The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology - (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities) by Alex Goody & Ian Whittington

About the Book

The first comprehensive reference book to define and delineate the intersections of modernism and technology.

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

The first comprehensive reference book to define and delineate the intersections of modernism and technology Though modernism's emergence in an environment of techno-cultural acceleration has long been recognised, 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. The Editors 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 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 (2018) as well as a number of essays on radio studies and twentieth-century British, Irish, and Anglophone literature, and is editor of a special issue of The Global South on 'Radio Cultures of the Global South' (2022).

Review Quotes

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 Carolina

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, Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne "The Modernist Review"

About the Author

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.