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The very premise of this volume and the ongoing debate in which it intervenes testifies to an anxiety at the core of the new modernist studies. The one topic of discussion you can count on hearing at conferences of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) is the question of what modernism is and how it is to be determined. It is a meta-critical problem, one of the discipline, of disciplinarity itself, and its interminable hashing-out marks a fundamental concern that in remaking modernist studies we may risk losing modernism. Put another way, the ongoing concern with (re-)defining modernism/modernity/modern is testimony to a desire to preserve the validity of what we do as modernist studies, even as we recognize the necessity and desirability of expanding its contours and reconfiguring accepted understandings. There is a genuine anxiety here, one that keeps us returning to the problem of what, exactly, we are supposed to be working on. The question is pertinent, even if the ways of posing it seem impertinent at times, and demands that we really consider whether we can make what we do modernist studies simply by declaring it to be so—and why it matters so much that it should be modernist studies, after all.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230274297_3

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