Over the last fifty years the study of fragmentary and unfinished texts has shifted from a status of regrettable by-product to that of a central object of literary, philological and theoretical reflection. In classical studies this change has prompted a re-evaluation of assumptions about textual integrity, authorial intention and scholarly aims. Rather than focusing solely on reconstructing lost wholes, scholars now attend to the interpretative, aesthetic and epistemological implications of textual imperfection. Two recent publications exemplify this shift: Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism and the volume Labor Imperfectus, edited by Fabre-Serris, Formisano and Frangoulidis. Together, they offer a rich exploration of incompleteness as a productive category at the intersection of philology, reception studies and modern aesthetics.

Labor Imperfectus is a collective volume originating in a ‘Trends in Classics’ conference, bringing together 20 contributions that range widely across Greek and Latin literature, from archaic poetry to late antiquity, and extend into modern receptions. Part 1, ‘Facing Unfinishedness’, primarily addresses fragmentary (E. Sistakou on Callimachus and M. Garani on Theophrastus) or mutilated texts (C. Williams on Petronius). Particularly valuable is the focus not only on reception and translation but also on editorial practices. The section highlights how the transmission and availability of incomplete texts shape the understanding of unfinished works, echoing recent discussions on the editorial treatment of fragmentary literature (e.g. J. Elliott, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales [2013]). Part 2, ‘Questioning (In)Completeness’, explores the implications of defining textual endings (R. Hunter on the Odyssey), the interplay between open-endedness and closure (J.F. Miller on Ovid’s Fasti) and between provisional closure and promise of continuation (P. Hardie on Statius’ Achilleid), and it engages with the reception of antiquity, illustrating the perpetual incompleteness inherent in reading ancient literature (L. Jansen on Borges). Part 3, ‘Constitutive Unfinishedness’, explores unfinishedness as a constitutive feature, examining how it relates to the subject matter, argumentative tradition, writing practices or formal constraints chosen by the author. In this context incompleteness is considered a hermeneutic criterion, offering insight into how ancient and modern authors often regarded it more positively than contemporary scholars might. This perspective leads to a reassessment of the degree of completeness, taking into account the epistemological horizon of the treatise (R.R. Marchese on Cicero’s De officiis), the specific characteristics associated with the genre or philosophical doctrine (F. Tutrone on Lucretius), the author’s own reflections on their fragmentary work (S. Thorel on Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux), textual structures and serial compositions (P.F. Sacchi on Fulgentius’ De aetatibus mundi et hominis), and the thematisation of fragmentariness and interruption (Formisano on Rutilius Namatianus). Part 4, ‘Reading Unfinishedness’, focuses on texts that modern scholars explicitly recognise or interpret as unfinished. It raises questions of mutilation and interpolations, leading to an exploration of alternative narrative possibilities (D. Konstan on Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis), the continuous redefinition of the notion of closure within metaliterary discourse (Frangoulidis on Seneca’s Phoenissae) and the various scholarly approaches to the same unfinished text (Fabre-Serris on Hyginus’ Fabulae). Additionally, it examines the phenomenon of echoes between the incompleteness of a modern text and that of its ancient model (G. Sissa on Plato’s Critias and Bacon’s New Atlantis) as well as the historical, biographical or literary causes of unfinishedness (F. Cadel on Pasolini’s Petrolio). Part 5, ‘Searching for Completion’, examines the temptation to respond to incompleteness by filling the gaps, whether through philological methods (A. Zissos on Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica) or by adopting a more creative approach through personal rewriting (B. Reitz-Joosse on Tacitus’ Annals and Gustav Freytag’s Die verlorene Handschrift). It also explores the potential offered by Digital Humanities to address the voids left in incomplete works (S. Dord-Crouslé on Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet).

