protomodern

With the turn of the century Eakins had made his own transition from high Victorian to protomodern artist.

Intimations of Mortality 2010

In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the modern mass-market pulp narrative.

The Wall Street Journal Wishes... 2009

In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the modern mass-market pulp narrative.

Archive 2009-09-01 2009

Ghost stories, detective stories, all sorts of strange fiction pervades the protomodern periodicals.

Notes from New Sodom: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café 2009

At the end of the day, these are both works which, like The Stooges with punk, fit the aesthetic criteria but sit outside the historical context; they are protomodern works, written in that distant time before the walls went up around the ghetto of Genre.

Notes from New Sodom: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café 2009

The literary “variety” journals in the UK, most notably the Strand, capture the last days of this protomodern period perfectly, publishing many of the writers named above alongside poets and short story writers of any and every mode.

Notes from New Sodom: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café 2009

In those early decades before the SF Café was even built there was not one Genre but a whole host of them, where the protomodern adventure story was gradually being transformed into the modern mass-market pulp narrative.

Notes from New Sodom: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café 2009

In the dialectic between the two aesthetics then, in the interzones where they collide and collude through the medium of individual texts — where the author isn’t purely allied one way or the other but playing out the conflict in their writing — there emerges this synthesis of Rationalist thesis and Romanticist antithesis that we might call “protomodern.”

Notes from New Sodom: Down in the Ghetto at the SF Café 2009