Fragmentary Modernisms: The Classical Fragment in Literary and Visual Cultures, 1896-1950

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In 1896, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a 'torrent' of papyri in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, including fragments of lost poems by the lyric poet Sappho. Their discoveries, and the publications and lectures based on them, gripped the public imagination, infiltrating popular novels and music hall songs, newspaper reports, and the Times 'book of the week'. Other notable archaeological discoveries - such as Arthur Evans' excavations at Knossos (home of Ariadne's mythical labyrinth) at the turn of the twentieth century - continued to bring a stream of fragmentary material from the ancient world to contemporary public notice. Discoveries of fragmentary remains abroad were mirrored in museological developments at home. Radical changes in museum display - increasingly the site of consumption of ancient art and artefacts beyond the Grand Tour and its successors - were emphasising fragmentation by removing the older neoclassical restorations from the staple classics of ancient Greek sculpture, including the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. As Rilke put it, writing on a damaged torso in the Louvre: the fragment can be so lucent that it has the power to 'change your life'. A striking parallel to these developments is found in contemporary artistic and literary production. The revolution in literature and the visual arts which took place between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries was fundamentally marked (almost to the point of cliché) by a tendency to radical fragmentation: statues half-finished as if broken off by the ravages of time; poems with little or no narrative meaning, the words laid out on the page as though parts of the text had been excised; novels seemingly made up of what Virginia Woolf called the 'orts, scraps and fragments' of modern experience. Yet these trends did not arise in a vacuum of avant-garde modernity. Designated by the term 'modernism' to reflect its novelty, the modernist movement in art and literature, so strongly marked by its fragmentary aesthetics, was, in fact, crucially shaped by a striking turn to the fragmentary remains of antiquity.This project takes as its starting point the crucial realisation that the period in which some of the most radical literary and visual experimentations with fragmentation took place also witnessed a series of paradigm-shifting developments in the discovery and dissemination of classical antiquity in fragments. Bringing together archaeology, museology, philology and epigraphy with modern literature and art, it provides the first integrated picture of the combined impact of classical scholarship on the literary and visual aesthetics of modernism and its legacy. 'Fragmentary Modernisms' reaches across disciplinary and institutional borders to bring to light the multiple networks of influence between classical scholarship (broadly conceived) and the literary and visual arts. In doing so, it aims to fundamentally change the story of the reception of the classical fragment that we are able to tell. Fragmentation - the most pervasive characteristic of modernist aesthetics - was essentially a function of classical reception, and the seismic shift the modernist reception of classical fragments and their dissemination by classicists produced in the ways in which we imagine antiquity continues to shape contemporary artistic, scholarly and museological practice.