Multimedia Modernism
Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde

This book explores the complex effects of a new media environment on avant-garde literary production in the early twentieth century.

Julian Murphet (Author)

9780521513456, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 April 2009

232 pages, 2 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

Multimedia Modernism explores the complex effects of a new media environment on avant-garde literary production in the early twentieth century. During this period, the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky wrote works which, in one way or another, attest to the immense effect that photography, cinematography, mechanical print technology and visual advertising had on the established arts. Re-reading modernism's technological origins through the lens of media theory, this innovative study proposes a serious new methodological approach to modernism in general. Examining a wide range of literature that includes Gertrude Stein's contributions to Camera Work, Louis Zukofsky's groundbreaking poem 'A' and Wyndham Lewis's celebrated Blast, this book embeds literary revolution within media evolution to show that literary criticism and media history have a lot to learn from each other.

1. Towards a media theory of modern poetics
2. Camera ready copy
3. Figure, image, thing
4. The Vorticist membrane
5. Zukofsky's cinema
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Media studies [JFD], Communication studies [GTC], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]