Introduction

Pamela L. Caughie

pp. 1-10

in: Pamela L. Caughie (ed), Disciplining modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

Over the past two decades scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has been returning to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reexamining initial assumptions about and approaches to that time period in light of recent changes in those disciplines. The ascendance of interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and cultural studies, and new theoretical perspectives such as postcolonial theory, queer theory, and critical race theory, along with increasing attention to globalization, cosmopolitanism, and transatlantic studies across disciplines, has brought about a reconsideration of those quintessentially mutable concepts, modernism and modernity. Much of this recent work aspires to be interdisciplinary. Yet definitions of the key terms of these studies differ markedly from one discipline to another, and even within disciplines. Disciplining Modernism confronts this terminological confusion in an effort to advance interdisciplinary work in the field of modernist studies.