Goldschmidt’s Fragmentary Modernism, by contrast, is a single-authored monograph with a clearly delimited chronological and cultural focus: the modernist engagement, defined as ‘the poetry of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H. D., and Richard Aldington, and the sculpture of Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’ (p. 6), with classical fragments in the early twentieth century. Structured into five chapters, the book examines papyrology, textual criticism, inscriptions, museum practices and archaeology, tracing the reciprocal influence between classical fragments and modernist aesthetics. Chapter 1, ‘Papyrus’, explores the discovery of ancient Greek papyri, such as Sappho fragments, and their impact on modernist literature, notably Pound’s Papyrus. Goldschmidt emphasises that the rise of papyrology as a discipline paralleled modernist formal experiments: the typographical presentation, strategic use of white space and editorial conventions of papyrologists resonated with modernist literary techniques. This created a reciprocal dynamic, with modernist fragmentation influencing classical scholarship and vice versa. Chapter 2, ‘Editions’, examines how fragmentary texts edited by scholars, including H. Diels’s Presocratic fragments and F. Bücheler’s work on Satyricon, shaped modernist writers like Eliot (The Waste Land, Burnt Norton) and Pound (Cantos I). Goldschmidt shows how modernists appropriated philological methods for aesthetic ends, transforming scholarly reconstruction and citation into literary strategies, thereby blurring boundaries between academic and avant-garde practices. Chapter 3, ‘Inscriptional Modernism’, highlights the British Museum’s Hall of Greek and Roman Inscriptions as a formative space for writers such as Pound and H. D., who encountered inscriptions as material objects. Modernist poetry, exemplified by H. D.’s Hermes of the Ways, reimagined epigrams and inscriptionality, foregrounding spatiality, brevity and interactive reading practices. Chapter 4, ‘Modernism and the Museum’, addresses how museum display, especially of the Parthenon marbles, reflected and shaped a cultural acceptance of fragments. Sculptors like Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein drew on the fragmentary aesthetic of Greek statuary, while museum practices both influenced and responded to modernist sensibilities. Finally, Chapter 5, ‘Archaeologisms’, examines how modernist engagement with fragments intersected with contemporary archaeology. Rediscoveries such as Troy and Veii, as well as Evans’s reconstructions at Knossos, provided new conceptions of antiquity, while modernist aesthetics shaped the perception and presentation of archaeological findings. Goldschmidt emphasises the reciprocal dialogue between archaeology and modernism, demonstrating how fragmentary encounters with the past stimulated innovation across disciplines.

From a historiographical perspective, Labor Imperfectus situates itself firmly within contemporary debates on absence and partial survival in ancient literature. In the introduction, which deserves praise for its clarity and usefulness, the editors (p. 3) align the volume with recent publications such as M. Papini’s Opus Imperfectum. Monumenti e testi incompiuti del mondo greco e romano (2019) and T. Geue and E. Giusti’s Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception (2021), thereby inscribing their project within a broader scholarly movement concerned with silence, gaps and incompletion as meaningful literary phenomena. This positioning underscores the volume’s ambition to move beyond a narrowly technical treatment of fragmentary texts towards a more theoretically informed engagement with imperfection as a structural and hermeneutic principle. At the same time the volume’s selective engagement with earlier foundational scholarship is striking. Works such as Classical Closure (D.H. Roberts, F.M. Dunn and D. Fowler [1997]) and Commencer et finir (B. Bureau and C. Nicolas [2008]), which explored beginnings and endings as privileged sites of meaning, receive little or no sustained attention. Their relative absence is not merely a bibliographical oversight but reflects a deeper shift in scholarly orientation: where earlier studies foregrounded closure as a normative horizon, Labor Imperfectus privileges interruption, openness and loss as starting points for interpretation. Goldschmidt’s monograph participates in a parallel historiographical shift, albeit from a different disciplinary angle. Situated within the Classical Presences series, Fragmentary Modernism foregrounds the reciprocal relationship between classical scholarship and modernist aesthetics. Rather than treating modernism’s fascination with fragmentation as a purely internal artistic development or as a reaction to the dislocations of modernity, Goldschmidt demonstrates how it emerged through sustained engagement with classical antiquity as mediated by philology, archaeology, papyrology and museum practices. In doing so, she complicates any simple opposition between ancient wholeness and modern fragmentation, revealing instead a dense network of intellectual exchanges in which scholarly methods and artistic forms mutually shaped one another. These two books share the same methodological intuition: incompleteness is not merely a lack to be remedied but a condition that actively shapes meaning, interpretation and creativity. The comparative value of reading these works together resides in the tensions they expose between accident and intention, loss and generation, philological discipline and aesthetic experimentation and in the way in which each illuminates the conceptual blind spots of the other.

