Face and Form
Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

Anca Parvulescu's prehistory of facial recognition technologies retells the story of literary modernism through the prism of the human face.

Anca Parvulescu (Author)

9781009599795, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 September 2025

206 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on “modernist faciality” in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.' Rochelle Rives, Professor of English, City University of New York

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity. In literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, or difference – and combinations thereof. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority, but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction. The modernist overinvestment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Introduction
1. Aschenbach's makeover: physiognomic faces in death in Venice
2. A personal style of face: proust and the physiognomy of women
3. The biography of a face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando
4. The face of a genius: Picasso, Stein, and the struggle with facial form
5. Translated faces: Kōbō Abe's the face of another
Coda: Instagram face
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]