Modernism/modernity’s feature on Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem Wins Prize for Best Digital Feature
Modernism/modernity’s cluster on Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem, commissioned and developed in collaboration with Fordham English’s Professor Anne Fernald, has won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals 2025 prize for Best Digital Feature. Modernism/modernity is the flagship journal for the study of modernism and Fernald was its co-editor from 2019-23. The CELJ, an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association, is an organization of editors of scholarly journals in all disciplines. The award for Best Digital Feature recognizes excellence and innovation in the affordances of the digital for an academic journal.
Hope Mirrlees (1931); photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell, from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery
“Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100,” edited by Nell Wasserstrom (University of Lausanne) and Rio Matchett (University of Liverpool), is dedicated to the critically under-read poem by Mirrlees, which follows the twenty-four-hour journey of a flâneuse strolling through the streets of post-war Paris, “her lyric consciousness registering a sensory experience of the cityscape mediated by a vast knowledge of the Western cultural tradition.” The 1920 poem has been described as a lost modernist masterpiece. Fernald, who was commissioning editor of Modernism/modernity during the conception of the volume, notes that while the journal usually has a policy against single-author clusters, the possibility of highlighting the almost-forgotten poet whose Paris: A Poem was a major inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was very much worth bending the policy. It helped foster one of Fernald’s main goals when taking over the editorship: to make the journal more open to feminist scholarship. Supporting new scholarship on Mirrlees’s influential but often disregarded modernist poetry certainly achieves this intention, poignantly in parallel with the contemporary and experimental format of the digital journal.
The first page of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1919) from Melanie Micir and Anna Preus’s new digital edition, featured in the cluster’s Introduction
As commissioning editor, Prof Fernald’s job was to work with the cluster editors on their proposal and send it out for peer review. By the time revisions were ready, her time at the journal had passed, and her successors Stephen Ross (Concordia University in Montreal) and Anjali Nerlekar (Rutgers University) completed the work of line-editing the pieces.
The cluster features articles on Mirrlees’s materialist aesthetics, the intertextuality of Mirrlees and her female contemporaries such as Mina Loy, connections to Russian modernism, and the colonial linguistics of Paris: A Poem. The judges of the CELJ award praised how the cluster “makes use of the digital format to present a multiperspectival, multimedia (including audio) dossier on the centenary of the publication Paris: A Poem.” They noted that the eight contributions and detailed introduction center on “fresh topics such as colonialism, plasticity, feminism, and new materialism,” as the poems themselves are “presented in visually appealing form,” and throughout the edition “the open-access dossier also integrates (other) images in salient ways.”
Congratulations to Prof Fernald and all the editors and contributors involved in producing “Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem @ 100” for this exciting achievement.
Anyone wishing to access the cluster can do so here.
An Example of a Verse Comparison Exercise by Mathias Horvath and Varvara Timchenko (University of Geneva, Spring 2024), featured in the cluster’s Introduction