Central to both works is the problem of terminology, a difficulty reflecting the conceptual complexity of the phenomena under investigation. Labor Imperfectus adopts the Latin adjective imperfectus as its organising concept, a choice that allows for an impressively broad range of case studies. This rubric includes fragmentary texts preserved only in quotations, works transmitted in damaged or mutilated manuscripts or papyri, compositions left unfinished by their authors and even texts traditionally regarded as complete but whose endings have been called into question. This conceptual inclusiveness is one of the volume’s major strengths, enabling it to juxtapose contributions on Homer, Callimachus, Theophrastus, Euripides, Statius, Seneca, Cicero, Lucretius and later figures as well as modern authors such as Borges, Barthes, Bacon and Pasolini. At the same time this breadth generates methodological tensions. Can fragmentary lyric poetry, unfinished epic and truncated prose be meaningfully compared under a single conceptual umbrella, or does the term imperfectus risk flattening crucial distinctions? The editors acknowledge this difficulty and articulate comparison as a guiding critical goal: ‘comparing different kinds of fragmentariness and incompleteness can give us a key to understanding and discussing the aesthetical and hermeneutical implications of this feature’ (p. 5). Yet the absence of a concluding chapter synthesising the volume’s findings remains a notable limitation. Without such a synthesis, readers are left to infer the broader theoretical stakes from a series of individual case studies, which operate at different methodological levels. The result is a rich but occasionally fragmented intellectual landscape that mirrors, perhaps unintentionally, the phenomenon the volume seeks to explore. Goldschmidt’s monograph confronts similar terminological challenges, though in a more controlled fashion. Her central object, the classical fragment as encountered and reimagined by modernists, is itself notoriously difficult to define. She resists reducing the fragment to a mere symbol of rupture or loss and conceptualises it as a dynamic site of reinterpretation, memory and continuity. Fragments, in her account, are active components that generate new meanings through their brokenness (p. 11). This perspective challenges traditional views that see ancient fragments merely as a negative form (p. 10), emphasising instead its potential to accept its own state of incompleteness.

The distinction between fragmentariness, incompleteness and unfinishedness emerges as a particularly productive point of comparison between the two works. In Labor Imperfectus unfinishedness frequently appears as a hermeneutic problem closely tied to questions of authorial intention and genre expectation. Contributions on Statius’ Achilleid (Hardie) or Cicero’s philosophical treatises (Marchese), for example, explore texts that appear to promise systematic completion yet remain suspended in a state of provisionality. Other essays address works whose endings remain disputed, raising fundamental questions about the criteria by which textual completeness is judged. In these cases, incompleteness is not simply the result of material loss but a challenge to interpretative frameworks grounded in teleology and closure. Goldschmidt’s focus, by contrast, lies less on unfinishedness in this sense than on fragmentation as an aesthetic and epistemological principle. Modernist writers and artists engage with fragments not because they are incomplete in relation to an imagined whole, but because fragmentation offers a mode of expression capable of articulating discontinuities, memory and cultural transmission. This difference becomes especially apparent in discussions of texts such as Petronius’ Satyricon (Goldschmidt, Chapter 2 and Williams in Labor imperfectus). Is such a work fragmentary, incomplete or merely partially preserved? As both studies implicitly suggest, the answer depends largely on proportion and perspective. A text that survives in substantial portions but lacks a definitive ending occupies a different conceptual space from one preserved only in scattered quotations or damaged papyri.

This question of fragmentation ultimately foregrounds a broader methodological issue that runs through both works: the comparability of ancient and modern fragments. As A.C. Dionisotti (‘On Fragments in Classical Scholarship’, in: G.W. Most [ed.], Collecting Fragments [1997], p. 1) famously observed, fragments are ‘made rather than born’, shaped by the selective practices of excerptors, scribes and editors, while modern fragments were born fragments. A major strength of Fragmentary Modernism lies in its careful articulation of this asymmetry: Goldschmidt is particularly attentive to this tension. She consistently underscores that ancient fragments are most often the outcome of contingent processes of transmission and scholarly mediation, while modernist fragments emerge from deliberate compositional strategies, shaped by encounters with classical papyri, epigraphic inscriptions, museum displays and philological editions, creating a reciprocal dynamic, a ‘generative dialogue’ (p. 3), in which modernist aesthetics both respond to and reinterpret the historical fragmentary record. In Labor Imperfectus this distinction is approached from a different angle. The volume’s deliberate openness to modern texts or fragments broadens the scope of comparison and highlights the continuity of the fragmentation phenomenon throughout the ages. At times, however, this inclusive perspective places greater weight on readers to negotiate the methodological gap between ancient fragments, produced through historical loss and transmission, and modern fragments that result from deliberate acts of composition. Rather than constituting a flaw, this tension reflects the exploratory ambition of the volume, which seeks less to resolve the problem of comparability than to keep it productively open.

