The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology
Will be published approx. on 1. December 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
480 pages
978-1-3995-5709-2 (ISBN)
Description
Though modernism's emergence in an environment of techno-cultural acceleration has long been recognized, recent scholarship has deepened and challenged our understanding of the connections between twentieth-century cultural production and its technological interlocutors. In twenty-eight chapters by leading academics, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology re-examines the machines and media that functioned as modernism's contexts and competitors. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by the theoretical and socio-historical frames of current teaching and research on modernism and technology, this research volume makes a crucial and timely intervention in the field of modernist studies. The scholarly contributions on machines that govern transport, production, and public utilities, on media and communication technologies, on the intersections of technology with the human body, and on the technological systems of the early twentieth century capture the contemporary state of modernist technology studies and chart the future directions of this vibrant area.
Reviews / Votes
True to its name, this essential tool on the intersection of modernism and technology is an excellent companion for those interested in how innovation touched modernity at all angles. It would be valuable to any modernist scholar due to the prevalence of these techno-cultural novelties at a time when we were being implored to make it new. Moreover, this book would be a valuable starting point for any greenhorned scholar in the field, though to be used as a complementary resource for any particular discussion rather than a stand-alone, which is why each chapter's bibliography is its own gold mine. [...] Overall, this book is a significant contribution to modernist studies, and should be referenced abundantly whenever discussing this movement. -- Christina Heflin, Universite Paris I - Pantheon-Sorbonne * The Modernist Review * Brilliantly organised and imaginatively capacious, this invaluable volume features fortuitous pairings of writer and topic, with experts thinking beyond their previously published work in new and surprising ways. From illumination through transportation to infrastructure, from media theory to materials science, we are revealed a modernism heterochronic, networked, multiply embodied, intermedial. -- Debra Rae Cohen, University of South CarolinaMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
40 black and white illustrations, 11 colour illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 172 mm
Width: 244 mm
Thickness: 31 mm
Weight
828 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-3995-5709-2 (9781399557092)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature & Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019),Technology, Literature and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: a cultural study of Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019) and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009). Ian Whittington is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Writing the Radio War: Literature, Politics and the BBC, 1939-1945 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) as well as a number of essays on radio studies and twentieth-century British, Irish, and Anglophone literature.
Content
List of FiguresAcknowledgments
Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies - Alex Goody and Ian Whittington
I. Machines
1. Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics - Laura Ludtke
2. Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock - Charles Tung
3. Print: Anais Nin's Embodied Encounters with Print Technology - Jennifer Sorensen
4. Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose - Sunny Stalter-Pace
5. Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed's Visual Limit-field - Enda Duffy
6. Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s - Leo Mellor
7. Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia - Katherine Shingler
II. Media
8. Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric - David Trotter
9. Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early-Twentieth-century America - Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
10. Photography: Gertrude Kaesebier and the Maternal Line of Sight - Alix Beeston
11. X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions - Tom Slevin
12. Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac's 'Integral Cinema', Form and Spirit - Felicity Gee
13. Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology - Emily Bloom
14. Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening - Josh Epstein
15. Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde's Technological Imaginary - Emilie Morin
16. Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas - Damien Keane
III. Bodies
17. Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body - Jana Funke
18. Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity - Joshua Lam
19. Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler - Jeff Wallace
20. Germs: The Shocks, Politics and Aesthetics of Microbial Modernism - Maebh Long
21. Noise: Labour, Industry and Embodiment in Interwar Factory Fiction - Anna Snaith
IV. Systems
22. Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state - Janice Ho
23. Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems - Jennifer L. Lieberman
24. Paperwork: Atomic Age Bureaucracy in C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers - Caroline Z. Krzakowski
25. Information: Literature and Knowledge in the Age of Bradshaw and Baedeker - James Purdon
26. Computation: The Work of Calculation Between Human and Mechanism - Andrew Pilsch
27. Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920-2020 - Shawna Ross
28. War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime - Patrick Deer
Introduction: Modernist Technology Studies - Alex Goody and Ian Whittington
I. Machines
1. Electricity: Technologies and Aesthetics - Laura Ludtke
2. Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock - Charles Tung
3. Print: Anais Nin's Embodied Encounters with Print Technology - Jennifer Sorensen
4. Subways: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose - Sunny Stalter-Pace
5. Automobiles: The Modernist Gaze and Speed's Visual Limit-field - Enda Duffy
6. Aeroplanes: Rethinking Aeriality in a Long 1930s - Leo Mellor
7. Robots: Gendered Machines and Anxious Technophilia - Katherine Shingler
II. Media
8. Materials: Glass, Iron and Ghostly Fabric - David Trotter
9. Advertising: Magazine Ads and the Creation of Femininity in Early-Twentieth-century America - Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
10. Photography: Gertrude Kaesebier and the Maternal Line of Sight - Alix Beeston
11. X-rays: Technological Revelation and its Cultural Receptions - Tom Slevin
12. Cinema: Notes on Germaine Dulac's 'Integral Cinema', Form and Spirit - Felicity Gee
13. Radio: Blindness, Disability and Technology - Emily Bloom
14. Music: Modernist Remediation and Technologies of Listening - Josh Epstein
15. Performance: Machine Dances and the Avant-garde's Technological Imaginary - Emilie Morin
16. Amplification: At Home with Marlene Dietrich Overseas - Damien Keane
III. Bodies
17. Sex: Hypnosis, Hormones, Birth Control and the Modernist Body - Jana Funke
18. Race: Fordism, Factories and the Mechanical Reproduction of Racial Identity - Joshua Lam
19. Technics: Education and Pharmakon in Lawrence, Simondon and Stiegler - Jeff Wallace
20. Germs: The Shocks, Politics and Aesthetics of Microbial Modernism - Maebh Long
21. Noise: Labour, Industry and Embodiment in Interwar Factory Fiction - Anna Snaith
IV. Systems
22. Nation: GPO Documentaries and Infrastructures of the Nation-state - Janice Ho
23. Infrastructure: Women Writers Confront Large Technological Systems - Jennifer L. Lieberman
24. Paperwork: Atomic Age Bureaucracy in C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers - Caroline Z. Krzakowski
25. Information: Literature and Knowledge in the Age of Bradshaw and Baedeker - James Purdon
26. Computation: The Work of Calculation Between Human and Mechanism - Andrew Pilsch
27. Networks: Modernism in Circulation, 1920-2020 - Shawna Ross
28. War: Modernism in Camouflage, Strategic Fantasy and the Technological Sublime - Patrick Deer