Imprints of the New Modernist Editing: an intermedia exploration

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This project will maximise the previously unforeseen potential of the work of the AHRC-funded New Modernist Editing Network (NME) to meet needs identified by the editors and artists who were members of the NME. The NME Network ran from September 2016 to September 2017, bringing together academics, publishers, editors and artists engaged with or with an interest in the scholarly editing of the modernist text. The specific concerns of the NME can be grouped under two headings: a) technological and practical: the effect of the rapid change, development and innovation in print technologies during the period in which these texts were being produced, alongside writer's unprecedented embracing of the process of revision in this period.b) aesthetic and cultural: the particular characteristics of fluidity and uncertainty permeating modernist aesthetics, the centrality of the relationship between the verbal and visual in the modernist period, and the breadth of allusion characteristic of many modernist texts.Our non-academic members noted that these issues and arising discussions had significant implications for numerous non-academic creative practitioners and professionals; and that creative artists, writers, editors, proofreaders, printmakers, publishers would benefit from the opportunity to come together in groups to explore these scholarly and creative issues in hands-on ways, to maximise knowledge exchange and skills enhancement. Such opportunities were seen as particularly important because, although many individuals work across a number of creative or professional fields, there are limited opportunities available for them to meet others with similarly broad fields of activity.The outputs of the NME, including a digital edition of a short fiction by Virginia Woolf and summaries of the discussions held at the Network events posted on the NME website, capture some of the possible approaches to the challenge of editing a modernist text. The work of the NME has already had significant impact across the academic community in the field of modernism; this follow-on funding will extend and expand the impact of the project into various non-academic or academic-associated fields.The six events which form the project have been designed in collaboration with project partners from a range of professional and creative fields to ensure we engage a wide range of potential beneficiaries. They are also informed by our non-academic members' very positive responses to the NME's open and discursive workshop model. All events will focus around a selection of modernist texts of particular interest from an editing perspective, ranging across genres and styles, and from across the modernist period. The centrepiece activity will be an exhibition of works to be held at Shandy Hall. We will issue a call for proposals to make creative work responding to any or all of these texts, in the context of the findings arising from the work of the NME. Leading up to this exhibition we will host five workshops: 1) modernist print technologies 2) the book as physical object of social and cultural exchange 3) pochoir printmaking technique and the text/image relationship 4) languages of editing, and 5) curating the verbal and the visual (responding to the exhibition of works). These will be run by experts drawn from our project partners including artists, social enterprise leaders, editors, publishers, curators and academics.Collectively, these events will bring the insights of the NME - the questions raised by the activity of editing a modernist text for the twenty-first century as much as the conclusions drawn - into productive dialogue with those involved in text-based work across a wide range of creative and professional fields, at a moment when reflecting on the particular qualities of the modernist text is of increasing interest to a post-postmodern generation of creative artists, writers, designers, and publishing and editorial professionals.