One of the most significant points of convergence between the two works lies in their shared attention to editorial and scholarly practices. Labor Imperfectus devotes sustained attention to the role of editors and scholarly traditions in shaping incomplete texts. Several contributions emphasise that fragmentary or mutilated literature does not exist independently of the editorial frameworks through which it is transmitted and interpreted. Particularly valuable is the focus not only on reception and translation but also on editorial practices. Goldschmidt’s analysis complements and extends this emphasis by tracing how philological practices themselves became integral to modernist aesthetics. Her chapters on papyrology and textual criticism demonstrate how the visual and material features of scholarly editions resonated deeply with modernist literary forms. The result was a profound reconfiguration of both fields: modernist literature reshaped scholarly perceptions of fragmentation, while philology emerged as a historically situated cultural practice rather than a purely technical discipline.

Materiality constitutes another crucial axis along which the two works intersect. Goldschmidt’s chapters on inscriptions, museums and archaeology vividly demonstrate how physical encounters with ancient fragments shaped modernist aesthetics. The British Museum’s Hall of Greek and Roman Inscriptions, for instance, emerges as a formative space for writers such as Ezra Pound and H. D., who encountered inscriptions not as complete texts but as material objects embedded in space. This experience informed a poetics of inscriptionality that foregrounded brevity, spatiality and the embodied movement of the reader. Similarly, changes in museum display practices (most notably the treatment of the Parthenon marbles) reflected and reinforced a growing cultural acceptance of fragmentation as an authentic state rather than a defect to be concealed. Although Labor Imperfectus does not engage as extensively with museology, its emphasis on reception and material transmission points in a similar direction. Several contributions underscore that incomplete or unfinished texts are always encountered within specific material, institutional and historical contexts that shape their interpretation. Whether through manuscript damage, editorial intervention or modern reproduction, the material conditions of transmission play a decisive role in determining how incompleteness is perceived and valued.

Despite their many strengths, both works leave certain questions unresolved. In Labor Imperfectus the interchangeable use of the terms ‘incompleteness’, ‘unfinishedness’ and ‘fragmentation’ occasionally obscures important methodological distinctions. A more explicit differentiation between these concepts would have strengthened the volume’s comparative ambitions. Moreover, while the diversity of perspectives is one of the volume’s greatest assets, it also poses challenges to coherence. Some articles seem to extend beyond the framework established by the volume (classical antiquity): while the inclusion of perspectives on the reading, rewriting, representation and editing of ancient imperfecti labores in the modern era is valuable, some articles require readers to make a considerable interpretative effort to envision their connection to classical antiquity or the potential redeployment of the proposed methodologies, however interesting and promising they may be. Such occasional divergences and expansions are understandable within the context of a collective volume originating from a conference, where the richness of individual contributions, the terminological preferences of different authors and the extensions debated during scholarly discussions inevitably produce a certain heterogeneity. By contrast, Goldschmidt’s monograph offers a single, situated perspective, resulting in a more tightly coherent and consistently argued treatment, yet it too exhibits minor limitations. Chapter 2 appears somewhat less robust in its argumentative development than the other chapters, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of categorising certain works as genuinely fragmentary. In both works early fragmentary Latin literature receives comparatively little attention. In Labor Imperfectus this absence is somewhat regrettable, though understandable given the volume’s broad chronological and thematic scope. The editors anticipate this point with a playful acknowledgment, referring to the volume as a labor imperfectus (p. 5), humorously conceding its own inevitable lacunae. In Goldschmidt’s study the focus on Greek material aligns with the modernists’ particular engagement with Hellenic texts; nonetheless, the omission of Latin fragments highlights fruitful avenues for future research, especially considering their long and complex editorial history and the potential for comparative study across languages and literary traditions.

Taken together, Labor Imperfectus and Fragmentary Modernism offer a compelling demonstration of how fragmentation and incompleteness operate across temporal, disciplinary and methodological boundaries. The former provides a wide-ranging exploration of unfinished and partial texts in antiquity, foregrounding the diversity of forms and the challenges they pose to interpretation. The latter traces the afterlives of classical fragments in modernist culture, revealing how scholarly practices and artistic experimentation have mutually shaped each other. Both works underscore that engagement with incompleteness is never neutral. Editorial decisions, museum displays and creative reappropriations all participate in an ongoing negotiation between loss and meaning.