Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity

David Bradshaw · Laura Marcus · Rebecca Roach

Jul 2016 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

The essays in Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, written by renowned international scholars, open up the many dimensions and arenas of modernist movement and movements: spatial, geographical and political: affective and physiological; temporal and epochal; technological, locomotive and metropolitan; aesthetic and representational. Individual essays explore modernism's complex geographies, focusing on Anglo-European modernisms while also engaging with the debates engendered by recent models of world literatures and global modernisms. From questions of space and place, the volume moves to a focus on movement and motion, with topics ranging from modernity and bodily energies to issues of scale and quantity. The final chapters in the volume examine modernist film and the moving image, and travel and transport in the modern metropolis. 'Movement is reality itself', the philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: the original and illuminating essays in Moving Modernisms point in new ways to the realities, and the fantasies, of movement in modernist culture.

About the author

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English at the University of Oxford, where she is a Professorial Fellow of New College. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007; awarded the 2008 James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association), Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2015), and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004). Her current research project includes a study of the concept of 'rhythm' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a range of disciplinary contexts. David Bradshaw is Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. In addition to editing a range of modernist texts, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, A Room of One's Own (with Stuart N. Clarke), and The Good Soldier, he has published numerous articles on modernist writing and culture, and edited The Hidden Huxley (1994), A Concise Companion to Modernism (2003), A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006; with Kevin J. H. Dettmar), The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster (2007), and Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day (2013; with Rachel Potter). Rebecca Roach is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project, 'Ego-Media: The Impact of New Media on Forms and Practices of Self-Presentation' (2014-2019) at King's College London. Her current project draws on theories of life writing, the public sphere, linguistics, information theory, and history of the book/material culture to explore representations of communication, collaboration and relational selfhood in literature in the era of computing. Prior to joining Kings, Rebecca completed her doctorate at Oxford University (2014). Her thesis, entitled 'Transatlantic Conversations: The Art of the Interview in Britain and America' assessed the role of the interview form within Anglophone literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day.