrace of neophilia and neophobia, as well as her attachment to the marginal, peripheral and non-institutionalised. 

7We have gathered ten papers examining the processes of writing the tension between renewal and resistance, focusing on several aspects such as trans-national, trans-historical, trans-human or gendered readings, and inviting an epistemological dialogue with current debates that have come to challenge the spatial and ontological boundaries of Modernism. The contributions to this issue present essays that revise and interrogate the Modernist renaissances – and tensions between neophilia and neophobia – of Modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, May Sinclair and Thomas Wolfe, but also Harold Nicolson, Lytton Strachey and Walter Benjamin.

8In keeping with one of the tropes of the Modernist ethos – multiplicity and fragmentation – we have conceived this issue as a reference to Modernist collage: it is intended to form a mosaic of four parts that will bring out the different facets of the topic, and explore the multiple ways in which Modernism engages, plays with, and challenges renascent temporalities. Each section examines one different dimension related to the temporalities of renewal and is composed of two or three articles that we envisage as small clusters that either share common interests or establish a budding – nascent – conversation with one another. This fragmented structure will provide an opportunity to mingle neophiliac and neophobic moods and energies as well as to intersperse discussions of Virginia Woolf with other Modernist writers, which will in turn allow unexpected resonances between previously overlooked affinities to spring from these juxtapositions.

9The first section, entitled “Transhuman, Transnational, Transcultural Renascence,” inaugurates the issue by addressing the intensely contemporary questions related to transition across traditional boundaries, between human and animal, between languages, cultures and continents, as a dynamic process and movement. It explores the ways in which Modernism has engaged with sometimes turbulent experiments that contributed to making porous those previously unpassable frontiers, both symbolic and geographic, between different worlds, languages, cultures, bodies and identities. Frédéric Regard’s formative article “Modernism’s Zoo (Pet and Pen in Virginia Woolf’s Flush),” drawing on both Agamben and Arendt, the “most eminent 20^th-century Aristotelian philosophers,” inaugurates this issue with an Aristotelian reading of the radical and creative potentialities of Virginia Woolf’s handling of animal life and subjectivity as a paradoxical form of humanism, one that suggests a philosophical renewal of the ways in which the elusive human mind can be redefined. Also drawing on Agamben’s and Arendt’s Aristotelian conception of poiesis to explore the fierce neophilia of a transatlantic artist as Modernist maker, Diane Drouin’s discussion of Mina Loy, “‘Mina Loy’s Surrealist Strategies of Renewal,” creates a counterpoint to Woolf’s experimentation with the frontiers between different worlds by paying tribute to the lesser-known artistic productions and “American” linguistic innovation of an “English” writer and artist who engaged with Surrealism in Paris yet spent her entire life stepping across national and aesthetic borders, and whose national or continental belonging remains, to this day, undecidable.

10The second section, “Renascent Temporalities,” contains three articles concerned with the question of Modernism’s dialectics of past and present across temporal divides, with a different positioning regarding neophiliac and neophobic moods. It explores the relationship between Modernism and other, more distant time periods, either historical or individual, and of the power of the past to be revived, and to revitalise the present in turn. By looking at “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Modernist Renaissance’ in ‘Anon’,” Anne Besnault delves into Woolf’s interest in history writing to explore her constant engagement with and revival of distant periods of English history as a mode of occasioning her own rebirth as a writer, in part through the resurrection of female predecessors. Besnault’s article initiates the investigation of the Renaissance as another time period based on formal innovation – a discussion that will be continued in Part IV of this issue. This “dialectical embrace” will, in turn, establish a fruitful basis for a dialogue with Leslie de Bont’s piece on May Sinclair, often referred to as a “transitional writer” – another, though less canonical, woman Modernist writer, who actually met Woolf in 1909. De Bont investigates the links between Romanticism and Modernism through Sinclair’s reworking of tropes and works of British Romantic poets in her fiction, not only as a theme, or source of inspiration, but also as the living material for her own Modernist experiments. The last paper of this section, Anne-Marie Di Biasio’s article entitled “Making the Past Audible: the Childlike Element and Renewal of Existence in Benjamin and Woolf,” engages with the “dialectical embrace” across time periods by probing the resonances between the works of Virginia Woolf and Walter Benjamin – who, although they were contemporaries, never met, but whose works have fruitfully been discussed together as two prominent thinkers of modernity that engaged with the political and historical upheaval of their times and fiercely stood against any form of fascism. The discussion of the theme of infancy as a launch point of the “renewal of existence” will close this three-way conversation about the Modernists’ capacity to bridge temporal gaps and rework a “usable past,” as well as an effective introduction to the next section which addresses another perspective on “existence” as something that needs to be constantly transformed.

11In our third section, “Personality and the Staging of Renascent Modernism,” questions related to personality through staging and performance will be given pride of place as a central theme in Modernism that has been much discussed with Eliot’s iconic phrase “escape from personality” as a starting point (Eliot 1997, 48-49). This time, the three articles will engage in a three-way dialogue around questions of biography, acting, performance and paradoxical, contrapuntal postures regarding neophilia and neophobia. Maryam Thirriard’s survey of Virginia Woolf’s “sense of kinship” with “Eighteenth-century life-writing” provides a fruitful ground for the investigation of Modernist life-writing which was one of the sites of formal experimentation not only for Woolf, but also for other Modernists such as Strachey or Nicolson. This concern for the staging of lives will be further illustrated by Caroline Marie’s investigation into the Woolfian critique of famous 19^th-century actresses as a matrix for the ‘becoming other’ of her own characters, and indeed of herself as a writer: her piece entitled “How to Undo Things and Selves with Words: Understanding Literature as Praxis in Virginia Woolf’s Essays on Actresses” examines Woolf’s theatricalization of literature as a self-reflexive praxis that questions her own art of writing. The final paper of this section focuses on the “bad Modernism” of American writer Thomas Wolfe whose marginality in the Modernist canon, even among the “Southern Renaissance,” – although for widely different reasons – is reminiscent of Woolf’s until not so long ago: his rendition of the “dialectical embrace” is explored by Amelie Moisy from the perspective of his emphasis on both the modo as the present moment and tropes of “degeneration and decay.”

12The final section, “The Modernists’ Renaissance” – which is also part of the title of this issue – investigates a specific form of “dialectical embrace” in the form of the well-known topic of Modernism’s affinities with the European Renaissance (already tackled by Anne Besnault in section II of this issue) as another time period that was the site of cultural, artistic and poetic innovation, and the way it reconstructed the Renaissance from the perspective of poetic experimentation. This final section will adopt a two-fold trans-European perspective. First, the famous relationship of Modernist American poets such as Ezra Pound with the Italian Renaissance as a major reference and source of inspiration for their own innovative endeavours will be qualified by Emilie Georges by demonstrating that Pound in fact referred to three different periods of political and artistic rebirth in Italy: not only the Early Modern period but also the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Marie Laniel’s essay “Reviving/Revising ‘Lycidas’: Virginia Woolf’s Elegy to Unborn Poets in A Room of One’s Own” closes this issue by looking at the ways in which Milton’s pastoral poem “Lycidas,” a canonical all-male elegy of the English Renaissance that laments the death of a young aspiring poet, is reworked into Virginia Woolf’s own mourning of unborn women poets in her famous feminist essay A Room of One’s Own.