Material Modernisms – serie

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects.

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects.

This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press.

This book interrogates the relationship between the material conditions of Woolf's writing practices and her work as a printer and publisher at the Hogarth Press.

While text processing is often associated with the digital humanities, it is still seen as worlds apart from literary modernism and its aesthetic preoccupations. To capture the magic of such devices through writing, these authors devised radical methods for generating literary text, anticipating today's digital humanities.

While text processing is often associated with the digital humanities, it is still seen as worlds apart from literary modernism and its aesthetic preoccupations. This book upsets that narrative. Examining literary manuscripts from some of the twentieth century's best-known and lesser-known novelists, from Marcel Proust to Mina Loy, Alex Christie reveals where authors experimented with proto-digital writing methods by hand. Instead of looking to computers as sources of inspiration, the authors discussed turned to twentieth-century media for their ability to reveal new layers of the material world. From analog fantasies of contacting the dead to digital anxieties of invisible information, the aesthetic ambitions of these novels can be traced back to their author's interest in emerging media devices and their technical operation. To capture the magic of such devices through writing, these authors devised radical methods for generating literary text, anticipating today's digital humanities.

The iconic appliance of twentieth-century domestic revolution, the vacuum cleaner stands at the forefront of radical changes in technology, automation, finance, marketing, hygiene, infrastructure, time-management, domestic labour, and the history of dirt.